Note To Self

If Coco was her character, Gabrielle could be considered the author. Now a new fragrance — Chanel’s first in 15 years — sets the story straight.

- Eugenie Kelly

AMONG THE NUGGETS OF TRUTH, there’s also a hefty dose of mystery associated with the rags-to-riches story of Coco Chanel. Probably due to the countless films, biographies and even picture books she inspired. Talk about page turning stuff. Daddy’s disappearing act. Orphanage upbringing. A fashion genius intent on creating her own fortune. The femme fatale with a weakness for incorrigible womanisers. You couldn’t script this plot-twister if you tried.

Even the name Coco seems straight out of a Disney film. Just as one of her flawlessly constructed jackets would be pieced together, taken apart and restitched, it was a nickname she embraced professionally somewhat reluctantly from about the age of 30, when she started to become a household name. It was part of her brand. As she famously declared, “I have chosen the person I wanted to be and am.”

Officially speaking, she was baptised Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, her mother, Eugénie, having named her after a nun who worked in the poorhouse hospice where she was delivered in rural France in 1883. Only those closest to her were granted permission to call her Coco in her presence. For everyone else — the seamstresses who worked for her, say — it was Mademoiselle.

If she walked into the room I’m sitting in now on this sullen late-winter Tuesday afternoon, I have a feeling I’d be in the Mademoiselle camp. No matter how often I visit these floors above the Chanel Fine Jewellery boutique at 18 Place Vendôme, Paris, the plush surroundings and the hushed, reverent tones everyone talks in make you feel as if she’ll stride through the door any second. Even the room’s floor-to-ceiling windows look directly across the square into the couturier’s lavish three-room former suite at the Ritz, where she lived until her death in 1971. It’s like she’s keeping an eye on proceedings.