The Law of Covetousness
bsence and presence have very primal effects upon us. Too much presence suffocates; a degree of absence spurs our interest. We are marked by the continual desire to possess what we do not have—
the object projected by our fantasies. Learn to create some mystery around you, to use strategic absence to make people desire your return, to want to possess you. Dangle in front of others what they are missing most in life, what they are forbidden to have, and they will go crazy with desire. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Overcome this weakness in yourself by embracing your circumstances, your fate.
The Object of Desire
In 1895 eleven-year-old Gabrielle Chanel sat by her mother’s bedside for several days and watched her slowly die from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-three. Gabrielle’s life had been hard, but now it could only get worse. She and her siblings had grown up in poverty, shuttled from one relative’s house to another. Their father was an itinerant peddler of goods who hated any kind of ties or responsibility and was rarely at home. Their mother, who often accompanied her husband on the road, was the only comforting force in their lives.
As Gabrielle had feared, a few days after the mother’s death her father showed up and deposited Gabrielle and her two sisters at a convent in central France. He promised to return for them quite soon, but they would never see him again. The nuns at the convent, housed
in a former medieval monastery, took in all sorts of girls to care for, mostly orphans. They enforced strict discipline. Within the somber walls of the monastery, which was sparsely decorated, the girls were to live a life of austerity and spiritual practice. They each had only two dresses they could wear, both alike and formless. Luxuries were forbidden. The only music was church music. The food was
exceptionally plain. In her first few months there, Gabrielle tried to accommodate herself to this new world, but she felt impossibly restless.
One day, she discovered a series of romance novels that somehow had been smuggled into the convent, and soon they became her only salvation. They were written by Pierre Decourcelle, and almost all of them involved a Cinderella-like story—a young girl growing up in poverty, shunned and despised, suddenly finds herself whisked into a world of wealth through some clever plot twist. Gabrielle could
completely identify with the protagonists, and she particularly loved the endless descriptions of the dresses that the heroines would wear.
The world of palaces and châteaux seemed so very far away from her, but in those moments in which she drifted through novel after novel she could feel herself participating in the plot, and it gave her an overwhelming desire to make it come to life, even though it was
forbidden for her to want such things and seemingly impossible to ever have them.
At the age of eighteen she left the convent for a boarding school, also run by nuns. There she was trained for a career as a seamstress.
The school was in a small town, and as she explored it she quickly discovered a new passion to pursue, the theater. She loved everything about it—the costumes, the sets, the performers in makeup. It was a world of transformation, where somebody could become anybody.
Now all she wanted was to be an actress and make her name in the theater. She took the stage name Coco and she tried everything—
acting, singing, and dancing. She had a lot of energy and charisma, but she realized quickly enough that she lacked the talent for the kind of success she desired.
Coming to terms with this, she soon hit upon a new dream. Many of the actresses who could not make a living from their work had become courtesans who were supported by wealthy lovers. Such women had enormous wardrobes, could go where they pleased, and, although they were shunned by good society, they were not shackled with some
despotic husband. As luck would have it, one of the young men who enjoyed her on the stage, Etienne Balsan, invited her to stay in his nearby château. He had inherited a family fortune and lived a life of total leisure. Gabrielle, now known as Coco to one and all, accepted the offer.
The château was filled with courtesans who floated in and out from all over Europe. Some of them were famous. They were all beautiful and worldly. It was a relatively simple life that centered on riding horses in the country, then lavish parties in the evening. The class differences were noticeable. Whenever aristocrats or important people came to the château, women like Coco were to eat with the servants and make themselves scarce.
With nothing to do and feeling restless yet again, she began to analyze herself and the future ahead of her. Her ambitions were great, but she was always searching for something beyond her grasp,
continually dreaming about a future that was just not possible. At first it was the palaces in the romance novels, then it was a grand life on the stage, becoming another Sarah Bernhardt. Now her latest dream was just as absurd. The great courtesans were all voluptuous, beautiful women. Coco looked more like a boy. She had no curves and was not a classic beauty. It was more her presence and energy that charmed men, but that would not last. She always wanted what other people had, imagining it contained some hidden treasure. Even when it came to other women and their boyfriends or husbands, her greatest desire was to steal the man away, which she had done on several occasions. But whenever she got what she wanted, including the boyfriend or the life in a château, she inevitably felt disappointed by the reality. It was a mystery what in the end could satisfy her.
Then one day, without thinking of what exactly she was up to, she wandered into Balsan’s bedroom and pilfered some of his clothes. She started to wear outfits that were totally her own invention—his open- collared shirts and tweed coats, paired with some of her own clothes, all topped with a man’s straw boater hat. In wearing the clothes she noticed two things: She felt an incredible sense of freedom as she left behind the corsets, constricting gowns, and fussy headpieces women were wearing. And she reveled in the new kind of attention she
received. The other courtesans now watched her with unconcealed envy. They were captivated by this androgynous style. These new outfits suited her figure well, and nobody had ever seen a woman
dressed quite in this manner. Balsan himself was charmed. He
introduced her to his tailor, and on her instructions the tailor custom- made for her a boy’s riding costume with jodhpurs. She taught herself to ride horses, but not sidesaddle like the other women. She had
always had an athletic bent to her character and within months had become an expert rider. Now she could be seen everywhere in her strange riding costume.
As she progressed with this new persona, it finally became clear to her the nature of her vague longings: what she wanted was the power and freedom that men possessed, which was reflected in the less
constricting clothes that they wore. And she could sense that the other courtesans and women at the château could identify with this. It was something in the air, a repressed desire she had tapped into. Within a few weeks several of the courtesans began to visit her in her room and try on the straw hats that she had decorated with ribbons and feathers.
Compared with the elaborate hats that women had to pin on their heads, these were simple and easy to wear. The courtesans now strode around town with Chanel’s hats on their heads, and soon other women in the area were asking where they could buy them. Balsan offered her the use of his apartment in Paris, where she could begin to make many more of her hats and perhaps go into business. She happily took up the offer.
Soon another man entered her life—a wealthy Englishman named Arthur Capel, who was excited by the novelty of her look and her great ambitions. They became lovers. Capel started sending his aristocratic lady friends to Coco’s studio, and soon her hats became a craze. Along with the hats she began to sell some clothes that she designed, all with the same androgynous look that she had worn herself, made out of the cheapest jersey fabric but seeming to offer a kind of freedom of
movement so different from the prevailing styles. Capel encouraged her to open up a shop in the seaside town of Deauville, where all the fashionable Parisians spent their summers. It turned out to be the perfect idea: there in the relatively small town, filled with people- watchers and the most fashionable women of all, she could create a sensation.
She shocked the locals by swimming in the ocean. Women did not do such things, and swimming costumes for women were almost nonexistent, so she created her own out of the same jersey fabric.
Within weeks women were at her store clamoring to buy them. She
sauntered through Deauville wearing her own distinctive outfits—
androgynous, easy to move in, and ever so slightly provocative as they hugged the body. She became the talk of the town. Women were
desperate to find out where she got her wardrobe. She kept
improvising with men’s clothing to create new looks. She took one of Capel’s sweaters and cut it open, added some buttons, and created a modern version of the cardigan, for women. This now became the rage.
She cut her own hair to a short length, knowing how it suited her face, and suddenly this became the new trend. Sensing momentum, she gave her clothes without charge to beautiful and well-connected
women, all sporting hairstyles similar to her own. Attending the most sought-after parties, these women, all looking like Chanel clones, spread the desire for this new style well beyond Deauville, to Paris itself.
By 1920 she had become one of the leading fashion designers in the world, and the greatest trendsetter of her time. Her clothes had come to represent a new kind of woman—confident, provocative, and ever so slightly rebellious. Although they were cheap to make and still out of jersey material, she sold some of her dresses at extremely high prices, and wealthy women were more than willing to pay to share in the Chanel mystique. But quickly her old restlessness returned. She
wanted something else, something larger, a faster way to reach women of all classes. To realize this dream she decided upon a most unusual strategy—she would create and launch her own perfume.
At the time it was unusual for a fashion house to market its own perfume, and unheard of to give it so much emphasis. But Chanel had a plan. This perfume would be as distinctive as her clothes yet more ethereal, literally something in the air that would excite men and women and infect them with the desire to possess it. To accomplish this she would go in the opposite direction from all the other perfumes out there, which were associated with some natural, floral scent.
Instead, she wanted to create something that was not identifiable as a particular flower. She wanted it to smell like “a bouquet of abstract flowers,” something pleasant but completely novel. More than any other perfume, it would smell different on each woman. To take this further, she decided to give it a most unusual name. Perfumes of the time had very poetic, romantic titles. Instead, she would name it after herself, attaching a simple number, Chanel No. 5, as if it were a
scientific concoction. She packaged the perfume in a sleek modernist
bottle and added to the label her new logo of interlocking C’s. It looked like nothing else out there.
To launch the perfume, she decided upon a subliminal campaign.
She began by spraying the scent everywhere in her store in Paris. It filled the air. Women kept asking what it was and she would feign ignorance. She would then slip bottles of the perfume, without labels, into the bags of her wealthiest and best-connected clients. Soon
women began to talk of this strange new scent, rather haunting and impossible to identify as any known flower. The word of yet another Chanel creation began to spread like wildfire and women were soon showing up at her store begging to buy the new scent, which she now began to place discreetly on shelves. In the first few weeks they could not stock enough. Nothing like this had ever happened in the industry, and it would go on to become the most successful perfume in history, making her a fortune.
Over the next two decades the house of Chanel reigned supreme in the fashion world, but during World War II she flirted with Nazism, staying in Paris during the Nazi occupation and visibly siding with the occupiers. She had closed her store at the beginning of the war, and by the end of the war she had been thoroughly disgraced in the eyes of the French by her political sympathies. Aware and perhaps ashamed, she fled to Switzerland, where she would remain in self-imposed exile. By 1953, however, she felt the need not only for a comeback but for
something even greater. Although she was now seventy, she had become disgusted at the latest trends in fashion, which she felt had returned to the old constrictions and fussiness of women’s clothing that she had sought to destroy. Perhaps this also signaled a return to a more subservient role for women. To Chanel it would be the ultimate challenge—after some fourteen years out of business, she was now largely forgotten. No one thought of her anymore as a trendsetter. She would have to start almost completely over.
Her first move was to encourage rumors that she was planning a return, but she gave no interviews. She wanted to stimulate talk and excitement but surround herself with mystery. Her new show debuted in 1954, and an enormous crowd filled her store to watch it, mostly out of curiosity. Almost immediately there was a sense of disappointment.
The clothes were mostly a rehash of her 1930s styles with a few new touches. The models were all Chanel look-alikes and mimicked her way of walking. To the audience, Chanel seemed a woman hopelessly
locked in a past that would never return. The clothes seemed passé and the press pilloried her, dredging up at the same time her Nazi
associations during the war.
For almost any designer this would have been a devastating blow, but she appeared remarkably unfazed by it all. As always, she had a plan and she knew better. She had decided well before the debut in Paris that the United States was to be the target of this new line of clothes. American women reflected her sensibility best of all—athletic, into ease of movement and unfussy silhouettes, eminently practical.
And they had more money to spend than anyone else in the world.
Sure enough, the new line created a sensation in the States. Soon the French began to tone down their criticisms. Within a year of her return she had reestablished herself as the most important designer in the world, and fashions now returned to the simpler and more classical shapes she had always promoted. When Jacqueline Kennedy began to wear her suits in many of her public appearances, it was the most apparent symbol of the power Chanel had reclaimed.
As she resumed her place at the top, she revealed another practice that was so against the times and the industry. Piracy was a great problem in fashion, as knockoffs of established designs would appear all over the world after a show. Designers carefully guarded all of their secrets and fought through the courts any form of imitation. Chanel did the opposite. She welcomed all sorts of people into her shows and allowed them to take photographs. She knew this would only
encourage the many people who made a living out of creating cheap versions of her clothes, but she wanted this. She even invited wealthy women to bring along their seamstresses, who would make sketches of the designs and then create replicas of them. More than making
money, what she wanted most of all was to spread her fashions everywhere, to feel herself and her work to be objects of desire by women of all classes and nations. It would be the ultimate revenge for the girl who had grown up ignored, unloved, and shunned. She would clothe millions of women; her look, her imprint would be seen
everywhere—as indeed it was a few years after her comeback.
• • •
Interpretation: The moment Chanel tried on Etienne Balsan’s clothes and elicited a new kind of attention, something clicked in her brain that would forever change the course of her life. Prior to this she
was always coveting something transgressive that stimulated her
fantasies. It was not socially acceptable for a lowly orphan girl to aspire to mingle with the upper classes. Actress and courtesan were not
suitable roles to pursue, especially for someone raised in a convent.
Now, as she rode around the château in her jodhpurs and boater hat, she was suddenly the object that other people coveted. And they were drawn to the transgressive aspect of her clothing, the deliberate flouting of gender roles. Instead of being locked in her imaginary world full of dreams and fantasies, she could be the one stimulating such fantasies in other people. All that was required was to reverse her
perspective—to think of the audience first and to strategize how to play on their imagination. The objects she had desired since childhood were all somewhat vague, elusive, and taboo. That was their allure. That is the nature of human desire. She simply had to turn this around and incorporate such elements into the objects she created.
This is how she performed such magic: First, she surrounded herself and what she made with an aura of mystery. She never talked about her impoverished childhood. She made up countless
contradictory stories about her past. Nobody really knew anything concrete about her. She carefully controlled the number of her public appearances, and she knew the value of disappearing for a while. She never revealed the recipe for her perfume or her creative process in general. Her oddly compelling logo was designed to stimulate
interpretations. All of this gave endless space for the public to imagine and speculate about the Coco myth. Second, she always associated her designs with something vaguely transgressive. The clothes had a
distinct masculine edge but remained decidedly feminine. They gave women the sense that they were crossing some gender boundaries—
physically and psychologically loosening constrictions. The clothes also conformed more to the body, combining freedom of movement with sex. These were not your mother’s clothes. To wear the overall Chanel look was to make a statement about youth and modernity. Once this took hold, it was hard for young women to resist the call.
Finally, from the beginning she made sure her clothes were seen everywhere. Observing other women wearing such clothes stimulated competitive desires to have the same and not be left out. Coco
remembered how deeply she had desired men who were already taken.
They were desirable because someone else desired them. Such