PAPARAZZI Karl Lagerfeld Long before Gabrielle reinvented herself as Coco, she knew the meaning of abandonment, and the evidence of her unhappy childhood is not entirely absent from her Parisian salon. There is a set of tarot cards on her desk, just as she left them before her death at 87 in January 1971 (among them is the number five, her lucky number, illustrated by a picture of a green tree, its roots visible above the ground), and a gold crucifix; the mystical and Catholic symbols coexist yet also form the outlines of an iconography of Chanel's own making. But much else was hidden away, hundreds of miles from Rue Cambon, at Aubazine, a remote 12th-century Cistercian abbey high in the hills of the Corrèze, where Gabrielle was shaped by the nuns who raised her. Chanel never admitted to her years at Aubazine, where she lived from the age of 11 to <strong>18</strong>, in an orphanage run by the sisters of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary. Her father, a feckless peddler always on the run from his family, left his three daughters there after the death of their mother from TB and disappeared forever. Conitnued from pg 10 The nuns who still live at Aubazine are more concerned with the worship of God than the antecedents of fashion, yet they were kind enough to allow me to visit them, on the understanding that I observed their rules of prayer and silence. Gabrielle came here with her two sisters in February <strong>18</strong>95; I arrived at the same time of year, a bitterly cold season, when winter had not yet loosened its grip on the mountains (and I felt lost in the deep despair of a looming divorce). Only a handful of nuns remained, the orphans long since vanished, though their dormitories were untouched, the children's iron beds lined against whitewashed walls hung with crucifixes. Here I walked, and here I sat, contemplating what it meant to be cast aside, not in the expectation of finding an answer to my own grief but in search of the heart of Chanel. Inside the abbey, alone in the early dusk of winter, I spent hours gazing at the interlocked graphic patterns of medieval stained-glass windows — a mysterious geometry that looks eerily like the famous double-C logo that still signifies Chanel as a global brand — and then climbed the dark stairs beyond the altar, up to the long corridor that runs the length of the cloisters in which medieval monks fashioned intricate mosaics of five-sided stars and petals, the quintessence of Chanel's subsequent designs. By the time I left Aubazine, I had not found a miraculous solution to unhappiness, but I did feel a profound sympathy for what Chanel might have learned there. She was abandoned, then raised in an atmosphere of pronounced asceticism, where prayer and punishment existed side by side. At Aubazine she learned to sew, which would prove to be the means of her early employment as a seamstress in a provincial town, but she also grasped the austere beauty of her surroundings and transformed them in the course of her career into her signature style. The black and white of the nuns' habits would reappear in the restrained yet fluid couture so characteristic of Chanel, their rosary beads, crosses, and chains transfigured into pearls and jewellery that were more significant than mere accessories. And beyond that, Chanel also displayed the heroic qualities that would make her so successful: the vision to turn black, the colour of mourning, into the symbol of independence, freedom, and strength and the courage to keep working, even when love failed her. She was flawed, of course, like all the most compelling characters: hard and pitiless and mistaken at times, like the nuns who educated her. But she was also vulnerable enough to grieve for those she had lost and loyal to the series of men who left her, including the father she never saw again. Where had he gone, at least in the tale she told in adulthood (one in a series of stories that formed so many layers of myth)? To America, the promised land, to make his fortune. He never got there, of course — his path ended in drunken obscurity in the bars of rural French market towns — but his daughter did, and America applauded her, coast to coast. Emerging from behind the forbidding walls of the orphanage, via Paris all the way to uptown Manhattan and the Hollywood Hills, Gabrielle Chanel proved that a woman need not define herself by the men who desired and deserted her. For in the end, Chanel was entirely her own creation, still seeking perfection in her designs until the very last day of her life. <strong>ST</strong> Credit: Bazaar 48
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