The Woman Who Put the World in Mourning — Chanel and the Aesthetics of a Curse

At the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, la Galerie du 19M was meant to celebrate Chanel’s craftsmanship.

But in one room, I stopped moving.

Suspended cocoons. Red and black fabrics. Offerings wrapped in fallen leaves.

It didn’t feel like a luxury maison—

it felt like a ritual.

An altar from the slave history museum in Guadeloupe

The scene resembled a Vodou altar I once saw at the Slave History Museum in Guadeloupe—

a space where the boundary between prayer and curse dissolves.

And I remembered: Chanel was once a woman who cursed the world.

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The Curse of the Black Dress

In the 1920s, Chanel’s lover, Arthur “Boy” Capel, died in a car accident.

After his death, she could wear nothing but black.

Her grief became fashion—

and the little black dress was born.

A private mourning turned into a global style.

One woman’s sorrow became civilization’s uniform.

Chanel didn’t invent fashion;

she infected the world with grief.

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La Magie: Craft as Invocation

In the current exhibition la Magie (“Magic”),

threads, feathers, metal, and fabric are arranged like ritual tools.

The suspended cocoons resemble both fetuses and ghosts.

The fallen leaves beneath them—skin between the earth and death.

Here, craft is not just technique.

It is conjuring.

What the needle stitches is not fabric but memory itself.

Beauty becomes a method of communion with the dead.

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Beauty and the Curse

The world Chanel covered in black might have been her séance.

She turned sorrow into luxury, loss into design—

that was her magic.

The works in this exhibition feel like the residue of that same spell—

proof that her magic still haunts the living.

Chanel is gone,

but black is still in fashion.

The curse hasn’t lifted.

This wasn’t a fashion exhibition.

It was a chapel for ritual.

And the women inside—

they looked as if the ghosts had already chosen them.

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Update ー October 11, 2025

The Voudou alter I menthioned was not in Martinique, but in Guadeloupe (and related islands).

I sincerely correct this detail.

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©️DSH / 2025