FASHION

How interested in fashion are you?

Whats the most expensive item of clothing youve ever

bought?

If money was no object and you wanted to buy something

special for a wedding or an important family event, what would
you treat yourself to?

Do you have a favourite perfume or do you prefer to sample lots

of different perfumes?

Have you ever tried Chanel n 5 or bought it for anyone?

What do you associate it with?

What do you know about Coco Chanel?

Coco Chanel: enduring style, fairytale

story - just don't mention the Nazi lover
The Guardian, Wednesday 22 April 2009
Biopic of 'Mademoiselle' omits her darker period
First of two films to trigger Chanel mania in France

It was the ultimate French fairy tale. An illegitimate child abandoned in a rural
orphanage and taught needlework by nuns rose to become the star of Paris fashion a
bolshy, androgynous trendsetter who freed women from corsets, invented the little
black dress, round-neck jackets and quilted handbags which inspired a century of ripoffs.
France is braced for months of Chanel mania as the first of two feature films about the
fashion house founder, Coco Chanel, opens today. With French luxury brands desperate
to show they can buck the financial crisis, the biopic of "Mademoiselle" has been
accompanied by endorsements of Chanel style from silk pyjamas to women's suits. Next
month, the label's best-selling perfume Chanel No 5 unveils a new advertising campaign
starring Audrey Tatou, best known for her role in the film Amelie, who plays
Mademoiselle Chanel in the first film, Coco Avant Chanel. A second, rival film about
Chanel's love affair with the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky will be released later
this year as France embraces a newly discovered film genre: biopics of troubled females
such as the singer Edith Piaf and novelist Franoise Sagan.
The film Coco Avant Chanel focuses on what its director calls the miserable, "pure
Balzac" early years of Gabrielle Chanel, nicknamed "Coco" during her failed attempt to
launch a singing career. The film sees her move from poverty to high society, from
young hat-maker to her first catwalk show. But it stops short of a darker period in her
life - her affair with the Nazi officer, Hans Gunther von Dincklage, at Paris's Ritz hotel
during the Occupation.
The film's release coincides with publication of the latest instalment in historian Patrick
Buisson's much-praised study of sex lives during the Nazi occupation of France: 19401945 Annes rotiques. Buisson details not just the French prostitutes who served Nazi
officers, or the young women who fell in love with soldiers, but Paris's famous cultural
and artistic elite who engaged in "horizontal collaboration" with Nazi officers, including
Coco Chanel and the actress "Arletty", star of Les Enfants du Paradis.
Buisson told the Guardian that despite the success of his book, French women's wartime
relationships with Germans were still taboo in France, where there had been an
organised "collective amnesia". He felt a feature film exploring those relationships
would be impossible for at least a decade.

"Coco Chanel or the actress Arletty were the incarnation of the values of France:
insolence, freedom and in Chanel's case elegance," he said. "In their own way, each was
an icon. The fact that they could fall for the occupier was not just a transgression, it was
damaging for the national conscience. These women were part of the French national
heritage - in terms of Chanel, haute couture and fashion were even more important in
that era than they are today."
Chanel tried, but failed, to use the law banning Jews from owning businesses to wrest
control of her perfume manufacturing from the Wertheimer family who ran it at that
time. She preferred to conduct her relationship with the Nazi baron indoors, rather than
at Nazi soirees. Briefly moving to Switzerland, she escaped punishment at the
Liberation and would later stage a fashion comeback in Paris.
French commentators have not protested that the new films stops before the Nazi links
of a designer described as "indomitably antisemitic" in Carmen Calill's recent study on
French collaboration. Instead, extensive press coverage has revelled in nostalgia for
Chanel's style.
Alicia Drake, the Paris-based fashion author, explained: "As a woman, she was the
ultimate Franaise: a survivor, a working woman, she had multiple love interests, she
was disciplined, thin, brilliant and chic. Her work spanned 60 years from her hatmaking
in 1910 to her death in 1971, during which time she invented the first working woman's
wardrobe. She set very strict, lasting rules for French women's dressing. It's impossible
to overestimate her relevance to high fashion today."

trigger: (v) to set a course of action in motion

bolshy or bolshie: (adj) informal. difficult to manage; rebellious; politically radical or
left-wing.
rip-off: (n) a grossly overpriced article; the act of stealing or cheating.
buck: (v) to resist or oppose obstinately.
indomitable: (adj) too strong to be defeated or discouraged. indomitably adv.
revel in: (v) to take pleasure or wallow in; to take part in noisy festivities.

Chanel's war years: secrets and style

The Guardian, Wednesday 22 April 2009
Having spent the last six months immersed in dark corners of various historical
archives, researching a book on Coco Chanel, it has come as something of a surprise to
emerge, blinking, into the light, to read a flurry of newspaper stories speculating that
she was a Nazi.
The truth is more complicated, but then CHANEL WASN'T A NAZI would make less of
a headline. That said, it would be hard to give an absolutely accurate account of her
wartime activities in a headline, as she was operating in a world of double-dealings,
double-crossings, and double agents.
Yes, she had an affair with a German officer, Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a playboy
posted to Paris before the war; but his allegiances are as mysterious as his family
origins: he had a British mother, and tended to speak English in conversations with
Chanel.
Her relationship with Winston Churchill was warm enough for him to have written
admiringly of her merits, and to approve of her relationship with his friend, the Duke of
Westminster. She remained sufficiently close to Churchill to be able to write to him
during the war. There has been much speculation about whether it was Churchill who
intervened on Chanel's behalf when she was arrested after Paris was liberated.
There is much that is admirable about Chanel - her fierce independence, her refusal to
follow convention - and much that remains mysterious, including the narrative of her
past (one that she told and retold in a number of conflicting ways).
What is clear is that she wept on the day the Germans invaded Paris, and immediately
closed her couture house. Thereafter, like other friends and contemporaries (including
Cocteau and Colette), she found ways of accommodating the Occupation, proving - as
she did throughout her life - to be a great survivor.
Justine Picardie's book about Coco Chanel will be published this autumn by
HarperCollins

flurry: (n) a number of things arriving or happening suddenly and

during the same period.