Biography | Coco Chanel — She Died in Her Rooms at the Ritz on Place Vendôme

People treat the grave in Lausanne as the last Paris chapter.

She died here.

On the evening of 10 January 1971, Gabrielle Chanel died in her apartment at the Hôtel Ritz, 15 Place Vendôme.

She was eighty-seven.

The New York Times reported the next morning that friends announced a peaceful death and that a chambermaid had called a physician.

Nothing in the preceding days had suggested she was in danger.

She had been finishing the spring collection, due later that month.

The house showed that collection on 26 January.

The Ritz sits on the northwest side of the square, a short walk from 31 rue Cambon.

She had used the hotel since the 1920s because the workrooms were around the corner.

After her 1954 return to couture she lived here more or less for good.

The rooms she actually occupied were small suites on an upper floor.

The present Coco Chanel Suite is a later prestige reconstruction, not the bedroom of 10 January.

The hotel façade on the square is what a visitor can still stand in front of.

The funeral was held in Paris on 13 January.

The coffin then went to Lausanne, to the plot already told in this collection.

The pin is the hotel on Place Vendôme, not the stair at rue Cambon and not the Swiss stone.

Photo: Vlastimil Juricek, 5 October 2006, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.