Coco Chanel appears in countless guises, as befits the greatest-ever queen of fashion. She has been revealed in turn as the courtesan lover of Picasso, Stravinsky and the Duke of Westminster, a pioneer of cross-dressing, a feminist hero, a Nazi collaborator, and most recently a probable French resistance operative, to say nothing of her roles as the inventor of the tan, the diet and “the little black dress”. And all of these contrasting Chanels, it turns out, are pretty much true.
Now a new BBC film is to invite the real Coco to finally step forward in a documentary that unmasks her as an arch opportunist and gifted influencer, a woman who steered herself from poverty to great wealth with the most effective piece of consumer branding the world had yet seen.
“People wish their favourite artists were ‘good people’ too, and while I understand that desire, I don’t think people are ever really neatly ‘good’ or ‘bad’,” said filmmaker Hannah Berryman this weekend. “Chanel was of her times, an opportunist and a survivor, which probably influenced her choices.”
Berryman’s Arena film, Coco Chanel Unbuttoned, broadcast this Friday on BBC2, ties together her life’s extraordinary contradictions to explain how an abandoned child came to shape the tastes of the 20th century and then to risk her freedom and reputation in the world of politics.
Chanel is already the subject of many published studies, and next weekend also sees the opening of a major Victoria & Albert Museum retrospective in advance of the launch later this year of the Apple TV+ drama series The New Look, starring Juliette Binoche, which will chart her rivalry with fellow French designer Christian Dior. British writer Justine Picardie is bringing out an updated edition of her biography of Chanel, The Legend and the Life, to include new claims that, while close to rightwing figures, the designer may have worked for the French resistance. But Berryman’s film paints a wider picture of a survivor and organic intellect more than capable of such political and personal intrigue.
While the documentary details Chanel’s romance with the illustrator and French nationalist Paul Iribe and Nazi officer Hans Gunther von Dincklage, it raises new questions about the use she made of these links. It is likely Chanel influenced rightwing friends to secure the release of her adored nephew, Andre Palasse, held prisoner of war in Germany. Palasse, believed to be the son of one her late sisters, had been raised by Chanel and went on to live to the age of 76, dying 10 years after his aunt in 1981.
Further indication that Chanel could have been considered a wartime allied “asset” is provided by her mysterious early release from arrest as a collaborator after the liberation of Paris. Her old friendship with Winston Churchill, formed on the grouse moors of Britain, during the decade she lived with the Duke of Westminster,offers a plausible answer, claims the documentary. Churchill once described Chanel as “fit to rule a man and an empire”.
Chanel’s story really begins in the abbey of Aubazine in Correze where Coco, born Gabrielle Chanel, was raised by nuns after the death of her mother when she was 11 and her abandonment by her itinerant salesman father. The designer used to say she had been brought up from the age of six by two severe aunts after the loss of her mother and her father’s move to America. It was a fake narrative, built up rather in the way a spy assumes a “legend”, or cover story, and then starts to believe in it.
Berryman’s film revisits these early convent days to find the clues that unlock Chanel’s secrets, including the stained glass window that inspired her logo’s interlocked Cs. The nuns’ black and white habits and rosary beads are also thought to have dictated the colour palette and pearls of her later key looks. “I went back to the abbey of her childhood, and I am surprised more people have not done that before to show those connections on screen. I think House of Chanel is now doing that a little, restoring the place,” said Berryman.
Chanel rarely talked about her childhood, except to say that early happiness was a handicap to success, but she certainly learned to sew and embroider with the nuns.
Her fashion empire began with hats in 1913 and expanded into dresses that dispensed with the corsetry of the belle époque and Edwardian era. But Chanel also understood the need for constant change and keenly felt the competition with designers Jeanne Lanvin, Elsa Schiaparelli and Dior. “Fashion should die and die quickly, in order that commerce may survive,” she once decreed.
She also saw the need to create a mystique about a product. Choosing the fifth formulation of a perfume created in Grasse in 1921, she spritzed Chanel No5 around the high-tone restaurants of Paris and sent out bottles to celebrities, before launching it with her name on the bottle.
“I think she was well ahead of people like the Kardashians in realising the commercial possibilities of getting people to want to be her,” said Berryman.
Chanel’s love affairs with cultural figures such as Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Igor Stravinsky, along with her support of the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, mark her out rather as patron of the arts than a dependent mistress. She gave several of these men places to live as well as financial encouragement.
Her second phase of influence came in the 1960s, when wealthy Americans adopted Chanel suits and handbags as symbols of relaxed grandeur. It is a look subverted by hip-hop stars such as Lil’ Kim and Misa Hylton, who tells Berryman that she likes the rebelliousness of Chanel. But the designer does not emerge as a hero of the people, even if she did work for the resistance.
Years of luxurious living in Paris’ Ritz Hotel wiped away sympathies with the poor, and in the 1930s she tried to sack her striking workers. It is a battle that lives on, as the brand does. After its best earnings yet, Chanel Korea is now being threatened with a walkout if workers do not get more of a share of the vast profits. Department stores and duty-free shops have already seen staff action. So Chanel’s notoriety marches on, swinging its pearls.
