Coco Chanel

Coco Chanel: The Woman Who Deleted the Corset

In 1926 American Vogue printed a photograph of a plain black Chanel dress and compared it to the Ford motor car: one design, produced for everybody, that everybody would want. Seventeen years later the woman who made it was an Abwehr asset, agent number F 7124, travelling to Berlin with a German intelligence officer to propose that Britain negotiate a separate peace with Hitler. Both facts are true, and neither cancels the other.

Aubazine

Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel was born on 19 August 1883 in a charity hospital in Paris, daughter of Jeanne Devolle, a laundrywoman, and Albert Chanel, a street vendor. Her mother died at thirty-two, when Gabrielle was eleven, and her father placed his three daughters in the orphanage at Aubazine, run by the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary. There she was taught to sew. The convent gave her more than a trade: its chatelaine chains, its austere uniforms and their burgundy linings would resurface decades later in the design of the 2.55 handbag. At eighteen she moved to a Catholic boarding house in Moulins and began singing in cabarets, where she acquired the name Coco — possibly from the song "Qui qu'a vu Coco," possibly from the French slang for a kept woman.

The Men Who Financed Her

At twenty-three she became the mistress of Étienne Balsan, a former cavalry officer and textile heir, living at his château Royallieu near Compiègne from 1906 to 1908. Then came Arthur "Boy" Capel, a wealthy Englishman who installed her in a Paris apartment and paid for her first shops. She was licensed as a milliner in 1910 and opened Chanel Modes at 21 rue Cambon; a Deauville boutique followed in 1913 and a shop in Biarritz in 1915, which made enough money that she repaid Capel's investment within a year. Their nine-year affair ended with his death in a car crash on 22 December 1919. "In losing Capel," she said decades later, "I lost everything." Later attachments included the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia, Igor Stravinsky, the poet Pierre Reverdy — with whom she is said to have worked up her famous maxims — the designer Paul Iribe, and the Duke of Westminster, whose ten-year courtship she declined to convert into marriage: "There have been several Duchesses of Westminster. There is only one Chanel."

Jersey, and the End of the Corset

Her first great innovation began as economy. Jersey was cheap knit fabric used for undergarments; Chanel, short of capital, cut couture from it — and discovered that clothes which moved with the body suited women who were suddenly working. Around 1912 she began developing the plain black dress that Vogue canonised in 1926: "I imposed black; it's still going strong today, for black wipes out everything else around." The Chanel suit arrived in 1923, in supple tweed with functional pockets and a comfortable neckline, tailored and re-tested through repeated trials of movement. In 1929 came the quilted handbag, inspired by soldiers' satchels and jockeys' jackets, updated in February 1955 as the 2.55. In 1933 she first used the camellia, borrowed from Dumas's *La Dame aux Camélias*, and from the 1920s her own interlocked-CC monogram. In the 1930s she broke the era's rigid caste system in jewellery by mixing real gems with costume pieces. She also made suntans fashionable, inverting a mark that had signalled manual labour.

No. 5 and the Wertheimer Bargain

Chanel No. 5 launched in 1921. In 1924 she partnered with the brothers Pierre and Paul Wertheimer to form Parfums Chanel, taking ten per cent of profits against their seventy — a deal she spent the rest of her life trying to undo. It made the fragrance a global business and made the terms a permanent grievance.

The Occupation

She closed her couture house in 1939, declaring it was "not a time for fashion" and putting four thousand women out of work. She lived at the Hotel Ritz, favoured by senior German officers, and began a liaison with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, a German diplomat and Abwehr agent she had known before the war. Documents declassified in 2014 show she worked for General Walter Schellenberg, head of the Sicherheitsdienst, under agent number F 7124, and was recruited as a "vicious antisemite" who praised Hitler. In May 1941 she petitioned German officials for sole ownership of Parfums Chanel on the grounds that it remained "property of Jews" abandoned by the Wertheimers — who had, unknown to her, legally transferred control in May 1940 to the Christian businessman Félix Amiot, who returned it after the war. In 1943–44 she took part in Operation Modellhut, a scheme to broker a separate German-British peace: she travelled to Berlin with Dincklage, proposed meeting Churchill, recruited Vera Bate Lombardi as a courier and wrote to Churchill through the British Embassy in Madrid. Lombardi denounced her to the British as a Nazi spy and the plan collapsed. Interrogated by the Free French purge committee in September 1944, she was released for lack of documented evidence; her grand-niece reported her explanation as "Churchill had me freed." Churchill, who knew her through the Duke of Westminster, is thought to have intervened partly out of fear that her testimony would expose pro-Nazi sympathies among British elites.

Switzerland, and the 1954 Comeback

She fled to Switzerland from 1945 to 1953, part of the time with Dincklage. Her lawsuit against the Wertheimers over perfume profits ended in a renegotiated settlement on 17 May 1947 — wartime profits plus two per cent of all worldwide No. 5 sales for life, and all her living expenses paid — which made her one of the richest women alive. Neither side wanted a trial that would expose what she had done. In 1954, at seventy-one, she reopened her couture house after fifteen years, financed by Pierre Wertheimer, the rival she had sued. The French press was hostile; the Americans and British called it a breakthrough, Vogue's Bettina Ballard put Marie-Hélène Arnaud in the suit in March 1954, and the orders came from the United States.

Why Coco Is Called a Genius

The specific quality was subtraction. Chanel's method was to identify what in women's dress existed only for display or restraint — boning, ornament, the fixed hierarchy of real versus fake jewels, colour itself — and remove it, leaving garments defined by proportion and movement. That is a design intelligence, not a decorative one, and it repeated across categories: the jersey dress, the black dress, the tweed suit tested through motion, the shoulder-strapped bag that freed the hands, a perfume sold on an abstraction rather than a flower. Time magazine named her to its list of the 100 most influential people of the twentieth century — the only fashion designer on it.

The counter-case has two parts. The moral one is not arguable: she was an antisemite who worked for German intelligence, tried to seize her partners' business under Aryanisation law, and escaped judgment through a powerful friend. The professional one is that she was less an inventor than a ruthless editor — much of her vocabulary was borrowed from menswear, sportswear, servants' uniforms and her own convent — and that her 1954 return succeeded commercially while French critics judged it a repetition. What is not in dispute is the scale of the change: she is the reason the default silhouette of the twentieth-century woman was one she could move in.

Legacy

By 1935 Chanel was injecting morphine daily, a habit she kept until her death, and her last years were tyrannical and lonely. She died at the Hotel Ritz on 10 January 1971, aged 87, in the hotel that had been her home for more than thirty years, telling her maid: "You see, this is how you die." At her funeral at the Église de la Madeleine the front rows were filled with models, the coffin was covered in camellias and white flowers, and the mourners included Salvador Dalí, Marlene Dietrich, Cristóbal Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent. She is buried at Bois-de-Vaux in Lausanne. The 2.55 bag is still made largely as she designed it.