The Great Chanel

It must be the most beautiful boutique in Ireland – the Chanel shop within the Brown Thomas store. Sometimes, at night, I just pass by and press my face to the glass, absorbing the pure chic of the ensemble within. It is everything French, glamourous, chic, alluring: the very essence of high style, untouched by the gaudiness of a Versace or a Prada.

Their best-selling handbag, this year, was their standard classic with the Chanel logo, price €1,390, in lambskin and calfskin. Their best-selling item of apparel was the ever enduring Chanel little black dress – a plain shift – priced at €2,310. No, you won’t get one in the sales. The Chanel boutique doesn’t do sales.

And yet, the greatest wonder, to me, is that this world-class brand - of couture, accessories and the prestigeous Chanel No. 5 fragrance - all started from the humblest possible beginnings, in an orphanage in the Dordogne.

Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was a charity child, born out of wedlock, abandoned by a feckless father, made motherless by the early death of a mother worn out by work and poor health, and raised by the Sacred Heart of Mary nuns in their orphanage in a small town called Aubazine.

The nuns were austere, though not, apparently, cruel, and they equipped each charity child they sent out into the world with a skill and a trade. They taught Gabrielle to sew and she got a job in a tailor’s shop in the garrison town of Moulins, in Auvergne, in the early 1900s.

From nothing, and with nothing, Gabrielle Chanel started out on her dazzling career. She had a gift for cutting cloth, and an eye for style, though without gritty ambition and a shrewd peasant opportunism she might have ended up as a country dressmaker. Gabrielle – her nickname, “Coco”, was prompted by a brief period as a music-hall artiste – was also pretty and had a compelling personality, and she learned how to use men to advance her and support her.

In her early twenties, a medical procedure revealed that she could never have children, and perhaps this gave her a sense of sexual freedom: she would never “pay the price” of an unsupported pregnancy, a price which so often lead to poverty and dependency for women.

Gabrielle’s first lover was a cavalry officer who encouraged her confidence and introduced her to a horsey world: she was an adept equestrienne, and cut quite a figure in the smart jodhpurs she had tailored for herself. This enhanced her tailoring business: she was already her own brand. Her second lover, an Anglo-Frenchman known as “Boy” Capel, financed her with her first shop in Deauville, that smart hunting-ground of horse-lovers and casino-players, made popular by the hedonistic King Edward VII. In Chanel’s life, from there on, there was generally a wealthy lover in the background.

Chanel’s success blossomed from the end of the Great War in 1918: the 1920s was her time, with its bobbed hair and shortened skirts. She drew on her background: the black and white of the nuns’ habits inspired the “little black dress”: she chose the Number 5 for her perfume because of its numinous significance on a convent floor: she even conceived the “CC” logo of the Chanel brand from an ancient religious monogram signifying Christ which her grandfather had once carved on a table.

Chanel always drew on what she knew. That is why the brand has the ultimate stamp of authenticity.

She never married, and there was an awkward period during the 1940-45 period when one of the lovers was a German officer, tried at Nuremberg for complicity with the Reich. Coco was arrested in 1945 by one of the Purging Committees who executed 10,000 alleged collaborators and shaved the heads of Frenchwomen who slept with Germans. She was released, mysteriously, after two hours: she had friends in high places, including Winston Churchill. She wisely went off to live quietly in Switzerland for the next nine years.

In 1954, Coco produced a comeback couture collection, which flopped, damned by the Paris and London critics, as too old, too out of fashion, too 1930s. So she went back to her atelier and started all over again. Presently, the Americans took her up: Jackie Kennedy adored Chanel, and by the 1960s, the brand was successfully re-launched. For the last forty years it has known fabulous success, globally.

Gabrielle Chanel died in 1971, aged 88, holding a picture of St Anthony of Padua and a religious icon given to her by Stravinsky in 1925. Her models formed a kind of guard of honour at her funeral Mass. When I pass the Chanel boutique at Brown Thomas I not only admire the handbags and little black frocks: I ponder on the extraordinary life of the orphanage girl from Aubazine.

Irish Independent Magazine. 06 January 2007.