Coco Chanel, Fashionista Extraordinaire
She was a fashion visionary. An elegant woman with a penchant for little black dresses, gold chains and political intrigues. It is her legacy as a fashion designer of unparallelled genius that we know her. Her wide circle of friends and admirers in high places, her respect among couturiers where French design and manufacture guaranteed a sublime mix of exquisite fabric and outstanding fashion.
Even the porcelain dolls that became the fashion in France and Germany in the mid-19th Century and beyond were garbed in the latest fashions. They were the aristocrats of dolls as objects to be admired, not played with, as manifestations of cultural privilege and obsession with style for both the drawing room and the demi monde.
Coco Chanel's designs were simple, elegant and wonderfully festooned with draped chains to create an unforgettable look of languid beauty for women of leisure, class and riches. A look that less well-endowed women not of patrician birth and privilege did their utmost to emulate. As for her friends, she had many, among them none other than Winston Churchill.
Britain's indomitable war-time Prime Minister whom so many in Europe held singly responsible for enabling Britain to withstand the merciless mechanized onslaught of Nazi Germany. Coco Chanel moved in those kinds of exalted circles, from the drawing room to the politics of her day. And it was not the courage of Britain that she admired and supported, but the brash audacity of Berlin.
A new biography, Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War, by American author Hal Vaughan reveals her to have had her friendship with Winston Churchill responsible for being spared the vengeance of the French Resistance post-war, from arrest and trial. This, despite that she was on the list of the French Resistance as a collaborator.
Having been spared, she fled to Switzerland, until she was able to return to Paris and reinvent the House of Chanel. She, along with other French artists so highly esteemed, collaborated with the Nazis. The French Resistance "death rosters" should have included along with Coco Chanel, Maurice Chevalier, Jean Cocteau and Edith Piaf.
European and U.S. archives revealed to Hal Vaughan that Coco Chanel had an Abwehr identity with Nazi Germany as Agent F-7124, as a committed fascist. She was code-named Westminster, after her former lover, the anti-Semitic second duke of Westminster. She maintained close quarters at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, along with spies and senior Nazis.
Her lover, Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage was an officer thirteen years younger than her. Coco Chanel is portrayed in Mr. Vaughan's book as "fiercely anti-Semitic", carrying out missions for the Abwehr in Madrid and Berlin along with von Dincklage, a dangerous "Nazi spy master".
There is the inside look at the sublimely sophisticated dowager of French style and fashion.
Labels: Anti-Semitism, Germany, Holocaust, Human Fallibility, Societal Failures
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, August 17, 2011
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