Coco Chanel and the Nazis

A new television drama has reopened the debate over Coco Chanel's connection to the Nazis.

Set in occupied France, "The New Look" tells the story of Chanel and rival fashion designer Christian Dior, both of whom saw family members imprisoned by the Nazis and pulled "every kind of string to get them back", said Time.

 Dior's storyline is "moving and intriguing", said reviews website Roger Ebert, but it "cannot distract from the flat-out revisionist treatment" of Chanel. Extensive historical evidence has revealed that she was a Nazi sympathiser, yet the writers of the new Apple TV+ show "seem committed to doing everything they can to minimise, or conceal entirely, this truth".

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'A vicious antisemite'

After the Germans invaded France in the spring of 1940, Chanel remained in Paris. She lived in the Ritz hotel, "an establishment used as Nazi headquarters when they first invaded", said History Extra. "Described in French intelligence papers as a 'vicious antisemite', Chanel seemingly felt at home among these German officers."

"The New Look" portrays this period of her life as tumultuous and shows that she had a "long affair" with a Nazi agent, Hans Günther von Dincklage, known as Spatz, said the BBC. But the series doesn't show how Chanel tried, unsuccessfully, to use the Nazis' Aryan laws to "remove" the Jewish directors of her fragrance business Parfums Chanel, the Wertheimer family, said History Extra.

Todd Kessler, the series' creator, told the BBC that "the aim was to portray the spirit" of Chanel "as accurately as possible". But "it's not inspiring to write villains or heroes", he added. What's inspiring is to explore the grey."

'Too easy to say Chanel was a Nazi'

Although historians widely agree that she collaborated, Chanel biographers disagree over the extent to which the designer held Nazi sympathies.

"Chanel definitely socialised with them," Lisa Chaney, author of "Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life", told Time. The new television series shows Chanel, played by Juliette Binoche, hanging out with Nazis at small gatherings. But "there is no proof that she was in any way actually a Nazi by herself", said Chaney.

"It's too easy to say Chanel was a Nazi," agreed Justine Picardie, whose "Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life" was published in a new edition last year.  Picardie told the BBC that Chanel was too much of an Anglophile, and believed too strongly in freedom, to have embraced Nazism.

However, biographer Rhonda Garelick argued in  "Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History" that "patriotism had always meant less to her than power". Garelick told the BBC that "never did she acknowledge the implications of having tried to invoke the heinous Nazi Aryanisation laws against her own business partners".