As we have seen here Gabrielle Chanel never emphasized any past as a Resistance fighter.
At the Liberation in September 1944, Gabrielle Chanel is arrested at the Ritz where she lives and interrogated by a committee of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur. She is released after two hours. Some historians believe that the speed of her interrogation may have been due to the intervention of Winston Churchill, who wished to protect certain members of the English elite from testimony of their pro-Nazi sympathies. With the benefit of hindsight, we may wonder whether this speed was simply due to a lack of available evidence at the time.
In the months that followed, Gabrielle Chanel makes her way without too much difficulty to Switzerland, where she lives in the Lausanne area in exile or retirement, as the case may be, for eight years. She returns to Paris from time to time but is snubbed by her former social circle and held responsible for her affair with Spatz – with whom she lives a peaceful Swiss life.
She remains silent about the Modellhüt episode – except to make it clear that her friends were on the other side of the Channel.
As for the episode involving the Wertheimer brothers’ attempted spoliation, it is resolved after the Liberation through numerous rounds of negotiations between a shareholder who was guaranteed 2% gross of worldwide perfume sales and two shareholders too happy to preserve the smooth image of the woman whose name is printed on every bottle of perfume sold.
We’ll never know if the Nazis pressured Gabrielle Chanel into the compromising Operation Modellhut by bargaining for André’s release and the resolution of the latent dispute between the famous couturier and her partners.
We’ll never know whether Gabrielle Chanel’s intentions were pacifist, aiming for an imperfect peace because of her separation, but a peace nonetheless, whether she was a double agent or whether it was her sympathies for the Reich that led to her involvement in Operation Modellhüt.
It has often been said that Gabrielle Chanel was the only one, along with Madeleine Vionnet, not to have profited from Nazi money, since she closed her fashion house before the Occupation. This is true. But to be perfectly complete, as she also profited greatly from the war with the sale of her perfumes, which remained on sale.
Her biographers seem to agree on her latent anti-Semitism – in 1933, she and her lover Paul Iribe took over the xenophobic newspaper “Le Témoin”, and she made a clear distinction between “israélites” (to put it simply, rich Jews like her client Madame de Rothschild) and “youpins” (i.e. everyone else and the term is quite dismissive in French). Her close friends included Josée de Chambrun, daughter of the infamous Pierre Laval, and her lawyer was Maître de Chambrun, her husband. However, Gabrielle Chanel was known to criticize everyone – be it her close friend Misia Sert, homosexuals, men, women, artists or even couturiers (Paul Morand’s memoirs are an edifying read in this respect) – so it’s hard to tell the difference.
Three years after the war, a young, still little-known American photographer, Richard Avedon, captured Chanel’s ambiguity, by having her pose unknowingly in front of a Parisian wall on which two posters had been pasted: “Why Hitler” and “Centenary of 1848 – Liberté Égalité Fraternité”. The photo is cruel, accusatory and ambiguous, and Avedon finally refused to publish it (I don’t, here it is).
In 1954, Gabrielle Chanel is 71 years old. Following discussions with her partners, the indefatigable Wertheimer brothers – ultimately as pragmatic as herself – she decides to reopen her fashion house. Alas, the collection presented is an absolute flop. Christian Dior’s “New Look” prevails and Chanel’s androgynous approach fails to attract.
To reverse this misfortune, her inner queen of marketing strikes again: she adorns celebrities in tweed suits, silk blouses and two-tone shoes that make up the new Chanel wardrobe and has herself photographed with them. Romy Schneider, in the freshness of her twenties, looks fifty in a style that doesn’t suit her, Jeanne Moreau looks even less graceful than usual in tweed and Jackie Kennedy is about to see her husband die in a candy-pink suit.
But success is once again on the cards.
In 1957, Gabrielle Chanel receives the Oscar for Fashion in Dallas, but that is the end of the Chanel reign. Is the coincidence of the dates of one of the documents stating her Resistance activities and the Fashion Oscars fortuitous, or is it intended to nip any challenge in the bud? We’ll never know.
The 60s bring Marie Quant, miniskirts, pop culture, feminism and a very real social revolution. Fashion comes from the streets, from England, and this time Chanel fails to anticipate the zeitgeist.
She dies, alone and isolated, in 1971 at the Ritz. Her life was synonymous with hard work, determination and ambition.
Her human legacy is non-existent, her professional legacy immense. Today, the House of Chanel belongs to the descendants of the Wertheimer brothers. One of them, Éliane Heilbronn, who almost reached the age of one hundred when she passed away in 2024 and was still dressed in Chanel, was a lawyer who founded Salans (now part of Dentons, incidentally the world’s biggest law firm). I like that.
Chanel jacket and trousers – Agnelle gloves – Lanvin handbag – Banana Republic top – Vintage shoes
May 30, 2025
