The name Coco Chanel is synonymous with elegance, femininity, timeless style and high fashion. Chanel, who relied on simplicity and comfort in her creations, is considered by some to be the greatest fashion designer who ever lived, and certainly one of the most notorious. Her greatest strength was her ability to understand the times and the moods they were changing – and usually before anyone else.
Coco was a bold and ambitious businesswoman and a pioneer in many ways. Her name has been preserved not only on clothes, but also on jewellery, handbags and, of course, perfumes. Her Chanel No. 5 is one of the most popular and best-selling fragrances of all time.
The author of one of her biographies, Edmond Charles-Roux, describes her style as “unadulteratedly decent and pure”, while her life was far less impeccable.
Coco was also considered to be a vicious and narcissistic person, including the fact that she was a Nazi sympathiser and, ultimately, a Nazi spy.
Coco Chanel overcame several obstacles before achieving a success born of passion and hard work. Her story has become legendary and at least her basic facts are now part of fashion mythology, even for those who are not particularly interested in the world of fashion.
The facts about her early years are not easy to verify. She grew up in the last years of the 19th century in the French countryside, when the lives of the poor were rarely fully documented. And she exploited this throughout her life. She was good at mythologising herself, and it seems that many things had to be shrouded in a veil of secrecy.
A number of recently discovered sources from French, German and American archives reveal the dark side of Coco Chanel’s life and prove the double life of the French fashion designer.
From pauper to orphanage
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was born on 19 August 1883 in the small town of Saumur in western France, in a charity hospital run by nuns. Her mother, Eugenie Jeanne Devolle, worked in a poorhouse as a laundress, and her father, Albert, was a travelling street vendor. He married Eugenie a year after Gabrielle was born, but only after her family paid him to do so.
Her childhood was marked by poverty, her father’s alcoholism and the illness of her mother, who died of tuberculosis in 1895, leaving five orphans. The life Gabrielle faced while her mother was still alive was difficult enough, but her loss must have been devastating for the girl’s psyche.
The actions of her father, Albert, probably contributed to this. The itinerant street vendor had no intention of taking on the task of raising his five children. He tried to leave them in the care of their grandparents, but they refused, so a week after his wife’s death, he sold Gabrielle’s brothers to a peasant family, a kind of forced labour market for children, and took her and her two sisters to a Catholic convent in Aubazine, where he abandoned them.
This cruel and painful act marked Gabrielle and changed her destiny forever. At the age of twelve, she was abandoned to the care of nuns who looked after abandoned and orphaned girls and demanded of them a strict and disciplined life without many comforts. The girl was not impressed by the strict schedule and prayers, but she was fascinated by the art of sewing, one of the activities she learned at the orphanage.
Although she dreamt that her father would one day come for her and her sisters, Gabrielle never saw her father again.
Life in a strict Catholic institution only influenced her to resist all forms of discipline and to fight for her own way. The nuns did not succeed in breaking her spirit, but they certainly strengthened her resolve to take control of her life as soon as possible.
During the six years she spent in the convent, Gabrielle trained as a seamstress and created a fictional story of her birth and family. Her memoirs often included glamorous stories, which were generally untrue. Later, she told how, after her mother’s death, her father had sailed to America to seek his fortune and sent her to live with her strict aunts: “My aunts were good people, but completely lacking in tenderness. I was not loved in their house.”
She also claimed that she was born a decade later, in 1893, and that her mother died when she was much younger than eleven. For most of her life, she denied her family and relatives and hid all records of them because the past embarrassed her. In exchange for financial help, her brothers had to pretend they did not exist. The only one she kept in touch with was her nephew André Palasse, whom she adopted and sent to boarding school in England in 1910, after Coco’s elder sister committed suicide.
The charming Coco without singing talent
Gabrielle left the orphanage at the age of 18 for Moulins, a small town in central France, where the nuns of Aubazine got her a job in a small linen shop, and on weekends she sewed for a local tailor.
Her great passion was performing, so in the evenings she tried her hand at singing in a cabaret frequented by cavalry officers. She made her debut on stage singing in the entertainment area of La Rotonde pavilion. She was one of the girls known as ‘entertainers’, performers who entertained the audience during celebrity performances. Their earnings were the money they managed to raise when they sent a donation plate among the audience as a thank you for their performance.
It was during this time that the flirtatious Gabrielle was given the name “Coco” – perhaps on the basis of the two popular songs “Ko Ko Ri Ko” and “Qui qu’a vu Coco” with which she identified. The nickname could also be a more scandalous reference to the French word for prostitute, cocotte.
In 1906, she lived for a time in the famous spa town of Vichy. It boasted a multitude of concert halls, theatres and cafés, and she hoped to make it as a performer. Her youth and physical charms impressed those she auditioned for, but her singing voice was weak and she was unable to find work on stage. Her dreams of a singing career were dashed, but the charming brunette was noticed by the right men, which was her goal.
Her return to Moulins led to events that allowed her to make history. She soon found herself as a dependent woman, the coquettish lover of Etienne Balsan, a handsome young French salon lion and the son of rich industrialists who supplied uniforms to the army.
Coco was just one of Balsan’s mistresses, which was not unusual in upper-class French society. After a few days of acquaintance, the then 22-year-old Gabrielle moved in with the 27-year-old womaniser and entered a world of luxury and privilege. For the next three years, she traded the dirty stage for the Balsan estate and life at the Chateau de Royallieu. She socialised with the aristocracy of the day, rode horses, slept until noon, went hunting and dreamed big dreams.
But being the mistress of a very busy man was not enough for Coco. Her ambition needed a valve. Gabrielle, coming from a financially weak background, was stunned by what the cultural tradition of the mistress had to offer. The whole affair seemed more like a business transaction than a passionate love affair, which suited her personality well. She could have spent her whole life in comfort, jumping from lover to lover, because she was not shy about sex, but she had different ideas about her life path. She realised that her future was not in music, but in fashion.
While she lived with Balsan, who catered to her every whim and showered her with expensive gifts, dresses and jewellery, she passed the time by mending and making hats. Her sense of style set her apart from the ordinary women of the time and she stood out from other women in corsets with her elegantly tailored dress and men’s riding breeches. Balsan’s friends were soon fascinated by her hats and asked her to make them for them too.
Coco wanted to take the opportunity to become financially independent and asked Balsan for help to open her own boutique. At first, her lover just laughed; women usually asked him for new dresses and hats, not for a workshop to make them. Nevertheless, in 1909 he allowed her to use his Paris apartment, where Coco could redesign hats and dresses. At first, she simply bought hats in department stores and decorated them with ribbons, but eventually she found her way to original designs and reinvented elegant styles.
The rapid rise of a daring designer
Balsan also introduced Chanel to his close friend, the English aristocrat Arthur Capel, a billionaire, entrepreneur and polo player known as “Boy”, who soon became one of her lovers and probably the love of her life. Coco left Balsan, with whom she remained lifelong friends, and moved to Paris, where she lived in an apartment paid for by Capel.
In 1910, she decided to set up as a milliner and opened a small shop, Chanel Modes. At first she sold hats to her upper-class acquaintances, whom she met through Balsan and Capel, but her business expanded when the French actress Gabrielle Dorziat wore one of her hats and she attracted the attention of fashion-conscious women in Paris. When photographs of Dorziat posing with several of her hats were published in the French fashion magazine Les Modes in 1912, all the ladies of Paris wanted one of Coco Chanel’s creations.
When Coco was on holiday with Capel in Deauville in the north-west of France, she was struck by a new fashion idea, as she could not find resort wear that suited her style. She borrowed clothes from Capel, such as a striped shirt, a knitted jumper and a pair of comfortable trousers, and even wore a mariniere, a shirt usually worn by sailors.
She caused a sensation with these outrageous outfits. She realised that women visiting the resort needed comfortable clothes, so she soon developed a line of loose-fitting dresses made of free-fitting and comfortable jersey fabric.
Aware of another good business opportunity, Capel decided to finance her store in Deauville, where they could easily sell the new sportswear line that Coco had revolutionised the way women dressed. The business was so successful that in 1915 she opened another store, this time in south-west France, in Biarritz, on the border with Spain.
Her undoubted talent for fashion translated so successfully into money that she was able to repay the loan she had invested in Capel after just one year. Despite the outbreak of the First World War, she continued to run a thriving business, thanks to her use of different materials and her wealthy clientele.
Shortly after the end of the war, in 1918, she bought the entire building at 31 Rue Camdon, which was not far from her previous location in Paris. Once the renovation of the building was completed, she opened the doors of a beautiful new shop which set the benchmark for future fashion houses, selling not only clothes but also a wide variety of accessories.
In 1919, according to her own account, Coco Chanel suffered the worst shock of her life. Capel, with whom she had remained lovers even after his marriage to the Englishwoman Lady Diana Wyndham the previous year, was killed in a tragic car accident.
As she was already rising to the top of haute couture, she had little time to mourn. Coco had transformed fashion in the same way that her friends, including Picasso, Modigliani and Cocteau, had transformed art.
In 1920, she met the composer Igor Stravinsky, who impressed her with his charisma and personality. She accepted a commission to design costumes for the ballet Rite of Spring, but in the end, when the project was completed, she suffered a great financial loss.
Sometime around 1922, Coco began a new romance, this time with the poet Pierre Reverdy. Reverdy, who was friends with Picasso, Apollinaire and Modigliani, was a gloomy man with strong spiritual inclinations. He was recognised as a real talent for poetry and Chanel filled her bookshelves with her lover’s books, visited publishers and even financed his first major collection of poetry.
Her relationship with Reverdy was a turbulent one, for the poet was not a man of easy character. He appeared and disappeared easily, but he also had a devoted and beautiful wife, Henriette, who was greatly admired by his painter friends.
Reverdy’s oscillation between obsession with Chanel and rebellion against her must have been emotionally exhausting for both of them, but she was willing to endure his erratic behaviour and furious outbursts.
One day in 1926, because of his restlessness, Reverdy burned all his manuscripts and moved to Solesmes, where he lived as a hermit in a Benedictine monastery. Coco realised that she had lost him, but she never stopped admiring him and remained devoted to his poetry. Until his death, Reverdy sent copies of everything he wrote to Chanel with touching dedications. They maintained a deep bond and a great friendship which continued through letters for some forty years.
Chanel No. 5
While Reverdy was away, Coco Chanel passed the time with Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, the eccentric, bisexual and spoilt cousin of Nicholas II, the last Russian Tsar. He was eight years younger than her, but found in her the ideal lover. She gave him money and he gave her the Romanov pearls, which he managed to save.
In the summer of 1921, Dmitri introduced her to Chanel’s friend, the famous perfumer Ernest Beaux, who had been making luxury fragrances for the Russian royal family for most of his life. Like other members of the staff of the Tsar’s court, he had been unemployed after the Bolshevik Revolution. Coco seized the opportunity to work with Master Beaux to create the greatest innovation of her career.
On 5 May 1921, Coco launched Chanel No. 5, a revolutionary and iconic perfume. The first abstract fragrance did not smell of anything familiar, but rather of more than eighty ingredients blended and seduced with their sensuality. Beaux’s genius was to add synthetic chemical ingredients to enhance the natural scents and stabilise the perfume so that it would linger on the skin.
Except for a dedicated few, the formula for Chanel No. 5 remains a secret. All that is known is that it is extremely complex. The most important ingredient is high-quality jasmine, which is only found in Grasse, a city that is still the centre of French perfumery today.
It was on the bottle of this perfume that the famous logo of two intertwined Cs, the symbol of the fashion house Chanel, designed by Coco herself, was first used.
To promote the perfume, she invited her friends to dinner at a luxurious restaurant near Grasse, where she secretly sprayed the fragrance on the guests, who reacted with pleasant surprise and satisfaction. She returned to Paris and walked around so perfumed. She sprayed the wardrobes of her fashion house with Chanel No 5 and gave bottles to some of her high society friends.
Her perfume was soon the talk of the town and its success exceeded all expectations.
Coco employed hundreds of workers and worked long hours. In fact, she was so successful that she needed help. Everyone wanted to be like her. She had a boyish haircut, dresses with a dropped waist, a tanned complexion … and a hint of that distinctive fragrance. The world wanted more Chanel No. 5 perfume than she could offer.
Caught in a whirlwind of hyperactivity, Coco Chanel was busy designing her haute couture, making friends and chasing lovers. She had no time to worry about the details of the perfume industry. So, on the advice of her friends, the avant-garde designer teamed up with Pierre and Paul Wertheimer.
Pierre and Paul Wertheimer were wealthy Jewish brothers and owners of Bourjois, which was and still is one of the largest cosmetics and fragrance companies in France. They were professional and well-connected in the business world. In 1924, Coco made a deal with the Wertheimer brothers, who invested capital in the newly created Parfums Chanel.
The deal was not in her favour, however, as the Wertheimers were given a 70 % stake in the company and she was given only 10 % of the shares as compensation for the use of her name. The remaining twenty percent went to Theophile Bader, owner of Les Galeries Lafayette, the largest department store in Paris, who had helped broker the deal.
When the profits from the sale of the perfume reached nine million dollars a year, Coco realised with a sour taste that she had “let herself be taken for a ride” by taking such a small percentage of the company. After 20 years in the fashion business, she was a shrewd businesswoman, but perfume was simply not a top priority for her in the beginning.
The lawyers battled for more than twenty years to finally reach a settlement and accept a new deal.
Her business continued to expand. Her well-known short tweed suit jacket with a round-cut collar saw the light of day in 1925, and the little black dress that is still a must-have in women’s wardrobes today in 1926. Coco introduced gold-plated buttons, long pearl necklaces and bows as embellishments.
Forever single
During Christmas 1923, Vera Bate (later Lombardi), a member of high society who was Chanel’s public relations officer in London society, asked Chanel to accompany her to dinner with her childhood friend Hugh Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster. Bendor, as his friends called him, was a war hero and one of the richest men in the world.
Coco, with her petite figure, wit and sharp tongue, immediately charmed him and he began giving her extravagant jewellery, paintings and expensive gifts. Chanel entered the privileged world of the British nobility, who moved in the same circles as Winston Churchill and Edward, the handsome, blue-eyed, almost feminine 30-year-old Prince of Wales whom Coco met at a dinner in a prestigious Parisian restaurant.
The next evening, a few hours before the second dinner they were to attend, Edward came to her apartment for a cocktail. Years later, Diana Vreeland, former editor-in-chief of Vogue, insisted that Coco and the Prince of Wales “had a wonderful romantic moment together”.
The Duke of Westminster did not give up and appeared in Paris a few weeks later with a huge bouquet of flowers. Bendor’s extraordinary wealth must have increased his attraction for Coco, and she finally relented and became the unofficial mistress of Eaton Hall, the Duke’s grand residence. Hitler’s sympathiser lectured her on Communism, reinforcing her dislike of Jews, and allegedly got her used to cocaine and morphine.
After five years of an affair, Coco failed to conceive and the Duke of Westminster sought solace in mistresses. But Coco was no longer interested in sharing her man, and she was fed up with the Duke’s lifestyle.
When later asked why she hadn’t married him, she said that there had been several Duchesses of Westminster – the Duke had been married twice before he married her, and he married twice more afterwards – but Coco Chanel was the only one.
In 1931, Chanel met Samuel Goldwyn, then the most powerful man in Hollywood, in Monte Carlo. He offered her a million dollars – that would be more than €15 million today – to come to America twice a year and bring glamour to his films. She accepted the offer, but even though Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo were her private clients, her dresses were not the hit in the US that she expected and wanted.
She became involved with a group of elite members of the Parisian art world; right-wingers who were also known to be sexually provocative and emotionally unstable, probably because of their drug addiction. The French illustrator and decorative arts designer Paul Iribe was one of the members of this group and Coco soon became involved with him. He attracted the revolutionary fashion designer with his provocative wit and his many talents.
By this time, Chanel’s fortune was a quarter of a billion dollars in today’s money, so in 1934 she moved into an apartment in the Ritz Hotel, just across the road from her flagship boutique and atelier. She used her money to help her lover revive the monthly newspaper Le Témoin, which was known as a mouthpiece for anti-Semitism and aggressive nationalism.
Coco Chanel was in love up to her ears. Finally, she received a marriage proposal and gladly accepted. While her employees were struggling to get through the economic downturn, Chanel and her fiancé were lavishly spending on each other, going to exorbitantly expensive restaurants and spending weekends in the countryside.
And it was there, in the countryside, on a beautiful September afternoon in 1935, that her happiness ended. Paul Iribe suddenly collapsed dead of a heart attack in front of her eyes during a tennis match.
Chanel never recovered. Time and again, her lovers died young or left her for other women. Again and again she was left alone. Now, as she approached her fifties, she withdrew and became bitter. Crippled by pain, she developed a morphine addiction and quarreled with everyone around her.
She was not the only one struggling. The world economic crisis triggered widespread workers’ strikes throughout France and one morning in 1936 she woke up to find her boutiques and workshops empty. Frightened by the strikes, shaken by world events and crushed by grief and fear, she retreated into conspiracy theories. She was convinced that the Jews were to blame for the whole crisis – but above all she was furious at the Wertheimer brothers who had turned Chanel No 5 into a worldwide sensation.
“I’ve been badly conned”, she muttered to herself, even though a lot of money was pouring into her Swiss bank accounts from Parfums Chanel. She hired lawyers and filed a lawsuit against the Wertheimers. The lawsuit became her obsession, bringing out her worst impulses, fuelling her paranoia and bringing her ever closer to the Nazis and their promise of revenge against the Jews.
Always Stay Up to Date
Subscribe to our newsletter to get our newest articles instantly!
Love with a Nazi
At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Coco Chanel made a surprising move. Saying that war was no time for fashion, the queen of the fashion world closed all but one of her boutiques, which sold perfume and accessories. In the midst of wartime, it remained popular with Parisians and German and later American soldiers.
Three thousand seamstresses, craftswomen, embroiderers and saleswomen joined the ranks of the unemployed. Some speculate that the outbreak of war was used as revenge because its seamstresses had taken part in a general strike three years earlier demanding higher wages and shorter hours for French workers. The leaders of the fashion industry accused her of treason and the unions tried to force her to reopen. Coco refused to be persuaded.
During the Nazi occupation of Paris, she embarked on a journey that would forever tarnish her name.
German forces invaded France in May 1940. The fall of France was swift; the French forces were defeated in just six weeks. It was a humiliating and even shameful experience for the French; after all, they boasted the second strongest army in Europe at the time.
Most of the wealthy inhabitants of Paris had fled, so it seemed strange that Chanel returned to the occupied city in 1940 and took up residence in the Ritz Hotel, which had become the exclusive accommodation for high-ranking Nazi officials.
As Europe crumbled under the pressures of wartime, the Ritz continued to operate as normal. The champagne was still flowing, the cigar smoke was still in the air and the dining room was still full of intoxicating aromas and fashionable clothes.
Paris was overrun with Nazis and by the autumn of 1940 there were at least 300,000 of them in the city. Nazis in uniform could be seen everywhere, accompanying glamorous women to fashionable parties. Her fellow citizens were scavenging, starving and dying, while she lived like a queen in the Ritz, surrounded by Nazi officers, enjoying Nazi parties.
Berlin had decreed that the Ritz was “reserved exclusively for the temporary accommodation of high-ranking personalities”, which meant that Coco had to make contact with some very important Nazis to stay there. Herman Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Albert Speer all maintained rooms at the Ritz, so only a select few Germans were allowed to enter such a heavily guarded area. Chanel was one of them, and it didn’t take her long to find her Nazi.
At the age of fifty-seven, the fashion designer met her last great love. Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage was a senior officer in the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, and reported directly to Goebbels. The successful spy, called Spatz by his friends, was handsome, rich and fourteen years younger than Chanel.
Over the next few years, Coco took advantage of her new social circle and, together with her Nazi lover, tried to recruit wealthy Europeans for Nazi purposes.
By 1941, her world had shrunk. Now that the fashion house was closed, she had entirely too much time on her hands. In self-defensive statements later in life, she stated that all the activities she had undertaken during the Second World War had been on behalf of friends, family or France. Given the general pattern of her life, it is also fair to consider that she only became a Nazi spy because she was bored.
What did one of the richest women in the world want from the Germans? Understandably, she wanted her nephew André to be released from a German prisoner-of-war camp. But that was not all. Baron Waufreland, a Gestapo agent and friend of Dincklage, made it clear that in return for her cooperation, the Nazis would be happy to help Chanel regain control of the Chanel No. 5 fragrance from the Jewish Wertheimer brothers, who had in the meantime fled to America.
Coco Chanel hoped to use the Nazi Aryanisation laws to regain control of the perfume, which she had given to the Wertheimers in 1924. Much to her surprise, before fleeing, the brothers had given Parfums Chanel for the duration of the war to a non-Jewish Parisian businessman, Felix Amiot, who had even more senior connections with the Nazis than she did. Chanel could not touch the company.
To make sure that the measure was full, the Wertheimers sent Gregory Thomas, their American employee, to France to smuggle the exquisite jasmine and rose flowers, key ingredients for Chanel No 5, from Grasse to America. Without attracting attention, Thomas smuggled more than 300 kilograms of flower essences, enough to produce almost half a million bottles of the iconic perfume. It was a complete triumph for the Wertheimer brothers.
When the fashion house Chanel closed down, the sale of Chanel fragrances was its only source of income and, thanks to the business-savvy Wertheimer brothers, who dutifully remitted to it its share of the profits from sales, it maintained its fabulous wealth at a time when most Parisians were on the brink of subsistence.
The agent with the pearl necklace
Coco Chanel was registered with the Abwehr, the German secret service, as agent number F-7124, codenamed Westminster. Everyone agreed that the best place to show her usefulness to the Nazis would be Spain.
Coco flew to Madrid with Baron Vaufreland. Unfortunately, it is not known what happened after her arrival in the Spanish capital, as almost all records of this trip have been destroyed.
Whatever Coco did during this trip, the Nazis were very pleased, because after a few weeks her nephew was actually released.
The French resistance grew bolder by the day and Coco Chanel and others began to worry about the consequences if Germany lost the war. As the German army collapsed in Stalingrad and Hitler’s mental health deteriorated, Himmler began to make secret enquiries as to whether peace with Britain was possible.
According to leaked documents, Chanel was sent to Berlin at the end of 1943 to meet SS intelligence chief and Himmler’s right-hand man, General Walter Schellenberg. Coco was said to have tried to broker a secret behind-the-scenes armistice between Germany and Britain, as she was personal friends with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The armistice would have allowed Germany to focus only on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union.
Chanel secured the release of Vera Lombardi, a mutual friend of Churchill and herself, from an Italian prison. Together with Dincklage, they travelled to Madrid, where Lombardi was given the task of delivering a letter from Coco Chamel to Churchill at the British embassy. Chanel, in a fit of arrogance, was convinced that Churchill would listen to her as a voice of reason.
The so-called Operation Modellhut (“mannequin hat”) failed because Vera Lombardi refused to cooperate and denounced Chanel and her colleagues as German spies. She was taken back into custody, but Coco managed to return safely to Paris.
The letter proposing an armistice probably never reached Churchill’s hands.
Six months later, the Americans landed in Normandy and drove the Germans out of France for good. Chanel looked out of the window of the Ritz Hotel as Germans and collaborators packed their belongings into cars in panic and filled the sky with the smoke of burning documents. Well into her sixties and hopelessly addicted to morphine, she felt the walls around her squeezing ever tighter.
Within two weeks of the liberation of Paris, resistance fighters knocked on her door and arrested her.
German officers testified that Chanel had worked for them as a spy. Nevertheless, after a few hours, she walked free. How and why the Allies allowed her to slip away despite all the incriminating evidence is still a mystery. It is thought that she used alliances and bribery to hide her collaboration with the Nazis, and it is most likely that her release was demanded by her old friend Winston Churchill.
The French nation was seized by a desire for revenge. Many of the alleged collaborators were beaten and some were shot on sight. “Horizontal collaborators” – women and girls known to have slept with the Germans – were dragged half-naked through the streets. Some had swastikas painted on their bodies and many had their heads shaved.
Coco fled to Switzerland to join her Nazi lover, who had fled to Lausanne months earlier. They lived together in style and luxury on the shores of Lake Geneva until 1951, when von Dincklage moved to Mallorca, in fascist Spain under Franco’s dictatorship.
With the help of money and powerful friends, she successfully organised a cover-up of her Nazi connections. She lied to almost everyone and anyone. She even went so far as to betray her former collaborator to the French partisans and later bribed the Nazi spy chief to keep her secret. Indeed, when she learned that the ailing Schellenberg was planning to publish his memoirs, she paid his medical bills and ensured that his family was on a strong financial footing. Schellenberg’s later published memoirs made no mention of her involvement as an agent.
The return of “Mademoiselle”
In 1954, at the age of seventy-one, Coco Chanel, as she put it, was bored and felt that her days as a fashion designer were not over. She decided to return to Paris, where she rented a 188-square-metre apartment on the second floor of the Ritz Hotel, overlooking the Place Vendôme.
Strangely enough, the re-establishment of her fashion house was financed by her old enemy Pierre Wertheimer (Paul had died in 1948). The re-emergence of Chanel would of course have benefited Wertheimer financially, but it is incredible that Pierre, despite the quarrels, legal battles and difficulties, decided to pay all Chanel’s expenses as well. There is speculation that he was a long-time admirer and may even have loved her. He therefore became her saviour.
In return for his help, he acquired the right to the Chanel name for all products, not only perfumes.
The fashion world changed drastically during Chanel’s absence and the fashion industry was dominated by men such as Christian Dior and Cristobal Balenciaga. Now that one war was over, another war of styles had emerged and Dior, with its New Look, became Chanel’s great rival.
Dior infuriated Coco with its extravagant “spending” on goods which seemed unreasonably frivolous to some who still remembered the hard days of the war. Dior’s designs sometimes required a staggering 20 metres of taffeta for a single dress with a sumptuous and fluttering skirt. For Coco Chanel, who was brought up in poverty, this was insulting.
Chanel also allegedly felt that Dior, who was openly homosexual, despised women – if only because he could not be one – and that his prejudice was reflected in the fashion choices he made for them.
Her thinking turned out to be outdated. Many women longed for new styles and led a revolt against “boring” practicality.
Chanel’s collection presented after her return was not a success, with critics ripping it apart with comments such as “her dresses are fit for cleaning offices” and comparing her mannequins to a flock of geese. Her fashion comeback was met with reluctance by the French because of accusations of collaboration with the Nazis, but her legendary perseverance prevailed.
The second collection attracted the attention of British and American fashion critics and Coco Chanel’s iconic boucle costume, the handbag 2.55 with a double-chain shoulder strap and two-tone shoes, she regained her position in the haute couture market, but despite the enthusiastic admirers of her fashion house, including Marlene Dietrich, Romy Schneider, Jeanne Moreau, Grace Kelly and the American First Lady Jackie Kennedy, she never again reached the peak of popularity she enjoyed in the pre-war years.
Legacy
By 1971, Coco Chanel had become noticeably unpleasant, tyrannical, narcissistic, sometimes hostile to her employees and generally unhappy in her professional life. She also felt very lonely in her private life.
The day before she died, she was working on her spring fashion collection and when she returned from a walk she went to bed early because she felt exhausted. As she lay on her bed that day, 10 January 1971, at the age of almost 88, she is said to have said her last words to her chambermaid: “You see, this is how you die”.
The fashion designer was buried in Lausanne, Switzerland, where she had spent part of her life. In keeping with her fascination with numerology and astrology, her tomb is decorated with five lions, representing her favourite number and the sign of her astrological sign.
She left most of her fortune to her nephew André Palasso and his two daughters. Among her successors in design terms, the most famous is the German Karl Lagerfeld, creative director of Chanel from 1983 until his death in 2019. The company is now owned by Alain and Gérard Wertheimer, grandsons of Pierre Wertheimer.
Gabrielle Coco Chanel’s creations gave women what they could not have had before: practicality, youthfulness, timelessness and freedom, which was often scandalous in Chanel’s early years.
She never trusted men. She used the financial benefits of her relationships to set up her own fashion empire. She accepted money in exchange for her body and used it to maintain her independence. She chose lovers for their power and how they could help her. Coco stopped at nothing to get her way when she wanted something or someone. She would have dinner with the devil if she had to, without a second thought.
Her friend Lady Iya Abdy once said: “Coco had only two true loves … herself … and her fashion. Everything else was just passion, weakness, adventures without a future and calculating alliances.”
Instead of the eternal youth she wanted so much, she got eternal life in her creations and, last but not least, in her scent. Her star shone again in the post-war years. And it smelled like the famous statement made by the film star Marilyn Monroe, who, when asked what she wore when she went to bed, replied, “five drops of Chanel No. 5”.
Despite her achievements, Coco Chanel has taken positions and acted in her life that cannot be justified today, from her vocal anti-Semitism and homophobia to the fact that she actively aided the Nazis during the Second World War.
We are still uncovering the details of this dark legacy and only time will tell how history will ultimately judge the most influential fashion designer of all time.
