Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel

[Boomer]

The new book is out, but for those of us who are obsessed with these things, not much that we haven't known already, although it has usually been downplayed in a major way- so you can make of this what you will...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/a...ms-used-drugs-lesbian-affairs-loved-Nazi.html

 

[Boomer]

Chanel spied for Hitler: book

Coco Chanel was the best-dressed Nazi spy in the 1940s, according to a shocking new book on her life, which claims the creator and muse behind the Chanel brand was an intelligence operative for the German military organization Abwehr.

Journalist Hal Vaughan, born in America and who lives in Paris, lays out evidence of Chanel's work with the Nazis during World War II in a new book, "Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War." Vaughan reports that in 1940, Chanel was recruited into the Abwehr, having been introduced to the organization through one of her lovers, Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a German agent who was honored by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels during the war.

Dincklage, reports Vaughan, "managed Chanel's relations with Nazi officialdom in Paris and Berlin," and arranged for her to live in the Hotel Ritz in occupied Paris, which had been reserved for Nazi officials.
The designer was labeled in Abwehr records as Agent F-7124, he claims. Her code name was Westminster, borrowed from Chanel's longtime friend and sometime lover, the Duke of Westminster.

The book says Chanel used her Nazi ties to try to regain ownership of Chanel No. 5 perfume from her Jewish partners, the Wertheimers, who produced and distributed her fragrance across the world. Her bid was unsuccessful, as the Wertheimers had shielded their businesses before fleeing to the US. Chanel No. 5 went on to be the biggest-selling fragrance in history.

Chanel later fled to Switzerland with Dincklage for nine years until she returned to Paris at 70. She was never charged for any involvement with the Nazis, and died in 1971.

Vaughan's book will be published Tuesday by Knopf.

NY Post

 

[Mirik]

Harper's Bazaar US August 2011


storemags via tarsha

 

[farou7a]

^ eeee!

 

[Mirik]

Domovoy Russia March 2001 my scans

 

[Thefrenchy]

Gabrielle Chanel poses with her dog "Gigot" @ the Villa La Pausa - 1930

MADAME.LEFIGARO.FR

 

[farou7a]

wow ive never seen that pic-chaaaa before.

thank you for sharing! karma

 

[Thefrenchy]

For those of you who have never seen Mademoiselle Chanel in motion, watch this: http://www.ina.fr/art-et-culture/arts-du-spectacle/video/CAF91004225/coco-chanel.fr.html It also includes footage of the SS 1970 collection

 

[farou7a]

^ thank you

 

[farou7a]

is there any translation for the extremely fast french they are speaking?

 

[Boomer]

Well, here are my next several book purchases!! B)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204323904577038572818601252.html

 

[Mirik]

Elle Ukraine December 2011 ebook30

 

[Boomer]

CHANEL: COUTURE AND INDUSTRY
By Amy de la Haye
Abrams, $30, 128 pages

There has been a plethora of books about Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, most of them proving the obvious: that she was a horrible human being, a vicious anti-Semite, certainly a Nazi collaborator, perhaps even an active spy for them, a ruthless cutthroat in her business affairs. Mixed in with all these weightier matters are loads of good old-fashioned gossip. Was she really a lesbian, despite all those trophy lovers including Britain’s Duke of Westminster and the Romanov Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, Rasputin’s killer? There seems to be no end to the fascination with all the sordid details of her life.
But in the end, as Shakespeare put it, the play’s the thing. And the reason that Chanel was the only person from the couture world included in Time magazine’s list of the most significant people of the 20th century is not any of the things mentioned above. No, it is because, no matter how rebarbative she was as a person and how morally flawed, she was a transformative figure in the way women dressed themselves.

We are not just talking about clothes here: There were perfumes before Chanel No. 5, but no brand had ever been so linked with fashion nor a commercial product invested with such cachet and become, yes, so fashionable. It is salutary that we have this book by British fashion historian Amy de la Haye, whose title “Chanel: Couture and Industry” tells us right away what her book will hold: What is really important about Chanel, why we should actually bother about her, not just wallowing in the pathology of her awfulness.
That Chanel’s contribution to fashion was huge is undeniable. More than anyone else, she showed that simplicity was a real component of true elegance, with so many of her designs rebuking the over-the-top creations that bedeviled fashion in her time and continues to in our own. For example, loose, flowing trousers for women that left no doubt they were different from men’s and somehow enhanced, rather than diminished, that ineffable quality - femininity. The use of form-fitting jersey fabric to show off the beauty of the female body. The derided but much-copied “little black dress” that suited if not all, certainly many, occasions. And these are just the highlights.

Ms. de la Haye quotes Vogue as saying “Chanel is the fascinating paradox - the couturiere who takes no account of fashion.” Indeed, she had no time or interest in doing so; She knew she had that Midas touch creating the fashionable. There is such conviction in her designs; in fact, it is the true secret to their timelessness. - that and their simplicity, that basic quality that makes them stand the test of time. So many things that are the height of fashion manage to hold sway in their hour on the stage but look ridiculous to posterity. The many beautifully chosen, revealing illustrations in this book demonstrate the eternal elegance that was Chanel’s hallmark.
Of course, Chanel was as much a businesswoman as she was a creative artist. No other person can provide so strong a refutation of the notion that genius and enterprise are mutually exclusive. As Ms. de la Haye writes with an assurance and an authority displayed throughout her excellent book:
“For almost a century, the name Chanel has been synonymous with feminine elegance, modernity and fashion innovation. The fashion aesthetic and philosophy of Gabrielle ‘Coco‘ Chanel have spoken to stylish women worldwide - perhaps more so than any other designer before or since.
“This book examines the couturiere’s creative output over the course of a career that spanned some 60 years, documenting the creation and meteoric rise of Chanel’s international fashion empire and the products that bear her exclusive label: haute couture and ready-to-wear clothing, accessories, jewelry and perfume. Her designs for avant-garde dance and theatre, and for Hollywood films, are also considered. As her biography has already been documented extensively … it is referenced here only to provide context, especially when it elucidates her aesthetic and working practices.”
Which is as it should be. This is one book about Chanel that keeps its focus just right.

The Washington Times

 

[Boomer]

Chanel: An Intimate Life
Lisa Chaney
Fig Tree, Hardback, €34.00

The fashion icon's incredible life and colourful sexual habits are explored in this latest biography, says Frieda Klotz



There is often something poignant about old photos. One in Lisa Chaney's Chanel: An Intimate Life has a particular innocence to it. It shows Gabrielle Chanel sitting astride a grey horse wearing jodhpurs and a tie. A handsome young man stands close by, looking at her with affection, while the 27-year-old Chanel, with short hair and a childish grimace, glances at the camera.

The man was Arthur Capel, a half-Irish horse-mad playboy and businessman, who was the love of her life. The picture dates from 1910. Ten years later Capel would leave her, and not long after that he died in a car-crash.
Chanel's boyish outfit would have been shocking at the time, but its androgynous simplicity bears the hallmarks of her style. It was just around this time that she set up her business. It was unusual, even scandalous that she should work, but she had a desire to make money and did not want to be a kept woman. Already she had travelled an immense way from her love-starved and traumatised childhood.
Chanel: An Intimate Life gives a rich and vivid account of one of the most successful and entrepreneurial women of the 20th Century. Not only that: Chanel changed how women dressed. Nineteenth-century clothes were restrictive and elaborate. Chanel's designs were innovative, even revolutionary, in giving women freedom of movement. The short, beaded and fringed dresses of the Twenties; the classic woman's two-piece suit; and the little black dress itself -- her elegant, crisp styles suited the newly liberated women of that era.

Lisa Chaney deftly charts Chanel's almost incredible journey from an impoverished childhood to an adult life of stunning lavishness and wealth, as she developed a brand that only society's elite could afford. Gabrielle Chanel was born in 1883 to a profligate, alcoholic father and a downtrodden mother whose family had rejected her when she married. When Chanel was 11, her mother died, and she spent the rest of her early years in orphanages being cared for by nuns. Afterwards, she embarked on a career (ultimately unsuccessful) of singing and entertaining in local cafes -- it was here that she earned the nickname La Petite Coco.
At this time Chanel may have dabbled in prostitution to supplement her income. Her relations with men -- and with women -- are a recurring theme. When she was young affluent men offered the only escape from poverty. She attracted the attentions of an officer called Etienne Balsan and he invited her to join him in his country palace, an experience that gave her access to an exclusive social circle. Through Balsan she met Capel, whose father was a successful entrepreneur. Chanel's first business venture was a milliner's shop in Paris, and Capel encouraged her (and helped financially) when she decided to make dresses too.
Chaney conjures up a glittering, colourful world in which fidelity did not exist. Chanel shared Etienne Balsan with a famous courtesan, Emilienne d'Alençon -- with whom she may in turn have had an affair. Later, when she was with Capel, he had many flings with other women. To complicate matters, even after he left her to wed the English beauty Diana Wyndham, he would return to Chanel, tormented by an inability to decide between the two.

Chanel pursued her own romantic conquests, embarking on affairs with the Russian grandson of Tsar Alexander II, the English Duke of Westminster, with Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. In later years she acquired a reputation as a sexual predator. A young French woman on the staff of American Vogue recalled, "I had to go once to see her, and was told to be careful. I believed, and all others did too, that Chanel was bi-sexual. One assumed it to be the case. British and French laws were different. It wasn't illegal in France and people were just less fussed about it really."
The most sordid juncture in Chanel's life occurred well after she was established. During World War II, she lived in the Ritz Hotel in occupied Paris with the German spy Hans Günther von Dincklage. At one point, in fact, she shared her room with two men who were both active Nazi supporters. Chaney, who has fallen slightly in love with her subject, explores this period in dutiful detail and records that one evening an acquaintance noted in his diary, "Coco goes into a tirade against the Jews."
Chaney's observations that Chanel was pro-British (she was friendly with Winston Churchill) and that she wept when France was occupied, do little to excuse her behaviour. In fact another biographer, Hal Vaughan, has recently argued (in Sleeping with the Enemy) that Chanel was actively involved in the war effort -- as a secret agent for the Germans.
After World War II thousands of French women were publicly humiliated, their heads shorn, for their so-called horizontal collaboration with the Nazis. (Chaney suggests that the anger they faced arose from "the sense of personal and national emasculation felt by French men, living under an occupying army.) Chanel, however, was not punished and travelled to Switzerland where she remained for some time. She continued to pay von Dincklage an allowance.

Chanel was known for being generous and kind to friends, but as time passed she became cantankerous, and her harsh outbursts alienated many of those around her. At the end of her life she was lonely. She gave a brutally honest description of herself to an early biographer who was also a friend. "The hardness of the mirror reflects my own hardness back to me ... it expresses what is peculiar to myself, a person who is efficient, optimistic, passionate, realistic, combative, mocking and incredulous, and who feels her Frenchness. Finally, there are my gold-brown eyes which guard the entrance to my heart: there one can see that I am a woman. A poor woman."
Chanel died in 1971, never really coming to terms with the changes of the swinging Sixties (she hated the miniskirt and complained that knees were ugly). But, however prickly she was as a person, her creative spirit left its mark on fashion forever. A line from Vogue summarises her achievement, for she introduced "the heady idea that a woman should be more important than her clothes".

- The Independent Frieda Klotz

 

[Boomer]

Some scans from Edmonde Charles-Roux' classic book "Chanel"...

MyScans

 

[Boomer]

MyScans

 

[Boomer]

Call the bank- a once in a lifetime opportunity!!

http://www.businessinsider.com/coco-chanel-french-riviera-house-for-sale-photos-2012-2

 

[Prairie]

She was born 129 years ago, so... Happy 129th birthday to Coco

 

[Thefrenchy]

VANITYFAIR.FR

 

[VogueGirl8910]

US Vogue March 1995
"Miss Parker & her Circle"
Model & Designer: Suzy Parker & Coco Chanel
Photographer: Richard Avedon


Scanned by kelles