CHAPTER AND VERSE
A Venetian show reveals how literature shaped Coco Chanel’s creative voice
Sasha Slater explores the novels, poetry and paintings that inspired the designs of Coco Chanel
Venice was a magical dreamscape for Coco Chanel. She first came here griefstricken after the death of her English polo-playing lover, Boy Capel, in 1919, and became enamoured of the city, subsequently using its colours, patterns, iconography and ideas in both clothes and jewellery, and adopting La Serenissima’s lion as one of her own heraldic symbols – for Chanel’s star sign was Leo.
Now, a new exhibition has been unveiled at Ca’ Pesaro, a magnificent 18th-century palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal. It forms part of the Culture Chanel programme of occasional shows, which seeks to lift the veil on the inspirations and philosophy that drove the designer’s success, and have guided her eponymous fashion house ever since.
Yet the curator, Jean-Louis Froment, has not taken Chanel’s relationship with Venice as his theme; instead, he has created something more subtle. ‘I wanted to tell this story about a Chanel who has paused and who is reading in silence,’ he says. Titled ‘La Donna che Legge’ after a Pablo Picasso painting on display (known in English as Reclining Woman Reading), the show tells the story of the fashion visionary through the medium of the books she read and the writers, thinkers, composers, artists and impresarios whom she loved and who loved her. Glass cases enclose letters to Chanel from Jean Cocteau, poems by Pierre Reverdy, sketches by Picasso, music by Igor Stravinsky, a sculpture by Diego Giacometti… Alongside such treasures are more personal relics: her birth certificate; the little image of St Thérèse de Lisieux that nestled in her purse; a reliquary from the church in the town of Aubazine where she spent her childhood – for after her mother died, her feckless father placed her there in an orphanage run by nuns.
And as you pore over the scrawled manuscript of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Chanel herself seems to emerge and hover somewhere in the room, just out of sight. ‘Chanel constructed her life like a heroine,’ says Froment. ‘She wanted to be famous and powerful but she romanticised her own life. But she was also interested in a secret life, a life of the mind. She sought for space to think and dream.’
Most revealing is the little note Chanel wrote herself and always carried, an extract from The Sentimental Initiation by Joséphin Péladan: ‘The life we dream of, that’s the great existence because it will continue beyond death’ – a belief amply borne out by this inspiring exhibition. Culture Chanel’s ‘La Donna che Legge’ is at Ca’ Pesaro, Venice (www.capesaro.visitmuve.it), until 8 January 2017.