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142 PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF CHANEL C oco Chanel would have fared quite well in Boston— that's the thought that occurs while viewing one of the storied French label's most significant debuts in recent memory. She was, after all, highly industrious, fiercely independent, and tough as nails. Yet behind the ambition and visionary thinking, Chanel also possessed a thoroughly romantic soul and a fragility she sought to hide behind that otherwise steely veneer, concealed to all but her innermost circle— luminaries in their own right, with names like Picasso, Dalí, and Stravinsky. The resulting amalgam, a delicacy of spirit mixed with a tenacious desire to shield it, could be traced to her astrological sign, she said. "I was born under the sign of Leo," Chanel once explained (she was born August 19, 1883). "And like a lion, I use my claws to prevent people from doing me harm, but, believe me, I suffer more from scratching than from being scratched." Of all the items Chanel transformed from idea to icon—her favorite flower, the perfectly symmetrical pure-white camellia, for example, or the number five, which she considered lucky—perhaps it's most telling that she rarely introduced the symbol of her astrological sign into her collections. (A lion's head in gold sometimes adorned the buttons of haute-couture jackets, but she demurred from placing the animal on equal footing with the decidedly more conspicuous elements in her iconography.) For the woman who injected so many of her personal desires into her CLOCKWISE designs, was the lion perhaps too personal? "I think FROM TOP: The diamond Lion so, because it also meant more than her astrological Mosaique sign," explains Benjamin Comar, international direcnecklace; a Lion Royal piece tor of Chanel Fine Jewelry. "We have come to think of being crafted in it as being key to her rebirth." the workshop; a close-up of the Venice, 1920: Coco Chanel arrives in the city exquisite Lion known as "La Serenissima," her spirit in need of that Talisman pendant; the Italian coastal town long ago nicknamed "the most Lion Talisman serene." She has descended upon Venice not for a bracelet. vacation, but rather an escape: During the December of 1919, the man widely known to be the love of her life, the polo player Arthur "Boy" Capel, was killed in an auto accident, and the bereft Chanel sought refuge in Italy, yet soon found herself entranced by Venice's abundance of Byzantine art, the gilt detailing splashed across its architecture—and the bronze, winged lion that sits atop a tall granite column in the Piazza San Marco. "She had come to Venice because she was devastated, and soon she found herself inspired," Comar says. This month Chanel, the brand, takes center stage in Boston as it debuts one of its largest US boutiques on December 3 at 6 Newbury Street (see sidebar for more details). But it was earlier this summer that the label BOSTONCOMMON-MAGAZINE.COM 140-145_BC_F_Fashion_Holiday_13.indd 142 11/4/13 10:35 AM