On behalf of every woman who has ever received an invite to a posh do and thought ‘What on earth do do I wear’, we wish to thank Mademoiselle Coco Chanel from the top of our heads all the way down to the hem of our little black dress. Without her revolutionary talent and exquisite eye for detail, this design masterpiece would never have graced wardrobes everywhere. Prior to Chanel’s elegant design in 1912, black was only worn by mourners, but women took up the idea with more excited fervour than a hoard of shopaholics on Black Friday.
Sartorially speaking, Coco, actually christened Gabrielle, enhanced the world of fashion. She may not have been the first to embrace the practical and sporty ‘garçonne’ look (a woman with short hair and short dresses) but her designs became the ultimate must-have, helping women everywhere to burst free from corsets and shake bustles off their booty into clothes they could actually breathe in.
It could be said that those clothes were only liberating to those women who had a flat-chested coat-hanger body, rather like Chanel herself. Boobs were not de rigueur and so these fashions must have been an exercise in self-loathing for those more graciously endowed. She hated the lumps and bumps that ruined the line of her creations and abhorred those of us who were plus grosse.
Unfortunately boobs, tums and bums were not the only object of her vitriol. At the age of 12 her mother died and her errant father placed her and her sisters in a strict Catholic convent in Auberge. It’s possible that amid the harsh disciplinarian routine of the convent, little Coco was fully indoctrinated into the popular anti-Semitic beliefs of the day, including the favourite accusation that the Jews killed Jesus Christ. She was rabidly anti-Semitic but would put it aside for a lucrative business deal such as the development of the Chanel No. 5 brand with the very Jewish Wertheimer brothers.
She never trusted them though, and the business relationship was fraught with legal battles over ownership and rights. When Nazi Germany started taking businesses away from Jews, she clapped her manicured hands in glee waiting to do the same in France. The Wertheimers were nobody’s fool and had placed the perfume business in the proxy hands of a Gentile (non-Jew) much earlier before fleeing to the US to wait out the war.
Luckily she was consoled by her Aryan Adonis Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, who charmed his way into persuading elite and influential Europeans to turn informants for the Nazis. The big question was how far did Coco go in her support for the Nazis? According to H. Vaughn, she was definitely a spy charged with running Operation Westminster, an alternative peace deal with Churchill for the SS officers who had lost faith in Hitler.
She was certainly a nasty opportunist and enjoyed a lavish party lifestyle during the war in the Ritz where she hobnobbed happily with SS elite. But she could switch her allegiances as fast as her customers changed their handbags. At the end of the war she rushed to give out bottles of her perfume to the American GIs returning home. A show of Allied loyalty or an inspired PR move? She may have been unpleasant but she was an incredibly gifted designer and astute businesswoman who lived the ultimate rags-to-riches story.