In the first and perhaps only time I’ll be quoting an AP fashion writer, here’s Jenny Barchfield:
A new book by [Hal Vaughan,] a Paris-based American historian[,] suggests Chanel not only had a wartime affair with a German aristocrat and spy, but that she herself was also an agent of Germany’s Abwehr military intelligence organization and a rabid anti-Semite.
Doubts about Chanel’s loyalties during World War II have long festered, but “Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War” goes well beyond those previous allegations, citing as evidence documents culled from archives around the world.
The book, published in the U.S. on Tuesday by Knopf, has ruffled feathers in France, where the luxury industry is a pillar of the economy and Chanel is widely regarded as the crowning jewel.
The House of Chanel was quick to react, saying in a statement that “more than 57 books have been written about Gabrielle Chanel. … We would encourage you to consult some of the more serious ones.”
…
The book alleges that in 1940, Chanel was recruited into the Abwehr — her nom de guerre borrowed from another of her lovers, the Duke of Westminster. A year later, she traveled to Spain on a spy mission — on condition that the Nazis release her nephew from a military internment camp — and later went to Berlin on the orders of a top SS general, the book says.
It also suggests that Chanel’s alleged anti-Semitism pushed her to try to capitalize on laws allowing for the expropriation of Jewish property to wrest control of the Chanel perfume lines from the Wertheimer brothers, a Jewish family who’d helped make her Chanel No. 5 a worldwide best-seller.
What the hell is this.
