Biography | Coco Chanel — Five Lion Heads in Section 9 at Bois-de-Vaux

She died in a bedroom at the Ritz in Paris on 10 January 1971.

She is not buried in Paris.

The grave is in the Cimetière du Bois-de-Vaux, on the Route de Chavannes in Lausanne, section 9, plots 129 to 131.

She had asked to be laid in Switzerland.

The stone is a low slab she had a hand in, with five lion heads in a row and her name as Gabrielle Chanel.

White flowers are kept on it.

Pierre de Coubertin lies in the same section, a few plots away.

The cemetery opened in the 1920s to Alphonse Laverrière's plan: long linden avenues, clipped hedges, water.

It is a working municipal cemetery, not a fashion shrine.

Visitors come for the stone and for the quiet.

Do not photograph other funerals. Stay on the paths and keep voices down.

The Paris funeral had already happened.

This is the afterlife she chose, a long way from the hospice in Saumur and from the stair at 31 rue Cambon.

The pin is the plot, not the cemetery gate.

Photo: Los Angeles Times, 18 March 1931, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait from life, not a picture of the stone.