If the amber-hued liquid inside a classic bottle could speak, it would tell the tale of the convergence of an American sex symbol, a German officer, and a French legend. The black lettering on the bottle contains an eponymous name and a lucky number, and a story as extraordinary as the woman who willed it into existence.
For Coco Chanel, the Duchess of Windsor’s declaration that “You can never be too rich or too thin” was holy writ. The icon who became synonymous with haute couture started life in poverty. Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, the second daughter of an unmarried couple, hailed from the small town of Saumur, France. Her father, Henri-Albert, was an itinerant peddler, and her mother, Jeanne DeVolle, worked in the poorhouse where Gabrielle was born. When Gabrielle was twelve, her mother passed away and Albert (as he was known), now left with five offspring, took to travelling permanently. Gabrielle found herself in an orphanage where joyless nuns taught her to sew.
When Gabrielle made her escape, she found work as a cabaret singer, where her trademark song, a favorite of the soldiers, was “Qui qu’a vu Coco.” She shed her name Gabrielle (as she had been christened, after the nun who had delivered her) and became Coco, from the lyric and because it was the shortened version of “cocotte,” French for “kept woman.” Escape beckoned with the patronage of Étienne Balsan, a textile heir who set her up in a shop on 31 rue Cambon to pursue her “little hat hobby.” She lived in his grand manor, and he introduced his friends to her chapeaus (the antithesis of the flower-themed ones then in vogue), and they became wildly popular. During this period Coco met a friend of Balsan, Arthur Capel, nicknamed “Boy,” an English polo-playing businessman who became the love of her life.
Coco became a fashion force to be reckoned with because of a black dress she designed from an old jersey in order to stay warm on a chilly day; previously the material had been used solely for men’s underwear. In addition to warmth, it allowed liberty of movement, something that garters and the tight-fitting whalebone corsets of the day did not. The demand for the LBD (little black dress) was overwhelming; she explained her clothing philosophy thusly: “Luxury must be comfortable; otherwise it is not luxury.” She had taken a color associated with mourning and transformed it into the height of fashion for evening wear. Her philosophy was that women should dress for other women—and undress for men. She also, through a mishap, introduced the flapper-styled bob when, preparing for the opera, her gas heater blew up and singed her long, lustrous locks. She cut off a foot of her damaged tresses and the style inspired the garçon boyish style that became de rigueur for flappers.
Boy married an aristocratic English beauty; however, the C’s in Coco Chanel never stood for “conventional,” and she continued the affair. In 1919, en route to their rendezvous, he died in a car accident on the Côte d’Azur. Chanel stated that 1919 was “The year I woke up famous and the year I lost everything.”
After Boy there were other lovers, such as Hugh “Bendor” Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster—the richest man in Europe. Through him, Coco established connections with heavyweights such as David Lloyd George, Charlie Chaplin, and Winston Churchill. She refused her lover’s marriage proposal with the pronouncement, “There have been several Duchesses of Westminster—but there is only one Chanel.”
Chanel became the first female to head a fashion house, maintained a suite at the Ritz, vacationed on the Riviera (which she popularized as a holiday destination), befriended Pablo Picasso, and had an affair with composer Igor Stravinsky. Her shop, with its logo of mirror-image C’s, became a mecca for those who desired to sheathe themselves in the ultimate status label. As the Queen of the opulent castle on 31 rue Cambon, Mademoiselle (as her staff of three hundred called her) became the mother of reinvention—a French equivalent of Gatsby. She reminisced how her doting dad had used “coco” as a term of endearment, altered the date of her birth to make herself ten years younger, and changed the locale of her birth. Through steely determination, she trod the road from courtesan to doyenne of high society, from seamstress to celebrated couturier. Yet her crowning achievement was her empire’s greatest jewel: the eponym that made her name iconic.
The amber-hued perfume had its genesis in the collaboration of Chanel and Ernest Beaux—former perfumer to the Tsar of Russia—whom she had met through her lover, the recently deposed Grand Duke Dmitri Romanov. The perfume bottle’s design remains a masterful example of classic elegance; its iconic glass cap was inspired by an antique mirror in her Ritz home, and its label (the first to feature a designer’s name) still bears an understated “No. 5”, a number with superstitious significance for Chanel. A fortune-teller had told her that five was her lucky number, and Coco released her famous perfume on May 5, 1921. When a young woman inquired where one should use perfume, Chanel replied, “Wherever one expects to be kissed.” In a similarly sensual vein, when a reporter asked Marilyn Monroe what she wore to bed, the sex symbol responded, “Three drops of Chanel No. 5.” This comment began the tradition of the perfume’s association with the world’s most desired women. In the 1970s, Catherine Deneuve purred, “You don’t have to ask for it. He knows what you want: Chanel.” Coco herself was enamored of her eponymous scent: her assistants sprayed it in her spiral staircase whenever she made her entrance, so she could waltz in through a haze of her signature scent. Chanel No. 5 made its entrance into pop art history when Andy Warhol produced the image of its iconic bottle dozens of times on canvas. Coco’s couture also made it into American history: Jacqueline Kennedy was wearing a pink Chanel suit at her husband’s assassination. When Lady Bird Johnson asked the new widow why she kept the blood-spattered garment on for her husband’s impromptu inauguration aboard Air Force One, Mrs. Kennedy replied, “Let them see what they have done.”
World War II was the event where Coco’s talisman “5” deserted her. The war years proved to be the time when the creator of the world’s best-selling fragrance came away smelling not so sweet. During the Occupation of Paris, she embarked on an affair with Nazi officer Baron Hans Günther von Dinklage that carried the fringe benefit of allowing her to remain in her suite at the Ritz. The once homeless orphan was willing to become the “cocotte” once more. She served as a willing agent for the German high command, partly driven by anti-Semitism. In return she was granted favors that included the release of her nephew from a German prisoner-of-war camp. Moreover, under the laws of Vichy France, she sought to dispossess the Jewish Pierre Wertheimer of his 90-percent ownership stake in Les Parfums Chanel. However, before Pierre fled to New York City, he transferred his shares to the Christian industrialist Felix Amiot. After the war, Wertheimer bought back the company and his two grandsons’ fortunes are currently valued at $19.2 billion.
Nevertheless, the degree of her involvement with the enemy is shrouded in the gray arena of conjecture. Her defenders argue that her transgression was solely on a horizontal level, driven by love rather than avarice. Her detractors view her as a master manipulator, flawed, hard, and pitiless, like the nuns who had raised her. She had become rich by catering to the rich, and at age fifty her fortune was worth the equivalent of almost one billion in today’s dollars. Her success stemmed from her Golden Rule of never following anyone else’s rules. Coco was always able to land on her feet—or someone else’s—and move on to the next man, the next collection, or the next patron.
After the war, female collaborators had their heads shaved and were paraded through the streets; through Churchill’s intervention, she was spared the indignity. However, she could not elude the court of public opinion that condemned her for sleeping with the enemy, and Chanel retreated to her Elba—a self-imposed exile in Switzerland.
After eight years, she returned to her suite at the Ritz, the place where she had conducted affairs with the most celebrated men of the twentieth century; however, in the end, she was alone. Coco’s greatness, putting aside her legacy, lay in how she proved that she did not define herself by the many men who had desired and deserted her. Chanel’s personal tragedy was that her life never delivered the unalloyed sweetness of her iconic scent.
The grand doyenne of fashion passed away at age eighty-seven, hard at work up to the end—designing, controlling, and dictating, inspiring equal parts admiration and fear in Madame’s employees. Her last words were to her maid Celine: “You see, this is how you die.” On her casket lay a spray of white flowers in the shape of a tailor’s shears. The attendees at her funeral were clad in Chanel; interment was at the Cimètiere du Boise-de-Vaux in Lausanne. Her headstone bears the name Gabrielle Chanel—inscribed under five bas-relief stone lions, a nod to her astrological sign and her immortal scent.