How the Nazis ignited FASHION’S FIERCEST RIVALRY
Coco Chanel spied for the Germans, while Christian Dior helped the Resistance. As a star-studded TV drama reveals their extraordinary wartime exploits...
PERHAPS it is no surprise there was a lifelong rivalry between Christian Dior and Coco Chanel: the great French fashion designers sprang from different worlds. Dior, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman, was brought up in middleclass comfort. Chanel, daughter of a laundrywoman, was born into poverty and was taken into an orphanage, aged 11, when her mother died.
The iconic looks the two designers created from the ashes of World War II were as different as their backgrounds.
Dior’s ‘New Look’, with its rounded shoulders, cinched waists and full skirts was hailed as a break from wartime austerity. The simple lines of Chanel’s elegant but formal tweed suits were inspired by the comfortable clothing worn by men.
Chanel passionately disliked Dior’s aesthetic, because it feminised women – she believed her clothes empowered them.
When the New Look launched in February 1947, Chanel said, disparagingly: ‘Look how ridiculous these women are, wearing clothes by a man who doesn’t know women, never had one, and dreams of being one.’
She later declared that: ‘Dior doesn’t dress women. He upholsters them,’ and that a woman sitting down in a Dior dress looked like ‘an old armchair’.
Dior responded with gentlemany understatement, writing later in his memoir only that Chanel’s ‘personality as well as her taste had style and elegant authority’.
But winning the favour of the elegant — and richest — women of the time was crucial and not just to prove one style of design was more creative or forward-looking than the other. It was existential for their businesses, which had been hit hard by the war.
And we now know that what set the two apart was far more than a dispute over silhouettes: more important was how they had fought to emerge unscathed from the Nazi occupation of France.
A new ten-part Apple+ TV series, The New Look, released tomorrow, follows Christian Dior’s rise to fashion fame and his relationship with his beloved younger sister, Catherine, a member of the French Resistance and an inspiration for much of his work.
Starring Bloodline’s Ben Mendelsohn as Dior and Juliette Binoche as Chanel, The New Look brings the horrors and compromises of war into focus – inevitably making us wonder what we might have done in Dior or Chanel’s place.
Dior’s early career was surprisingly chequered: his family hoped he would become a diplomat, but he pursued his passion for art, opening a small gallery where he sold pieces by artists including Picasso. It was forced to close after Dior’s father lost his money in the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
A newly-impoverished Dior started selling fashion sketches, working for renowned designer Robert Piguet until he was called up for military service.
When Dior returned to Paris in 1942, he was hired by couturier Lucien Lelong (played by John Malkovich in the TV series), working alongside Pierre Balmain.
It’s extraordinary to think of French couture continuing amid the turmoil of war – but even more astonishing is that the Nazis planned to uproot the lucrative French fashion industry and relocate it to Berlin.
Lelong, president of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, fought to keep the couture houses in Paris. But the most notable designers – those who hadn’t fled the French capital – were obliged to produce clothing for the wives of SS officers. Jean Patou, Jeanne Lanvin and Nina Ricci all did so.
Dior, as an employee of Lelong, did what he had to do – no more, no less – in terms of pandering to Nazi wives, to help keep the French fashion industry alive. ‘Creation cannot stop the bullets. But creation is our way forward,’ Malkovich (as Lelong) says in the series.
Dior’s sister’s chosen path was altogether more risky. In 1941, Catherine (played by Game Of Thrones’s Maisie Williams) fell in love with one of the founders of the French Resistance and joined the organisation, setting up office in Christian’s Paris flat.
So, Christian would work each day making dresses for Nazi wives, then come home, where a hub of the Resistance was taking shape.
Tragically, Catherine was betrayed by a fellow fighter in 1944. Seized and tortured by Nazi officers, she was deported to Ravensbruck concentration camp in northern Germany.
Christian tried to intervene and prevent her deportation via the Nazi contacts he had made through his work but was unsuccessful.
Catherine was subsequently moved to the Torgau military prison, an offshoot of Buchenwald, then forced to work at a factory near Leipzig. She did her best to resist, sabotaging machinery.
In 1945, as the Allies swept across Europe, prisoners were ‘evacuated’ by being force-marched from one camp to another. Catherine was on such a march when she was picked up by the Allies near Dresden and returned to Paris. She was so emaciated Christian failed to recognise her at the station, and too sick to eat the dinner he had planned.
Coco Chanel’s approach to the Nazi occupation could not have been more different. On the surface, her actions look much more questionable – she has been accused, convincingly, of being a Nazi spy. But war and the desperate need to survive it often create moral ambivalence.
We know something of what the designer did during the occupation of France, but little about why.
Unlike Dior, Chanel was already well known by the time war broke out, having revolutionised women’s cumbersome Edwardian wardrobes in the early 1900s with the invention of the ‘little black dress’.
Her growing fame as a designer gave her an introduction to Europe’s elite. She became the mistress of Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, and, through him, friends with Winston Churchill.
During the spring of 1940, after the Germans entered Paris, Chanel
‘Dior doesn’t dress women, he upholsters them’
first fled south to Corbère to stay with her nephew André’s family. There, she learned that André, a soldier in the French army, had been captured and was being held in a prison camp. Chanel returned to Paris, determined to use her connections to free her nephew.
Shortly afterwards, she became the lover of a Nazi intelligence officer, Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage. Whether that was through attraction, a need for protection or a ploy to secure her nephew’s release, we can’t be sure.
She moved into the Ritz hotel, where she had stayed occasionally since 1935 – but rather than just a luxury hotel, the Ritz was by then the Nazi headquarters in Paris.
Some argue that Chanel’s affair with von Dincklage and her fraternising with Nazis was all to do with winning André’s freedom (and so determined was she to achieve this, that some biographers have theorised that André was, in fact, Chanel’s son by her first lover Etienne Balsan and not her elder sister’s child).
But it seems she went much further – perhaps to the point of collaboration. Most accounts of Chanel’s life dance around the issue, but The New Look doesn’t scrimp on dramatising this element. It also portrays an undeniably ruthless side to her character.
Early in the war, Chanel closed her business, putting 4,000 women out of work. That may have been a practical decision, given the uncertainty of the future, but it was thought by some to be revenge for a strike for higher wages that took place in 1936.
She also took full advantage of ‘Aryanisation’ laws that forced Jews to give up their businesses.
In an attempt to wrestle control of the perfume sector of Chanel from the Jewish Wertheimer family, with whom she had a business deal, she wrote to the government claiming the Wertheimers had ‘abandoned’ the business.
But the family outflanked her, having secretly signed over the stewardship of the company to a Christian friend who, it had been arranged, would hand it back at the end of the war.
In secret papers only released in 2014, Chanel was apparently shown to be a Nazi spy, registered in 1941 as Agent F-7124, with the code name ‘Westminster’, after her former lover.
She seems to have acted as a go-between, feeding information as dictated by the Nazis to her powerful, high-society friends over in England.
That same year she was sent on a mission for the Nazis to Madrid, in neutral Spain.
No papers pertaining to the journey survive, so historians are unclear as to what she was doing – but her nephew was released shortly after she returned to Paris.
Two years later, in 1943, she was sent to Madrid again, this time with a letter written by Heinrich Himmler, for delivery to Churchill.
Travelling from Paris to London to hand over the letter directly would have been nigh on impossible. But, as Spain was not involved in the fighting, she hoped to pass the letter – believed to contain a proposal for a truce – through the British embassy and then to Churchill via diplomatic mail.
The plan collapsed when a fellow Nazi spy was caught and named Chanel as an informer.
When France was liberated, in 1944, Chanel was arrested and interrogated by the Free French Purge Committee, but she was not named as a collaborator. She wriggled her way out of trouble, partly by saying she had acted to secure her nephew’s release and, some say, through an intervention by the British Royal Family secured by her faithful friend, Churchill.
To confuse matters further, a current exhibition about Chanel’s life includes two recently discovered documents claiming she was also part of the French Resistance.
These documents have apparently been verified by the French government, although a historian of the Resistance has questioned their authenticity – so Chanel’s role may remain a mystery for ever.
After the war, she went into exile in Switzerland for a decade, where she kept her head down, only returning to Paris to re-establish her fashion house once murmurings about her wartime associations had quietened down.
Chanel herself claimed she returned because ‘Christian Dior said a woman could never be a great couturier’. In the drama, played by Juliette Binoche, she declares: ‘Monsieur Dior ruined French couture and I’m coming back to save it.’
Dior, by contrast, triumphed in the decade after the war. He founded his fashion house in 1946 with the encouragement of his mentor Lelong and it was an immediate hit with Parisian society, hungry for beauty.
Scenes in the series portray in all their skirt-swishing beauty what
Dior’s first shows might have looked like.
It was Carmel Snow, editor of Harper’s Bazaar, who dubbed his hyper-feminine combination of accentuated shoulders, nipped-in waists and impossibly full skirts the ‘New Look’ – a look which re-established Paris as the world’s fashion capital and reignited the fantasy of fashion after six long years of frugality.
‘People need to feel. Dream. They need to live again. We can create a new world for them,’ Dior says in the series. Fashion was a kaleidoscope through which people imagined the possibility of a new, peaceful world.
In 1947, Dior also launched the Miss Dior fragrance – named for his sister, Catherine. With its creation, Dior seemed to say to the Nazis: ‘I quietly made dresses for your wives to ensure Parisian fashion’s survival, but I tricked you and have now named the most famous fragrance in the world after my Resistance fighter sister.’
German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno once said that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’, but both Christian and Catherine Dior saw things differently, believing that continuing a pursuit of beauty after the
His sister was tortured by the Germans
Chanel became the lover of a Nazi officer
barbarity and devastation of war was the most rebellious act possible.
Dior summarises it thus in the TV series: ‘For those of us who lived through the chaos of war, creation was survival.’
Catherine became a florist and eventually bought a rose farm in Provence. She was awarded innumerable medals of honour for her resistance, including a Croix de Guerre (usually awarded only to members of the armed forces) and the Legion d’Honneur.
For her part, Chanel can perhaps be summarised in one word: opportunist. You don’t go from impoverished orphan to the Duke of Westminster’s lover and pal of Churchill without an eye for the main chance.
In a final irony, she died at the Ritz in Paris in 1971, where she had lived during the war with her Nazi lover. By that point, of course, the fashion house of Chanel was well and truly entrenched as an iconic brand and byword for Frenchness.
A woman whose name is synonymous with France is only known today because her ruthless actions ensured the survival of her brand. ‘Chanel can be very treacherous,’ Malkovich’s Lelong warns Dior in the series.
Not that Coco would have cared. After all, this is the woman who said: ‘I don’t care what you think of me. I don’t think of you at all.’
The New Look series has hit written all over it, not least because it is a sumptuous visual spectacle: the beauty of its exquisite costumes, designed by Karen Muller Serreau, is only amplified by the grey, dismal wartime backdrop.
But the drama’s appeal is more than skin-deep.
‘Everything that has been part of my life, whether I wanted it to or not, has expressed itself in my dresses,’ Christian Dior once said.
And, beyond rivalry, this is a story of triumph over adversity – and that’s a theme that doesn’t date.
The New Look launches on Apple TV+ tomorrow.