Coco Chanel

On 19 August 1883, a baby girl was born in a hospital for poor people in Saumur, a town in France. Her name was Gabrielle Chanel. Her mother washed clothes for a living. Her father sold work clothes and underwear from town to town.

Her mother was too ill to go and register the birth, and her father was away. So the clerk wrote the name down wrong. He spelled it Chasnel. Gabrielle never fixed it, even when she was rich and famous. Fixing it would have shown the world where she was born, and she did not want anyone to know.

The family lived crowded into one room. When Gabrielle was 11, her mother died. Her father sent the two boys off to work on farms. He took the three girls to an orphanage run by nuns in a place called Aubazine.

Life at the orphanage was plain and strict. The rooms were bare and the rules were tight. But it was there that she learned to sew. That one skill changed everything.

A birth chart is a map of the sky at the moment you were born. Astrologers look at where the Sun, the Moon and the planets were, and which star signs they sat in. We know Chanel's chart well, because her birth record gives the time. She was born at four in the afternoon.

Your Sun sign is the one most people know. It is the sign the Sun was in on your birthday. Chanel's Sun was in Leo. Leo is the lion. Western astrologers say Leo wants to shine, to lead and to be seen. A Leo likes her name in lights.

Your Moon sign is the sign the Moon was in. Astrologers say it shows what you need to feel safe inside. Chanel's Moon was in Pisces. Pisces is the fish, the sign of dreams, soft feelings and stories. It is also the sign astrologers connect with hiding and escape.

Your rising sign is the sign that was coming up over the eastern horizon at the moment you were born. Astrologers say it is how people see you first, like the front door of a house. Chanel had Sagittarius rising, right at the very end of the sign. Sagittarius is the archer. It loves the outdoors, sport, horses and freedom.

So astrologers would expect a bright, proud person on show, a dreamy and hidden heart, and a love of fresh air and moving fast. You will see all three in her story.

At 18 she was too old for the orphanage. She went to the town of Moulins and got work as a seamstress, which means someone who sews for a living. At night she sang in a café where army officers came to relax.

One song she sang a lot was called "Who Has Seen Coco?" This is when she picked up the name Coco. Later she liked to say her father gave her the nickname. Nobody is quite sure where it came from.

This is the Pisces Moon at work. All her life, Chanel told new versions of her childhood. She said her father had sailed to America to make his fortune. She said she grew up with two aunts. She even said she was born ten years later than she was.

I think the real story of the girl from the orphanage is better than any of the ones she made up.

She wanted to be a singer on the stage. She went to the spa town of Vichy to try. But her voice was not strong enough. For a while her job there was handing out glasses of mineral water to visitors. Then she went home to Moulins and gave up on the stage.

In Moulins she met a rich young man called Étienne Balsan. She went to live at his big house in the country. People there rode horses, hunted and went to parties. Chanel took to the riding life. She also started making hats, at first just for fun.

Then she fell in love with Balsan's friend, an Englishman called Arthur Capel. Everyone called him Boy. He paid for her first shops. In 1910 he helped her open a hat shop in Paris, at 21 rue Cambon. A famous actress wore her hats in a play, and soon everyone wanted one.

In 1913 Boy helped her open a shop in the seaside town of Deauville. Here she did something new. She made clothes out of jersey. Jersey is a soft, stretchy knitted cloth. At that time it was used mostly for men's underwear! Nobody thought it belonged in smart clothes.

Chanel made easy jackets, jumpers and sailor tops out of it. Women could move in them. They could walk, ride a bike and get on a bus. Before that, many women were squeezed into tight corsets. Chanel helped send the corset away.

That is the Sagittarius rising. The archer wants to move, and Chanel made clothes you could move in. She took ideas from sailors, from horse riders and from sport. She even made suntans fashionable. Before her, a tan meant you worked outside in the fields.

Her shops did so well that by 1916 she paid Boy back all the money he had put in. Then, on 22 December 1919, he died in a car crash. She said many years later, "In losing Capel, I lost everything."

A year and a half later, Chanel brought out a perfume called Chanel No. 5. To get people talking, she took some rich friends to dinner in a smart restaurant. Then she sprayed them all with it as a surprise.

It went on sale in her Paris shop on 5 May 1921. That is the fifth day of the fifth month. She sprayed it in the shop's changing rooms so the smell would follow people out. The bottle was simple and square. People say she based it on a bottle that Boy carried in his travel case.

It was a hit straight away. It became one of the most famous perfumes in the world. Years later the film star Marilyn Monroe said it was all she wore to bed.

But Chanel made a deal she came to hate. In 1924 two businessmen, the Wertheimer brothers, set up a company to make and sell the perfume. They paid for everything. In return they took most of the money. Chanel got only ten parts in every hundred. She spent more than twenty years trying to win it back.

In the 1920s Chanel was a star of Paris fashion. She made a suit of soft wool with a jacket that did not pinch. She tested it on models. She made them climb steps as if they were getting on a bus. If they could not do it easily, the suit was not ready.

In 1926 the magazine Vogue showed a simple black dress by Chanel. Vogue compared it to the Ford car, the car almost anyone could own. It said every woman of taste would soon want one. Vogue was right. People still wear the little black dress today.

Here the Leo Sun shines. Leo wants its name on things, and Chanel put her name on everything. She designed the two back-to-back letter Cs that are still on Chanel bags today. When a very rich duke wanted to marry her, she is supposed to have said, "There have been several Duchesses of Westminster. There is only one Chanel."

There is another link in her chart, between the Sun and Mars. Mars is the planet of energy and drive. In her chart it makes a friendly angle with the Sun that astrologers call a sextile, and it is almost exact. They say it gives a person energy that flows easily into what they want. By 1935, 4,000 people worked for her.

In 1939 the Second World War began. Chanel closed her shops. She said it was not a time for fashion. All 4,000 of her workers lost their jobs.

Germany took over France. Chanel lived at the Ritz, a grand hotel in Paris where top German officers also stayed. She had a relationship with a German diplomat called Hans Günther von Dincklage. This next part is hard, but it is true and it matters.

Chanel held ugly views about Jewish people. The Wertheimer brothers, who ran her perfume company, were Jewish. The Nazis had made laws to take away businesses owned by Jewish families. On 5 May 1941 Chanel wrote to the officials in charge. She tried to use those cruel laws to take the perfume company for herself. It did not work. The Wertheimers had already handed it to a French businessman to keep it safe.

Papers opened many years later show that she worked with German spies. In 1943 she was part of a plan to carry a message from the Nazis to Winston Churchill, the British leader. The plan failed.

After the war she was questioned and then let go. She said that Churchill had her freed. She moved to Switzerland and stayed away from Paris for years.

In 1954, when she was over 70, Chanel opened her fashion house again. Her shop had been shut for 15 years. The French papers were cool about it, because of what she had done in the war. But in America and Britain people loved the new clothes. Orders poured in.

A year later she made a quilted handbag with a chain strap. She called it the 2.55, after the month and year it was made. The chain came from the chains of keys the women at the orphanage wore on their belts. The dark red lining was the colour of the convent uniforms. The orphan girl had put her past into a bag that people all over the world still want.

Chinese astrology gives each year an animal and an element. Chanel was born in a Water Goat year. Chinese astrologers say the Goat is gentle, artistic and fond of beautiful, comfortable things.

They also look at the day you were born. They call its element your Day Master, and it stands for you yourself. Chanel's Day Master is yin Wood. Yin Wood is a small plant, like a flower or a climbing vine. It bends in the wind. But it keeps climbing towards the light, a little at a time.

Then there is her Life Path number. You add up every digit of the birthday. For Chanel, 1, 9, 0, 8, 1, 8, 8 and 3 make 38. Then 3 and 8 make 11. People who use numbers say 11 is a special number. They call it a master number and say it means big ideas and lots of nervous energy.

Her chart has one hard angle too. Saturn is the planet of rules, limits and hard lessons. In her chart it makes a square to her Moon. A square is a tense, sharp angle. Astrologers say it can mean a tough start and a heart that learns early to look after itself.

Some planets take years to cross one sign. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto move slowly. Astrologers watch which spots in your birth chart they touch. They call these touches transits.

When Boy Capel died in 1919, Saturn was sitting right opposite her Moon, almost to the exact degree. Astrologers see that as a heavy time for the heart. Uranus, the planet of sudden shocks, was opposite her Sun too.

When No. 5 came out in 1921, Uranus had moved close to her Moon. Uranus and Jupiter were both making squares to her birth Saturn. Astrologers say this is a time when old limits break.

When she wrote her letter in 1941, Uranus and Jupiter were both making squares to her Sun. In 1947 she finally won a better deal over the perfume. On 17 May that year she was paid her share of the wartime money from No. 5, and she became one of the richest women in the world. Jupiter, the planet of plenty, was making a friendly angle to its own place in her chart.

Chanel worked until the very end. In January 1971, at 87, she was getting the spring collection ready. On 10 January she died in her room at the Ritz, where she had lived for more than 30 years. At her funeral, her models sat in the front seats.

You can look at your own chart the way we looked at hers. Start with the three big ones. Your Sun sign comes from your birthday. For your Moon sign and rising sign you need the time you were born. Ask someone who was there, or look at your birth certificate.

Then look at what you love and what you find hard. Chanel's chart did not make her clothes, and it did not make her choices in the war. She did both of those herself. But a chart can give you new questions to ask about a life, hers or yours.