Some showed Chanel and her sisters as living with family members in Thiers, a medieval town with tightly packed half-timber buildings in Auvergne, and Chanel herself is quoted in interviews as saying she'd been sent to live with aunts. She was in fact 11, and these inaccuracies around her age continued throughout her life.Īfter Jeanne's death, the records become muddy once again. In interviews with journalists, Chanel claimed she was six years old. It's unclear whether any of her children were present at the time. Chanel's mother Jeanne appears on the death records in Brive-la-Gaillarde, found dead in her bed on a freezing morning. "But it's important to say we don't know exactly her movements as a child, because they were constantly moving between small market towns." "Her father was itinerant, so there's these tantalising traces of her," said Picardie. The surviving children were Chanel's little sister Antoinette, and brothers Lucien and Alphonse.
They had four more children over the seven years that followed, although one never made it past infancy. Henri-Albert and Jeanne eventually married when Gabrielle was 15 months old, not that it would make her father any more present in her life. Her father, who seemingly was to spend the rest of his life on the run from his family, was not present for either birth. Her parents already had one child, Julia, born under a year before Chanel. Due to a clerical error, she was listed as 'Chasnel' on her birth certificate. What Picardie discovered is that Gabrielle Chanel was born in Saumur on 19 August 1883, the illegitimate child of Eugénie (Jeanne) Dévolles and Henri-Albert Chanel, who were then unmarried. She also met with people who'd known Chanel personally, among them her close friend Claude Delay, her great-niece Gabrielle Labrunie and an elderly woman from Aubazine. Picardie's own travels took her to Aubazine, the convent orphanage where Chanel and her sisters were placed when abandoned by their father, and to Chanel's former apartment in Rue Cambon, Paris. Picardie has spent 25 years researching the designer, and her biography, Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life, has been updated and republished to coincide with the new exhibit, and includes much more detail on Chanel's earlier life. The truth about her childhood was too unbearable and I think she wanted to leave it as far behind her as possible."
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She had to create a series of stories that were bearable. "I tend not to use the word 'lie' about Chanel. "Chanel's aesthetic may be black and white, but her life is filled with shades of grey," said Justine Picardie, an author, fashion writer and former editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar. But as the first major exhibition of Chanel's work in the UK (Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto) opens at the V&A museum on 16 September 2023, it's a reminder that the line between art and artist is often inseparable. It's particularly difficult to unpick as Chanel notoriously told many different stories to different journalists who interviewed her during the course of her life, and those stories, especially those relating to her childhood, often didn't add up. "Ah bon, Coco Chanel lived here?!" said the butcher herself in surprise. "No, it was the house that belongs to the psychiatrist," said another with confidence. "I think her home was down by the campsite," said one customer in the Courpière butcher shop. Without evidence for any of the above claims, how do we know which is the truth? Google "Chanel" and you'll be confronted with 50 different versions of her life. Numerous reports of her having been a Nazi collaborator. Rumours that her older sister Julia took her own life, and that Julia's son André was in fact Coco Chanel's illegitimate child. Feuds with rival designers (thanks to the Broadway musical, Coco, starring Katharine Hepburn). Part of this is due to media misrepresentation.
The lack of clarity about where Chanel came from doesn't stop people thinking they know who she was. Tracking down anything concrete was proving difficult, however, and records of her early life were no more substantial than a whiff of her No. A handful of half-timbered houses and shuttered windows, this sleepy little place was allegedly once home to one of the world's most famous fashion designers: Coco, née Gabrielle, Chanel. The butcher was the only place in the Auvergne village of Courpière that showed any signs of life when I visited on an August afternoon.
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