THE SECRET LIFE OF COCO CHANEL
 Exclusive illustrations of Chanel by Karl Lagerfeld.

The trail began in Paris at 31 Rue Cambon, the backbone of the House of Chanel, where the famous mirrored staircase leads from the ground-floor entrance to the couture salon on the first floor and then to Mademoiselle's private apartment. The doors into the apartment are hidden within the looking-glass walls of the landing, and slipping inside feels oddly akin to entering an Alice in Wonderland realm. On the other side of the glass, there are more mirrors — each reflecting the other, in a myriad of perspectives — and a crystal chandelier designed by Chanel herself, with hidden double C's in its wrought-iron frame and, at the top, G's for Gabrielle, her real name. And everywhere is evidence of what she had and what she lost: On a wall of bookshelves are leather-bound volumes from her first great love, Boy Capel, the British playboy and industrialist who was killed in a car crash in 1919 (by which point he had already betrayed her by marrying another woman, although their affair continued until his death); on the table in front of the beige suede sofa (the cushions quilted like Chanel's iconic bags) sit a set of crested, gold-lined boxes presented to her by the Duke of Westminster, the second Englishman to whom she gave her heart but whose name was never to become hers in marriage.

Most poignant of all, in this glittering salon where Mademoiselle entertained some of the most celebrated men of the century — Picasso, Dalí, Cocteau, Diaghilev, Churchill — yet finally found herself alone, are the pairs of animals that seem to stand like talismans: two bronze deer by the fireplace, almost life-size; a stag and a doe, their cloven feet sinking into the carpet, and another tiny pair beside the sofa in painted metal, with vases of pink flowers on their backs; two camels on a side table; two frogs (one glass, one bronze); two lovebirds made of pearl in a tiny jeweled cage; two porcelain horses on either side of the smoky mirror; and two golden firedogs in the empty hearth.

Long before Gabrielle reinvented herself as Coco, she knew the meaning of abandonment, and the evidence of her unhappy childhood is not entirely absent from her Parisian salon. There is a set of tarot cards on her desk, just as she left them before her death at 87 in January 1971 (among them is the number five, her lucky number, illustrated by a picture of a green tree, its roots visible above the ground), and a gold crucifix; the mystical and Catholic symbols coexist yet also form the outlines of an iconography of Chanel's own making.

But much else was hidden away, hundreds of miles from Rue Cambon, at Aubazine, a remote 12th-century Cistercian abbey high in the hills of the Corrèze, where Gabrielle was shaped by the nuns who raised her. Chanel never admitted to her years at Aubazine, where she lived from the age of 11 to 18, in an orphanage run by the sisters of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary. Her father, a feckless peddler always on the run from his family, left his three daughters there after the death of their mother from TB and disappeared forever.

The nuns who still live at Aubazine are more concerned with the worship of God than the antecedents of fashion,  Gabrielle came here with her two sisters in February 1895. Only a handful of nuns remained, the orphans long since vanished, though their dormitories were untouched, the children's iron beds lined against whitewashed walls hung with crucifixes.

At Aubazine she learned to sew, which would prove to be the means of her early employment as a seamstress in a provincial town, but she also grasped the austere beauty of her surroundings and transformed them in the course of her career into her signature style. The black and white of the nuns' habits would reappear in the restrained yet fluid couture so characteristic of Chanel, their rosary beads, crosses, and chains transfigured into pearls and jewelry that were more significant than mere accessories.

And beyond that, Chanel also displayed the heroic qualities that would make her so successful: the vision to turn black, the color of mourning, into the symbol of independence, freedom, and strength and the courage to keep working, even when love failed her. She was flawed, of course, like all the most compelling characters: hard and pitiless and mistaken at times, like the nuns who educated her. But she was also vulnerable enough to grieve for those she had lost and loyal to the series of men who left her, including the father she never saw again. Where had he gone, at least in the tale she told in adulthood (one in a series of stories that formed so many layers of myth)? To America, the promised land, to make his fortune. He never got there, of course — his path ended in drunken obscurity in the bars of rural French market towns — but his daughter did, and America applauded her, coast to coast. Emerging from behind the forbidding walls of the orphanage, via Paris all the way to uptown Manhattan and the Hollywood Hills, Gabrielle Chanel proved that a woman need not define herself by the men who desired and deserted her. For in the end, Chanel was entirely her own creation, still seeking perfection in her designs until the very last day of her life.