Coco Before Chanel: Fashion and Fascism

Wandering outside my comfort zone again, I picked this up at the shop:



It's all very glitzy and glamorous, "She defied convention!", blah, blah, and she's been lauded as the epitome of a sophisticated, independent woman. I got the impression that there wasn't much warmth in her childhood, though. Bit of a sad kid.

It's also very sanitised, given the controversy surrounding her, but they've picked a part of her life that was that wasn't controversial. There is no mention of her later habitual drug use (she was a daily intravenous morphine addict throughout most of her life), coke parties or bisexuality, but you get the impression that this is the way the Chanel company (and even Coco herself) would want her to be remembered. Having a founder portrayed as being smacked off her tits might not be good for sales. Then again...

It has occurred to me that she might have suffered from one of the mental illnesses that we now know as eating disorders, for example, bulimia or anorexia. I made a bit of a study of this after I read Microserfs a few months back (two of the characters, Karla and Dusty, suffered from eating disorders: Dusty from bulimia and Karla from an unspecified illness). Coco was noted for being very thin, was promiscuous (eating disorders can affect sexual appetite as well as for food, drugs and alcohol), and had no children, despite affairs with numerous men (infertility can also be an effect of the illness). It's an interesting theory and, if she did have the illness, what would things have been like had she got treatment for it? She might have been less wild, and a lot happier, but her parties would have been a bit dull.

As a coda, this all seems very sad, pathetic or scandalous depending on how you feel about her, but relatively harmless, until you read about her supposed collaboration with the occupying Nazis. How much, and to what effect, is the subject of much conjecture. She did live in the Paris Ritz hotel during the war, which was used by the German High Command to billet it's senior officers, plus supplying her drugs would have given them leverage. She also supported the family of Walter Schellenberg, head of SS foreign intelligence, while he was in prison after the war, as well as paying for his funeral. Maybe they were bridge partners or something? The allies did clear her of any collaboration, so it's possible that she might have been a double agent of some kind. Espionage is a murky world, no less then as now.

As with a lot of things, I found that the reality was more complex and contradictory, and sadder, than the movies.