The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

—Cesare Pavese

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A
5
Become an Elusive Object of
Desire
The Law of Covetousness
bsence and presence have very primal effects upon us. Too much
presence suffocates; a degree of absence spurs our interest. We
are marked by the continual desire to possess what we do not have—
the object projected by our fantasies. Learn to create some mystery
around you, to use strategic absence to make people desire your
return, to want to possess you. Dangle in front of others what they
are missing most in life, what they are forbidden to have, and they
will go crazy with desire. The grass is always greener on the other
side of the fence. Overcome this weakness in yourself by embracing
your circumstances, your fate.
The Object of Desire
In 1895 eleven-year-old Gabrielle Chanel sat by her mother’s bedside
for several days and watched her slowly die from tuberculosis at the
age of thirty-three. Gabrielle’s life had been hard, but now it could only
get worse. She and her siblings had grown up in poverty, shuttled from
one relative’s house to another. Their father was an itinerant peddler of
goods who hated any kind of ties or responsibility and was rarely at
home. Their mother, who often accompanied her husband on the road,
was the only comforting force in their lives.
As Gabrielle had feared, a few days after the mother’s death her
father showed up and deposited Gabrielle and her two sisters at a
convent in central France. He promised to return for them quite soon,
but they would never see him again. The nuns at the convent, housed

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in a former medieval monastery, took in all sorts of girls to care for,
mostly orphans. They enforced strict discipline. Within the somber
walls of the monastery, which was sparsely decorated, the girls were to
live a life of austerity and spiritual practice. They each had only two
dresses they could wear, both alike and formless. Luxuries were
forbidden. The only music was church music. The food was
exceptionally plain. In her first few months there, Gabrielle tried to
accommodate herself to this new world, but she felt impossibly
restless.
One day, she discovered a series of romance novels that somehow
had been smuggled into the convent, and soon they became her only
salvation. They were written by Pierre Decourcelle, and almost all of
them involved a Cinderella-like story—a young girl growing up in
poverty, shunned and despised, suddenly finds herself whisked into a
world of wealth through some clever plot twist. Gabrielle could
completely identify with the protagonists, and she particularly loved
the endless descriptions of the dresses that the heroines would wear.
The world of palaces and châteaux seemed so very far away from her,
but in those moments in which she drifted through novel after novel
she could feel herself participating in the plot, and it gave her an
overwhelming desire to make it come to life, even though it was
forbidden for her to want such things and seemingly impossible to ever
have them.
At the age of eighteen she left the convent for a boarding school,
also run by nuns. There she was trained for a career as a seamstress.
The school was in a small town, and as she explored it she quickly
discovered a new passion to pursue, the theater. She loved everything
about it—the costumes, the sets, the performers in makeup. It was a
world of transformation, where somebody could become anybody.
Now all she wanted was to be an actress and make her name in the
theater. She took the stage name Coco and she tried everything—
acting, singing, and dancing. She had a lot of energy and charisma, but
she realized quickly enough that she lacked the talent for the kind of
success she desired.
Coming to terms with this, she soon hit upon a new dream. Many of
the actresses who could not make a living from their work had become
courtesans who were supported by wealthy lovers. Such women had
enormous wardrobes, could go where they pleased, and, although they
were shunned by good society, they were not shackled with some

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despotic husband. As luck would have it, one of the young men who
enjoyed her on the stage, Etienne Balsan, invited her to stay in his
nearby château. He had inherited a family fortune and lived a life of
total leisure. Gabrielle, now known as Coco to one and all, accepted the
offer.
The château was filled with courtesans who floated in and out from
all over Europe. Some of them were famous. They were all beautiful
and worldly. It was a relatively simple life that centered on riding
horses in the country, then lavish parties in the evening. The class
differences were noticeable. Whenever aristocrats or important people
came to the château, women like Coco were to eat with the servants
and make themselves scarce.
With nothing to do and feeling restless yet again, she began to
analyze herself and the future ahead of her. Her ambitions were great,
but she was always searching for something beyond her grasp,
continually dreaming about a future that was just not possible. At first
it was the palaces in the romance novels, then it was a grand life on the
stage, becoming another Sarah Bernhardt. Now her latest dream was
just as absurd. The great courtesans were all voluptuous, beautiful
women. Coco looked more like a boy. She had no curves and was not a
classic beauty. It was more her presence and energy that charmed men,
but that would not last. She always wanted what other people had,
imagining it contained some hidden treasure. Even when it came to
other women and their boyfriends or husbands, her greatest desire was
to steal the man away, which she had done on several occasions. But
whenever she got what she wanted, including the boyfriend or the life
in a château, she inevitably felt disappointed by the reality. It was a
mystery what in the end could satisfy her.
Then one day, without thinking of what exactly she was up to, she
wandered into Balsan’s bedroom and pilfered some of his clothes. She
started to wear outfits that were totally her own invention—his open-
collared shirts and tweed coats, paired with some of her own clothes,
all topped with a man’s straw boater hat. In wearing the clothes she
noticed two things: She felt an incredible sense of freedom as she left
behind the corsets, constricting gowns, and fussy headpieces women
were wearing. And she reveled in the new kind of attention she
received. The other courtesans now watched her with unconcealed
envy. They were captivated by this androgynous style. These new
outfits suited her figure well, and nobody had ever seen a woman

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dressed quite in this manner. Balsan himself was charmed. He
introduced her to his tailor, and on her instructions the tailor custom-
made for her a boy’s riding costume with jodhpurs. She taught herself
to ride horses, but not sidesaddle like the other women. She had
always had an athletic bent to her character and within months had
become an expert rider. Now she could be seen everywhere in her
strange riding costume.
As she progressed with this new persona, it finally became clear to
her the nature of her vague longings: what she wanted was the power
and freedom that men possessed, which was reflected in the less
constricting clothes that they wore. And she could sense that the other
courtesans and women at the château could identify with this. It was
something in the air, a repressed desire she had tapped into. Within a
few weeks several of the courtesans began to visit her in her room and
try on the straw hats that she had decorated with ribbons and feathers.
Compared with the elaborate hats that women had to pin on their
heads, these were simple and easy to wear. The courtesans now strode
around town with Chanel’s hats on their heads, and soon other women
in the area were asking where they could buy them. Balsan offered her
the use of his apartment in Paris, where she could begin to make many
more of her hats and perhaps go into business. She happily took up the
offer.
Soon another man entered her life—a wealthy Englishman named
Arthur Capel, who was excited by the novelty of her look and her great
ambitions. They became lovers. Capel started sending his aristocratic
lady friends to Coco’s studio, and soon her hats became a craze. Along
with the hats she began to sell some clothes that she designed, all with
the same androgynous look that she had worn herself, made out of the
cheapest jersey fabric but seeming to offer a kind of freedom of
movement so different from the prevailing styles. Capel encouraged
her to open up a shop in the seaside town of Deauville, where all the
fashionable Parisians spent their summers. It turned out to be the
perfect idea: there in the relatively small town, filled with people-
watchers and the most fashionable women of all, she could create a
sensation.
She shocked the locals by swimming in the ocean. Women did not
do such things, and swimming costumes for women were almost
nonexistent, so she created her own out of the same jersey fabric.
Within weeks women were at her store clamoring to buy them. She

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sauntered through Deauville wearing her own distinctive outfits—
androgynous, easy to move in, and ever so slightly provocative as they
hugged the body. She became the talk of the town. Women were
desperate to find out where she got her wardrobe. She kept
improvising with men’s clothing to create new looks. She took one of
Capel’s sweaters and cut it open, added some buttons, and created a
modern version of the cardigan, for women. This now became the rage.
She cut her own hair to a short length, knowing how it suited her face,
and suddenly this became the new trend. Sensing momentum, she
gave her clothes without charge to beautiful and well-connected
women, all sporting hairstyles similar to her own. Attending the most
sought-after parties, these women, all looking like Chanel clones,
spread the desire for this new style well beyond Deauville, to Paris
itself.
By 1920 she had become one of the leading fashion designers in the
world, and the greatest trendsetter of her time. Her clothes had come
to represent a new kind of woman—confident, provocative, and ever so
slightly rebellious. Although they were cheap to make and still out of
jersey material, she sold some of her dresses at extremely high prices,
and wealthy women were more than willing to pay to share in the
Chanel mystique. But quickly her old restlessness returned. She
wanted something else, something larger, a faster way to reach women
of all classes. To realize this dream she decided upon a most unusual
strategy—she would create and launch her own perfume.
At the time it was unusual for a fashion house to market its own
perfume, and unheard of to give it so much emphasis. But Chanel had
a plan. This perfume would be as distinctive as her clothes yet more
ethereal, literally something in the air that would excite men and
women and infect them with the desire to possess it. To accomplish
this she would go in the opposite direction from all the other perfumes
out there, which were associated with some natural, floral scent.
Instead, she wanted to create something that was not identifiable as a