Coco Chanel

📍Abbaye d'Aubazine, Le Bourg, 19190 Aubazine, Corrèze, France

“I was born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel on the 19th of August 1883 in Saumur, Loire, but it was the orphanage and convent at Aubazine in the Corrèze region of central France that truly formed me. My mother died when I was eleven and my father — a travelling market vendor — placed my sisters and me in the convent, where we remained for six years. I have spent my adult life constructing a different story of my origins because the truth was too painful to wear, but Aubazine gave me everything that made me Chanel: the austerity of the convent aesthetic that became the aesthetic of my fashion — the black and white, the severe lines, the absence of unnecessary ornament. The nuns' habits, the stained glass windows, the stone floors — I absorbed a visual vocabulary at Aubazine that I spent sixty years translating into clothing for women who had never heard of it.”

Sources: Chaney, L. Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life (2011), Viking; Madsen, A. Chanel: A Woman of Her Own (1990), Henry Holt; Charles-Roux, E. Chanel (1975, translated Nancy Amphoux), Knopf