If you step up the wide, mirrored, creamy soft staircase to the topmost floor of 31 Rue Cambon in Paris, and then manage to negotiate your way through the diligently guarded door there, you will discover Coco Chanel’s private apartment. In its handful of modest rooms, you are immediately immersed in an openeyed lifetime of treasure: a bountiful harvest of precious objects. Egyptian sphinxes, ormolu looking-glasses, her beloved lions, Goossens ‘Wheat’ tables, leather-bound books. Each and every thing scrupulously chosen, deeply loved and intimately personal. Moving through this space is not unlike a time-warp safari, a delicious garden of distilled earthly delights, so resonant is the atmosphere of dedicated care, of innate value and of the savoured life – once lived and completed, and now eternally cherished still.
And at the back of this string of rooms, through the very final door, you enter Chanel’s inner office, a small square chamber, within which lives the crown jewel of her collection. An entire wall consists of a magnificent 18th-century coromandel screen – one of eight embedded in this trove of an apartment and of 32 she owned in total. Depicting, in lyrical and expansive detail, life on the legendary West Lake in Hangzhou, China, this luminous panorama constitutes nothing so much as a private cinema screen. Here a filigree bridge, overhung with wisteria, strolled over by ladies with parasols, there a boat carrying idling fishermen, a young girl at the bow trailing her fingers through the water, elegant plane trees shading temples and walkways, worshippers and pickpockets. The overwhelming vista of life ticking over, viewed from above and afar – both in space and time – quite takes one’s breath away.
The elevation of the point of view weaves in an existential, even spiritual, reflection. For all the candid detail of quotidian comings and goings, ours is somehow not a human eye as we take in this landscape. We hover above the great expanse of the lake as engaged visitors, alien if not godlike, in our capacity for detached – benign and non-judgemental – perspective. A camera obscura’s view. We see everything, we marvel at everything. This attitude, this suspension, is good for us. It fosters acceptance and encourages connection. The cinema screen is magic this way. This handcrafted prototype casts its proto-spell, direct and fresh from 400 years ago, and we feel its charge along the wires of time.
I was fortunate enough to travel with the house of Chanel to Hangzhou in December last year to discover for ourselves the miracle of this exquisite oversized snapshot. There we found the same, perfectly recognisable bridges host to the latest descendants of those strolling ladies, the boats filled with distinctly similar enthusiastic anglers and seekers of leisure as four centuries past. That familiar landscape, traced in glistening lacquer and inlaid mother-of-pearl according to meticulous traditions practised since the 14th century and now settled and beaming its rays in Paris, is living-and-breathing IRL.
Paris, is living-and-breathing IRL. Gabrielle Chanel herself never travelled to Hangzhou. She never saw West Lake and its intoxicating party atmosphere. But every day she entered her inner office she gazed upon a mise-en-scène as vivid and vibrant as the Brussels markets witnessed by Bruegel, as the neverendingly absorbing gardens of the mind captured by Bosch. She plugged into its mystical powers: intergalactic, time-travelling transport and its evidence of the immortal richness of human society, forever spinning around its earthly axis and, however divided by geography or time, perennially and reliably united in art.
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