Part Two: Coco Chanel: The Nazi Who Invented Fashion

and I'm not excited. But yeah, look, we can just make a whitewashed version of her life story for like again, Netflix or Hulu or somebody, and we can just cut out the whole, you know, ixnay on the atsien a part of it, and then we'll be good. Yeah. I know that's a good People do that all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, make a lot of money. Let's just make a lot of money. Look when you when you've got Netflix money, which at this point is what like forty dollars, you

don't have to apologize for anything. Um. So, Coco Chanel is riding high in the in the early nineteen twenties. She is rich as shit, She is the talk of the town. She is pretty racist, and the guy she loves is dead, but hey, she's friends with Picasso, and can you put a price on being friends with Picasso? Probably? She's also friends with the Grand Duke Dmitri, who is a former Russian noble exiled after the Bolshevik Revolution U Grand Duke Dmitri like the TLDR of his background as

he was one of the guys who killed Rasputant. So this is like a dude that she parties with. Um, maybe has a thing with. Is the Grand Duke Dmitri pretty cool? Um? Is he a good guy or a bad guy? I mean he's a he's a czarist noble, so he's a bad guy, but he's not the particularly bad. Yeah, she will hang out with worse people. And he does

not have a baleful influence on her. Mainly the thing that like, they spend a lot of time drinking and talking and whatever, and from his like stories of the homeland, she decides to launch a line of Chanelle clothing patterned off of Russian peasant clothes, which is again very successful. And it's also from her conversations with the Grand Duke that Coco gets the inspiration to create her own scent.

And yeah, this is what becomes Chanelle number five, Right, everybody knows that CNN Fashion describes the process of concocting the soon to be infamous scent. Chanelle launched her eponymous number five perfume in nineteen twenty one. A year before, so the legend goes, she had challenged French Russian perfumer Ernest Bow to create a scent that would make its wear smell like a woman and not like a rose.

The result was a mixture of eighty natural and synthetic ingredients, which Bow presented her with a numbered series of fume samples to choose from. She picked the fifth. The blend subverted the notion of fragrances as a symbol of high social class, instead pushing the idea that women could be multiple things, natural and artificial, provocative and pure. It was what I was waiting for, Chanel later said, a perfume like nothing else, a woman's perfume with the scent of

a woman. I did hear one time that she picked something else first? I think did yeah, yeah, yeah, I think she picks like another one twenty two, like yeah, she eventually lands on five. But that's why it's Chanelle number five, because she's given a bunch of options, and five is the one she picks, and she's not only like, obviously,

I guess it smells good. I can't think of off the top of my head what Chanelle number five smells like, Like, I couldn't tell you, but you know, everyone knows that it's a thing, right, you say Chanelle number five, and everyone has heard of it, which is it's like Coca Cola, Right, it's the Coca Cola of perfumes. At this point, I think it smells like department store kind of fright. Yeah, yeah,

probably that's probably fair to say at this point. And so the most interesting thing about it is how it became that ubiquitous, And this passage from how Vaughan's book describes the innovative way in which Coco is going to market her new perfume. To promote her new invention, Chanelle, like the shrewd peasant she was believed in word of mouth. She tested Chanelle number five by inviting friends to dine

with her at a posh restaurant near Grass. Then she furtively sprayed guests passing by her table, and they reacted with surprise and pleasure. Pleased with the results, Chanelle returned to Paris and quietly launched her new venture. She didn't announce its arrival in the press. She wore it herself and sprayed the shop's dressing rooms with it, giving bottles to a few of her high society friends. Her perfume soon became the talk of Paris. She does kind of

the department store. Yeah, no, no, non consensual perfume spraying. I do feel like the fact that they're marketing it a woman's perfume. They that's how it's marketed. Now, it's the same exact marketing. I mess with success, Sophie, you know. And then and then I think that the non consensual spraying is basically department that it is funny, Courtly, you brought up department store. She does kind of invent that too. Yes, yeah, some braun's just got to spray you. We would never

have that episode of Friends with Joey. Sorry. If you got it, you got it. If you didn't get it, watch it. I feel like guns stores should do the same thing with mace, like you want, honey, where are you going with it? Yeah? No, it was a mace joke. It's fine. So the demand for Chanelle number five almost immediately exceeded. This blows up like basically nothing ever had before. It immediately exceeds Coco's ability to produce or distribute it.

You know, she is a boutique fashion maker. She's very successful, but she does not have the kind of production capacity to mass manufacturer perfume. And so she starts looking for somebody to help her expand and an entrepreneur named Pierre Wertheimer makes her an offer. Pierre is the patriarch of a wealthy Jewish family, and he probably also is kind

of in love with Coco Chanelle. Coco has kind of a love hate relationship with him because there's I think a degree to which she finds him a little charming, but also she's very racist. And more to the point, this deal that he's going to make with her to produce Coco's perfume, to produce Shanelle number five, it's going to make her incredibly wealthy, right, and it's going to make Shanelle number five an iconic product, but he gets most of the money from it. Now, wait, is this

you said she'sist. Is this a Jewish man? Oh? Yeah, so that's going to be a problem because the deal and you know whatever, these are all wealthy capitalists, So I'm not going to try to come down on like this person and is the right or the wrong. But he is taking on the primary financial risk by putting in a shitload of money upfront to create a production line to mass produce Chanel number five, right, And so he gets most of the money. Right. Coco makes a

shitload of money. She makes more money than anyone could ever spend in a lifetime, and more money, in fact, than she is able to ever spend in her lifetime. But she will spend the rest of her life kind of obsessed with the fact that he's cheating her out of her fair share of the profits. And this is very related to the fact that he is Jewish and she is racist. Right, Yeah, it like that validates all of her I mean not really, but in her mind

validates all of her. Like yes, And from where I'm sitting again, I'm not gonna like whitewashed Wortheimer because there's some critiques to make of him because he's a wealthy businessman. But she makes more money than she could ever have spent on this ship. So the fact that she's obsessing over the fact that this is not as fair a contract as she thinks it should be is. I don't know. It says a lot about her, obviously. I think that

is more understandable because she grows up super poor. So maybe she has this kind of fixation because money was always so tight for her as a younger person. I don't know, but like her anger at the fact that she's not getting more money as academic because she is never able to spend close to as much money as she has. By the mid nineteen twenties, Coco had reached the absolute height of success in her business life, and she was about to reach a similar height in her

personal life. In nearly twenty she made the acquaintance of a British socialite and aristocrat named Vera Bate Lombardi. Vera was famed for her beauty and had many influential suitors in the British nobility. She was one of these like, look, you're not going to marry me, but we're gonna have a good time, right And Vera is a big advocate of what was called at the time the sporting life, and this is kind of how British aristocrats spent their

free time. They're going on a hunts, they're shooting pheasants, there shooting foxes, they're playing tennis, They're going on sailing advent is around the Cape of Good Hope or whatever. You know, this is what the elite spends their time doing, right, and that Vera is a big advocate of the sporting life. And because she is so beautiful and fucking a lot of these influential British aristocrats, she knows all of the

people that are worth knowing in British high society. Now she falls in love with Chanelle because the sporting life is kind of difficult when you're wearing like a sixty five pound whalebone dress that's got like a ten foot wide like hoop skirt or whatever. So Coco's clothing, like the sporting life is kind of increasingly becoming a fashionable thing in late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, and the fact that Coco starts coming out with these really comfortable, thin,

like easy to wear clothing is huge for abroad. Like Vera, She's like, oh man, this fucking this lady makes the best clothing ever. And so Vera befriends Coco Chanelle and introduces her to English high society, which is the most closed and hardest to enter aristocratic set in European society

at this point. And it's through Vera that in nineteen twenty three, Coco gets invited to a dinner at Monte Carlo, where she meets the Duke of Westminster, Hugh Richard Aartha Grosvena, known as Ben Door to his friends, and Coco quickly becomes a friend of Bendor. He is entranced by her. And you know, Ben Door is one of the only men, maybe the only man really she was likely to meet who has more money than her, because he is probably

the richest man in Europe. He is the largest landowner in Europe at like near the height of the colonial period. This guy he has so this guy's got a lot of slaves. There's a couple of levels, basically essentially, but like, so, there's a couple of levels to having money. Right, There's like being middle class, which is when you can afford the stuff that you need, but you're not free of procarity. Right.

There's upper middle class, where you can afford this off you need and most of the things you want, but you're not entirely free of precarity. And then there's rich, right, which is where you have all you have a lot of money, right, But there's a level and most people just think that, like, yeah, rich is kind of like the top of having money. There's a level above rich because rich people have money, the mega rich like Bendor, they don't have money. They just don't have They can

never run out of money. That's a different thing, right, Having money is different than you Like Bendor does not spend money. Ben Door demands things and they are made for him or they come to him, right, Like his wealth is so vast that he effectively does not have money.

He has a superpower, he has magic. That is the kind of rich this guy is, right, like this is this is like this is um, this is Jeff Bezos level right of wealth, except for more of it is actually in physical things for a guy like Bendorum it is. You cannot exaggerate how much fucking money this guy has. So like British, I mean usually it's old money, right, but you're year old. No, he is old money. He is inherited a lot of it. Um, this is old

colonial money. He owns land all over the fucking place like that, he owns palaces, um, he owns a massive yacht that is like a gigantic floating English mansion, Like it's a country mansion that he had turned into a yacht so he could sail around but still live in an English country mansion like this, Like yeah, beyond rich, you know, like that's that is the kind of money this guy possesses. Like this boat sounds like a great way to die. Yeah, and again, nobody told him how

much the boat cost. He just said, I would like a boat that feels like my country mansion and it was made, you know, like that's the that's the degree the kind of guy. This is. One of the women who spent time around Bendor later described him this way, a pure Victorian who had eyes for his shotgun, his hunters, jumpers and race horses, his dogs, while English women of his day had only to give birth to children and

please their masters. A man who played it dropping a bit of sugar in its paper wrapper into hot coffee and with a chronometer in hand, timing how long it took to melt. A man who enjoyed hiding diamonds under the pillow of his mistresses. A man who could brutalize women. Okay,

that has been door sexy. Yeah, that's what Coco thinks, and he is drawn to her in part because, like, as rich as he is, she is probably the only woman on planet Earth who he would number one be interested in, but who has no interest in his money. Yeah right, she doesn't need his money because she hasn't She like, again, he's rich as fuck, but like she

has more money than she can ever spend. At one point, they have a spat over the fact that he's like constantly cheating on her, right, and she tells him all I want from you? He's like, basically, what can I do to make this right? And she says, all I want from you are the wild flowers picked by your own hands, right, Basically, I want you to actually go

do a thing for me. And instead he has his servants get a bunch of wildflowers and lace them with jewels and give them to her because he just can't comprehend doing a thing. You know, he's not that kind of man. No, So what she is interested in? Addition, I think she does legitimately like this guy. She stays

with him for ten years, right, she does. I think there is like an emotional connection that they have, and he seems to legitimately care about her to the extent that a man like this is capable of caring about other people. Um. She is also interested in his connections. And it's through ben door that Coco meets with the Duke of Windsor later Edward King Edward the Eighth, who then abdicates because he marries a common woman. Even don't yeh he is he is he is he is a

hung out with Hitler. Not he is a he is a first name basis with Hitler Nazi. Um. She also meets with Winston Churchill, who, despite being pretty anti Nazi, is friends with all of these guys and hanging out with them. Churchill writes a lot at Churchill actually writes a good amount about Coco Chanelle. She is a good hunter. She's really good at like riding horses and hunting from horseback. And he's like impressed with how good she is at this stuff. He writes, I think he might have had

a crush on her. He writes a decent amount about like her shooting animals and riding her horse and stuff. Um, he's very he finds her very impressive though. Um, And you know, all of these men, including Churchill, are incredibly right wing and all of these men, aside from Churchill, are huge fans of Hitler. So even Churchill, though, wasn't he a little anti Semitic? Oh yeah, I mean for sure, yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, but he is he does like he is.

One of the things you have to give Churchill is like he's not a not a Hitler stand right? Yeah? Um, but no, I mean they're all they're all biggots, they're all right leg homies with Hitler. Hitler. Yeah, I mean I like it. But all these guys are shitty. Don't get me wrong, It's just that Churchill is not that specifically fuck all of these motherfuckers. But there are tears, absolutely, there are tears of fucker rate. And the guy that she's like bumping with is that one is almost the shittiest.

I would say, King Edward the Eighth is a little shittier than Ben Door. But yeah, it's it's good stuff. So in the late nineteen twenties and early thirties, which is when it's like kind of the mid twenties to the early thirties, like twenty three to thirty three, I think more or less, that's when Coco is kind of a really intimate part of this circle. So that's quite a lot of time, you know. They spend a lot

of time together. The Duke of Westminster and his friends admired the Nazi movement, most particularly for its strong stance against the Jews. Lawrence James, author of a book called Aristocrats, claims what lay behind their support of appeasement was a fear of communism. What emerges is a picture of a knot of peers adrifted, an unconcus genial world united by paranoia, pessimism,

and panic. So basically, the Bolshevik revolutions just happened. All of the nobility in Russia has been either murdered or forced to flee, and a lot of their wealth has been taken. Ben door. This is one of the few things he's got a fear is like with the socialism thing spreads over to England. Yeah, like I gotta shipload to louse um. So they support Nazison because of that, and because they're all anti Semitic, they see Bolshevism as a Jewish movement, right yeah, And these are the people

that Coco's hanging out with. So this kind of this is when she I think probably moves from the normal level of anti Semitic in French society more or less too super racist because she spends ten years with the most racist in these guys. All they have is money and time to spin conspiracy theories, often about the Jews, and so like she's just kind of hanging out with them when they're like drinking and talking about this Judeo Bolshevism shit and how fascism is the only thing that

can stop it. She's like, you got to meet these guys have really great YouTube channels. Oh man, these guys would have all been Tate stands absolutely. Lawrence James goes on to explain visceral anti Semitism permeated the upper classes between the wars. Jews were vilified as flashy and pushy arivests with a knack for enriching themselves when the aristocracy was grumbling about an often exaggerated downturn in their fortunes. And Coco, obviously, she's well prepared to embrace this bigotry.

But Ben Door is going to not only kind of encourage this bigotry, but he's going to lend a sheen of class and education to the way in which she's racist. As how Vaughan describes here whatever channel's views on Bolshevism. Before nineteen twenty five, Ben Door tutored her on the evils of communism and confirmed her antipathy toward Jews. He shuddered at the word Marxism. He was notoriously homophobic. When

his homosexual brother in law advocate free trade unions. As leader of the Liberal Party, Bendor revealed him to be gay to the King George the Fifth, ruining his sister's marriage. In the man's political career, Chanelle could match Bendor's homophobia. She is quoted as telling Paul Morand while in exile in Switzerland in the winter of nineteen forty six, at Saint Maurice's homosexuals, Are they not always hanging around women my beauty, my little one, my angel, continually strangling them

with flattery. I have seen young women ruined by these awful queers, drugs, divorce and scandal that will use any means to destroy a competitor in Reek vengeance on a woman. The queers want to be women, but they are lousy women. Oh my gosh, she's a real piece of shit. This

is the end of the sympathetic Coco. Oh yeah, yeah, I p is she going back and forth from Britain, Great Britain to Paris, Like London and Paris at this time, she travels constantly, okay, and she's often like hopping a ride across the Channel or whatever on like a yacht or you know, she's got she has all of the money in the world. She has all these connections. And you know who else has all the money in the world.

Our sponsors, not yet, not until you pay them some of your Ah, we are b a q that's how you spell back. So Chanel spends the worst years of the Great Depression with Bendor, and you know this is she is kind of completely divorced from regular life at this point. She's a very grounded upbringing, you might say,

not anymore. As his mistress, she finds herself regularly at exclusive gatherings, these royal cotillions, where she'll be like drinking and partying with like literally the fifty or sixty most powerful people in the world. Pretty much. Bindor's palace, Eaton Hall, had fifty four suites and a staff who were changed trained to keep completely silent and just ensure that the guests never had to lift a finger. So while millions of people are starving all around the world while like

the depression is at its worst. This is what Coco's up to, Yeah, would have been, could have used Amalata of her too. So she and the Duke of Westminster finally break up in the early thirties I believe it's thirty three, primarily due to the fact that Westminster wants an air and Chanelle is unable to get pregnant. She was also frustrated constantly by the fact that he cheated

on her with clock like regularity. The two fought more and more as time went on, having a particularly rivaled argument after Bin Door brought a beautiful socialite onto his yacht, the Flying Cloud. His usual tactic was to calm Cocoa with a gift, and on this occasion he gave her a priceless emerald that had been carved out of one of the Empire's overseas colonies, something that's probably worth an

incalculable fortune to day. And because they're fighting, she takes this massive emerald and she drops it into the ocean like a real life Titanic thing. Yeah, but instead of it being for whatever reason that lady did it, she just does it because like, fuck you were fighting. I don't even need this Emerald. I think she is like you can't buy me. That's like one of her vibes.

It's just like, fuck off, rich guy, and I think that is That's one of the things that is really interesting and kind of as bad as she is endearing about her is that from the beginning she's got this like number one, I ain't going to actually stay with a dude unless I really am in love with him. And part of how I will make that, like, the only way to really prove that is to make sure that I am rich as shit, like so that this whatever I'm doing is totally my call, you know, which

is interesting about her. It's one of the things that makes her a compelling person to read about. Now they break up, but there again, she's pretty good with her exes. They're friends for the rest of Bendor's life, which fortunately ends in fifty three, but Chanelle drifts away from him

after kind of the early thirties. She spends a chunk of those years in Hollywood, where she designs clothing for actor just like a like less than a year in Hollywood, she makes clothing for actors and actresses in a bunch of films, but most of those movies flop, which is kind of one of her few brushes with failure. But her time there puts her into the acquaintance of the next great love of her life, a guy named Paul Era barn Garay, known to most as Paul Iribe, thank God,

because I can't really say that last time. So Paul Iribe is a Basque man. He was, he's in the film industry. He had succeeded in the movie business as an art director for Cecil b de Mille. He was also a director in his own right in France. He was famous for being the illustrator of an erotic art book and also for being one of the first writers and illustrators for Vogue. So he's an artist. You know, Yeah, she's very drunk, well flaws. I'm sure you're gonna lay on.

So in addition to being a very talented artist with a provocative wit, he is so racist. This guy, this guy is like Hitler level of racist, right um, and that has an impact on Paul aid because like Hitler's coming into power in this period, the far rights in a sent globally. You know, YadA, YadA, YadA, anti Semitism is in, you might say, Vogue and a Reb convinces Chanel that she could be a part of this big

ground swell in racism. With a small investment and using her money, he relaunched a failed newspaper, Le Timoyne as a nationalist anti Semitic propaganda paper. And I'm gonna quote again, Yeah, Koko Chanelle founds a racism newspaper. Oh my gosh, cool, it's awesome. I can't believe you, like, learn what racism is and you're like, you know what, I'm gonna gotta be a newspaper about this shit. I want to pay

for the town with how racist I am. Yeah, I gotta make a newspaper about how much I hate people. I can just only imagine her in modern times, Like I think she would have been just as successful. I'll tell you that much. Yeah. No, I don't disagree. I don't disagree. I just it's fascinating the parallels. Yeah, yeah, and she really like she is this kind of timeless capitalist ghoul because you can just imagine, Yeah, you just transfer today the internet. She wouldn't have been any less successful.

She would have made most of the same calls and they would have worked about as well. She's like in this oddly fraught relationship with Bill Maher or something. Yeah, I would have been Bill mare today. So I'm gonna I'm gonna quote from how Vaughan. According to one biographer, Aribe was an elitist bourgeoisie supercharged with a with an irrational fear of foreigners. Reading his issues of Letemoine, one would think France was the eternal victim of some vast

international conspiracy. The magazine was a timid echo of France's fascist and anti Semitic press, publications that supported French stormtroopers named the Hooded Ones, and groups promoting law and order

in Italy and Germany. Biographer Charles Rue believed Chanelle's launching of Le Timoine with Ariba as editor and art director marked her transition from political indifference to a view of the future modeled on the opinions of Aribe, mixed with ideas and prejudices absorbed during her peasant and Catholic upbringing.

In the February twenty fourth, nineteen thirty three edition of the magazine, Aribe had the brass to draw Chanelle as a martyred Mary Anne in her Ferrgian Bonnet, her naked body held by a collection of evil looking men with obvious Jewish features. France, according to a Ribe and Let, Timoyne was suffering from a conspiracy managed by enemies within called Samuel or Levy, the alien like Leon Bloom and

the Judeo Masonic mafia, the USSR and read rabbles. Leon Bloom is like the leader of the Popular Front, which is kind of this like left wing progressive political movement that defeats the fascists and France during this period. So yeah, that's the bigot. This is all the shit that's in

her paper. Yeah, oh my god, it's pretty bad. Yeah, now there's a good there's some good news coming Courtney, because Paula Reebe, like after a couple of years of this in late nineteen thirty five, he's he's paying, he's playing tennis, Coco's out sunning herself. They're having a great day. And this motherfucker drops the fuck dead of a heart attack, which is awesome, that's great, dead Nazi fuck him. But second time her boyfriends died, right, Yeah, she loses a

lot of boyfriends. Yep. I'm just saying, you could really sell this fucking Netflix show. I know. I look, you're gonna have to cut a lot of the anti semitism. You're gonna have to You're gonna have to cast for Paula Rebe Who do we cast? Oh? Who's that guy? He's in? Um, he's in the new Star Wars movies. Everybody thinks he's handsome. Oh uh, you could probably do Padre, you could do Pedro. You could whitewash Paula Rebus, Pedro, Pascal. Sure, let's do that. You know what Courtney green Litt the

Coco story asterisk? My question? Yeah, what's that fucker's name? Um? Okay, one sec? I want to know who you think is handsome? I don't. I'm so bad at like movie star names. Wow, I'm going I gotta say one thing. I appreciate. I just typed into being Star Wars handsome guy. There's a lot of potential options for that. You get Warwick Davis Um, which I think is awesome. I don't even know who that is. Warwick is the guy who plays the LEPrecon

and the LEPrecon films. He plays a number of Adam Driver. No, not Adam Driver. I don't think Adam Driver's very good looking. He's the guy who's kind of like Latin. Oh I'm sure, I'm sure. Literally the entire audience is screaming at us. Yeah he was in Willow too, Yes, yeah, God, who's the fucking the guy who plays Anakin because everybody likes no, no, no, no, I don't know. I'm so bad at names. He's he's a little person that was in Willow and actually it

worked with a relative of mine and Willow. We're getting totally derailed. Sorry, you know, he's grab I just appreciate for his sake that he is the first pick and bing for Star Wars. Handsome guy. Good for you, Warwick, Yes, love you appreciate you. Oscar Isaac, God that was driving me crazy. Oh yes, okay, yeah yeah. Oscar Isaac is who I would cast as Paula Reeb in the whitewashed version of Coco's life where we pretend she didn't run a Nazi newspaper. But dope, yeah, isn't he? Ye? Look,

he's a handsome man, Oscar Isaac. Yeah, you're once. He's he's he's Guadama, he's his Guatemalan and and I think he's going to be honest. That ship I mean, yeah, but who are I mean, we're who are we casting for Coco? Right? We're going with somebody like in this period? Actually kind of maybe Aubrey Plaza is who I cast for Coco. She's kind of like her her late thirties,

early forties around this time. I think, so, yeah, I think she could I think she could do and she really well yeah, honestly, I don't know who else you cast cast now, now that we've mentioned it, now, um, yeah, Aubrey, do it, do it, and do it racist. Let's just let's just go for it. You're going if you're if you're sticking with a French actress, you could do. Um Marian Courtier. I don't know who that is now, you don't. I barely I couldn't. It took me like ten minutes

to figure out who Oscar Isaac was. Cool. Um, so you know, this piece of shit dies and good riddence. Very funny that he dies playing tennis. Fuck this asshole. This makes Oko very sad, though, because she loves the piece of shit, and she is made only the sadder because of the political currents that are going around in France at the time, as had happened in Italy, Spain,

in Germany. The far right is on the rise in France and the mid to late thirties, but unlike in those countries, a united left wing popular front was able to rise up and block the fascists from power. We cover this somewhat in our Behind the Insurrection series. Nineteen thirty six is the year of the popular fronts electoral success, and it brings with it, as part of this big, you know, kind of left wing counterwave to the fascists,

a wave of strikes by organized labor. There's a general strike on May twenty sixth, and by June the boutiques in the Ritz Hotel where Coco lived full time had closed. You know. Within a few weeks, Chanelle's salesgirls and seamstresses

had joined the strike. Some four thousand of her workers in total start striking, and when Chanelle is informed of this, she so she learns her workers are on strike because her personal assistant has to sneak into the hotel from the back because the employees have a picket line out front. And Coco is horrified and shocked that her workers have decided to join this strike. She expresses the thought that they must have lost their minds. She calls them her

little hands. That's what she calls her workers. I know she is a goal at this point, and she accuses them of having been infected by an American mind virus. List sit down, which is interesting to me that like today, when you talk about strikes, the French are like the first people you think about. But back in this day, when her workers go on strikes, she's like, this damn American striking virus. That could be us again, folks. So

her workers meanwhile SAPs like all held signs. That's so like they would basically, you know, the workers at these shops would cover the windows with signs that said occupied because they were not. They weren't just like not working. They were sitting in her factories and her stores and refusing to either work or leaves so that nothing could be done, which is fucking rad. It's very cool. Chanel calls this a betrayal. She felt that she paid them fairly.

She's particularly angry because she offered them unpaid vacation days and they weren't grateful. Can you believe that court now? They weren't happy with their unpaid vacation day day? Was she paying them fairly for the time. I don't think it's bad pay for the time. Obviously they're not happy with it, so I'm gonna trust them that it could

be better. Yeah, that's clearly a their attitude. So she became convinced, I don't think like from what I've read, I don't think it was particularly bad, but clearly it could have been better, and it's about to get better because they go on strike. She becomes convinced that a civil war is imminent. Such insolence from the working class, that's the only thing it could mean, right bolshevisms around the corner. They're going to be hunting us down in

the streets. This is the only logical conclusion to what if we had paid vacation days. You you live in a hotel and will never be able to spend all the money you have. Maybe we could have paid vacation days. She's like, no revolution or nothing, this is war again.

Very little ever changes. So gold prices during this period skyrocket in France because Coco and all of our friends buy all of the gold that they can get their hands on because they're worried the cash is going to collapse, which is actually that's not unfair considering this is around like right after the Great Depression, right, like not unreasonable to be worried about that. Coco raged and roared as she sought to bring her laborers to heal, without success.

They would not move on their demands, though ironically, her designs became even more iconic during this period because one of the big symbols of the strike is all of these Chanelle workers and their Chanelle suits strutting around in front of Chanelle's shops, refusing to work without a fucking raise. Pretty cool, So like they're advertising for her kind of well, I mean, it's the nicest clothing they have, right, yeah, yeah,

you know, I don't know, it's what they do. Eventually, Coco is forced to concede after the leader of the Popular Front and the French labor movement sign a pact granting French workers a forty hour work week, paid vacations, collective bargaining rights, and compulsory schooling up to the age of fourteen. Coco fought to the last moment possible, but enraged eventually conceded. So fuck yeah, way to go workers again. Like every story that has a good thing in it,

in this part of the twentieth century. It's like, yeah, that all ends well. And then on June fourteenth, nineteen forty, Germany invades Friends and things take a turn, shall we say. Within weeks, the Germans break the back of the French army. Paris has declared an open city to spare it from getting the fuck blown out of it, and as soon as the fighting starts, Coco is like, well, I'm not going to stay in fucking Paris. So she bounces to

her nephew Andre. He's like an adult now, he's in the French army, he's got a family, he has a nice home in the countryside. He's done reasonably well for himself. I'm sure she helped. And she winds up just kind of crashing with his family in the countryside in their nice manner. For a while. Andre is on the imagine O line. I probably don't need to explain to you that he gets captured. That's not a I mean, it doesn't work all that badly for him. Sorry, I'm so,

what's that line you just said? Oh, the imagine O line. So I shouldn't make assumptions like that. The imagine O line is so, you know, World War One goes pretty badly for everybody involved, a lot of a lot of murdering. So in order to like not have that happen again, the French build this big wall of fortifications across most of their border with Germany and the hope that, like, well, the next time they attack, will just kill them all

with these gigantic like bunkers and forts. But they don't, you know, the imagine O line actually does its job reasonably well. The French. The Germans just move around it and then enter from that area anyway, it's a whole thing. But he's stationed in the imagine a line, the Germans get around them, he gets captured, he becomes a prisoner of war. Right, So, Coco and her family living in the countryside are mostly insulated from the opening stages of

World War Two, but they are worried for Andre. You know, it becomes clear something has gonna ry when he stops sending letters. The mystery only lingered after the fighting ended and Germans occupied the French heartland. Coco found this as intolerable as she was separated from her businesses. That's the main reason she is frustrated about the German conquest of Paris.

And so shortly after Adolf Hitler's triumphant visit to Paris, she returns home telling her family the Germans aren't all gangsters. Oh Coco, Oh Cocoa. One fun anecdote is that on the drive back gases and shuts such short supply and it's about to be rationed into extinction for regular people. Her chau fur has to fill the trunk with tin cans of gasoline in order to get her to Paris.

Un't know, interesting context. Another thing I learned during this that I hadn't known is because the Germans when they take over, you know, most of France, because they rash and gas and people can't get it. A lot of French people convert their cars to beat to run off of like like like literally to run off of like charcoal and wood. So you just like stoke a burner and it makes your cargo. I didn't realize you could

do that. That's kind of a cool idea. That is interesting. Hey, did she feel safe because the Nazis are in charge of Paris? Right, so it's like she had friends? Yeah, she's Coco, you know, I think she she has this kind of confidence that it'll be fine and there's a reason for this confidence, because this is the point at which Channell's life comes to intersect with a Prussian military officer named Hans Gunther von Dinklage. Now Dinklage had been born the son of a Prussian major and the daughter

of a German merchant family. He'd been educated in England, though, which from this kind of worldly charm that German spies generally aren't good. In World War Two, the British basically catch all of them. Dinklage is about to become a spy. He's a very good spy because he has this kind

of worldly background. So after World War One, where he serves in the cavalry, he joins the ab VI or ab there, which is like German military intelligence, and he gets sent to France in nineteen twenty eight, so he's there before the Nazis rise to power, and he's working as a secret agent for the German government disguised as a diplomat for the entire period from twenty eight up

to the start of World War Two. And his job is basically to earn trust and sympathy with French high society people, with politicians, with the wealthy and He develops a perfect cover to do this because his wife is Jewish. So he's like, yeah, you know, we're here in France because of all the anti Semitism in Germany. We had to flee those Nazis, you know, we had to. Like, he's perfect double agent while he's fucking spying for the Nazis.

And to make it more fucked up, he actually divorced his wife in nineteen thirty five before the Nuremberg Laws, which made it illegal for them to be married, but they continue to live together in France in order to provide for his cover. Oh, it's fucked up. It's totally fucked up. I guess she would stay because she needed to be safe. I don't think she had a lot of options. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not an expert on the her specific story or why she did it.

It's messy, that's for sure. Yeah, when the Germans won, Dinklage returned to like because he leaves right before the invasion, he comes back after it succeeds because he knows France and the Germans need people in country who can help them run it. He and Chanel had known each other again before the war. He's kind of playing as this

like exile in high society. He's a noble, so they're friendly, you know, they know each other, and then when the Nazis take over Paris, she runs into him and is like, oh shit, I know this guy, and he's kind of a good guy to know right now, so they start hooking up right the fuck away. It doesn't hurt that Dinklage is a dashing man in his own right, but he also provides her a pathway to respect and luxury in the tenuous reality of the war years. Gotta get

that good Nazi dick. Yeah yeah. Von Dinklage, whose nickname is Spitz, is able to get Coco permission from the Reich to live in the Ritz Hotel in Paris, which during the occupation is only for Nazis and their approved guests, so she gets to keep living in her fancy hotel because she's kind of boinking this guy. She also gets high quality French cuisine, which is mostly restricted. Like actual

French people are living on a starvation diet. The average French working person diet is like twelve hundred calories a day. During the war in the areas that the Germans are running at least, but you can get all of the good food in the Ritz, right because it's being served to Nazis and to Coco, who at this point is

basically a Nazi. For an idea of like how bad shit is for regular French people, hospitals are bartering their wine rations for their patients because some of their patients are too sick to drink wine in order to get potatoes, which is the only food dense enough in calories to keep their patients from starving to death. Like, that's again how bad it is for regular people? While Coco is living in the Ritz, So yeah, that's good, awesome. You know who else lives in the Ritz, Courtney, Probably some

more Nazis. I'm guessing more Nazis. Yeah, probably still Nazis, but also our sponsors. No, oh god, we'll fix this in post. Ah, we're back. I don't think we fixed it in post. Oh well, what are you gonna do? You know that it was really good? How can you blame them? I'm sure it fucking was. So we're back a good times. Um. So, while this is going on, Coco and her new Nazi friends they're holding feasts. They're having these like fancy parties in some of which you're

pretty cheeky. One of the parties she has at the Ritz is one where like all it's like these these French collaborators and all these Nazi officials, and the Nazi officials aren't allowed to speak German, so they have to attempt to speak French. That's like the fun theme of this party, while everyone else in Paris is starving. German officers consciously wielded starvation as a weapon, which made it

easier to compel behavior by awarding collaborators with rations. As one German officer in the Ritz stated, in times like these, to eat well and eat a lot gives a feeling of power. Yeah, yep, good guys. The Nazis sympathizers will often justify Chanelle's choice to collaborate by saying that she was simply looking out for her nephew. This is true, but it's also true that she saw to her own comfort first, although it was to protect Andre that she

finally became an agent for the Nazis intelligence service. So she wants to get this guy, her nephew maybe son, out of jail, and that's why she agrees to start working with the Nazis and I'm gonna I'm gonna read a quote by Tim Ott Here Dinklage introduced his lover to another prominent obver agent, Baron Louis de Vaufreland, who allegedly promised to help Chanelle free her nephew in exchange

for her service to Berlin. Sometime in nineteen forty one, Chanelle was registered as agent F seven one two four with a code name of Westminster, after her former flame You know She's Her Nazi nickname is her fascist boyfriend That's cool. Tasked with obtaining political information from colleagues in Madrid, Chanelle traveled to the Spanish city for a few months midnine forty one with Vafferland under the guise of business dealings.

There is a record of her dinner with British diplomat Brian Wallace, which she casually discussed life and occupied Paris and the animosity the French and Germans held toward each other. It is unclear whether Channelle's interactions in Madrid moved the needle in any way, but there were apparently enough to impress ab their supervisors and earn the release of her nephew. So she goes on the spying mission in Madrid. Maybe it's to prep for a potential the Nazis are kind

of considering occupying the city. There's there's a number of theories about what she's doing. This is the first little thing she does, and as spying for the Nazis go, it's not that sketchy, but it's about to get sketchier because once she's done the solid for them, they have a relationship. She's like, Hey, you know, there's this I kind of like spying. She's also like, so there's this Jewish family I got beef with. Oh the people who

are making her perfume, the Wertheimer's. And she uses her position as an arian, which is a legal position in Nazi law, to petition German officials to lead goalies her claim as sole owner of the perfume. On May fifth, nineteen forty one, she writes to the Nazi official in

her area who's responsible for confiscating Jewish assets. She lists her grounds for ownership of the perfume as based on the claim that perfumes Chanel is quote still the property of the Jews and has thus been legally abandoned by its owners when they fled the country. She wrote, I

have an indisputable right of priority. The profits that I have received from my creation since the foundation of this business are disproportionate, and you could help to repair in part the prejudices I have suffered in the course of these seventeen years. But Coco has been out foxed because the Vertheimer's set shit up before they fled the country. They transferred ownership of the perfume firm to an Arian friend before they fled the continent, and during the war

years they sent one of their allies. This is kind of a cool story. They send this guy who becomes the president of their company into Paris where he like sneaks in and pretends to be somebody else, and he steals the formula for Chanel number five so it can be produced in the United States. It's like this skullduggery action, but it's all about making perfew amazing. I love that they looked out for themselves. Oh yeah, they're smart. They knew what they were doing. They took care of their shit.

So there are rumors that during the war years, while she is working for the Nazis, she is also working for the British royal family, possibly via Winston Churchill because her ex flame Ben Door and the former King all own property in Nazi occupied Europe, and the Nazis are fighting the British right. So the Nazis could take all that shit, they could destroy it, they could do give it to other people, and Chanel allegedly helps them protect

their properties on the continent during the war. Right, we don't know if this happened. We do know though, that she stays in one of these properties after a visit to Berlin to meet with SS General authors Schellenberg about another operation. So by nineteen forty three, most of the smart Nazis around Hitler, including Himmler and Schellenberg, knew that

the war was lost. The sheer scale of the tide that had turned against them in Russia made any hope of German victory nothing but a fantasy, and these Nazis went behind Hitler's back to try and make a separate peace through some of their sympathetic friends in the British government, including the former King and the Duke of Westminster. And this brings us back to our friend Vera Bate Lombardi. Remember Vera, She's that Italian British socialite who introduces Coco

to the Duke of Westminster. You know, she had remarried an Italian fascist military officer near the end of the twenties, so she's not anti fascist, right, But Mussolini's government also didn't trust her because she was English. So even though she's married to this fascist, she's watched carefully by Italian

intelligence services. During the outbreak of World War Two in nineteen forty three, horrendous reversals forced Mussolini briefly from power, and there's kind of this fascist crackdown to retake power in parts of the country, and the authorities arrest Vera during this crackdown. She spends about a week in an Italian fascist prison camp before the Germans intervene and get

her out. And they get her out, so that Coco, because Coco's like, hey, if you get me and Vera together, we can go, you know, meet with our contacts in the British government and negotiate a separate piece, right, That's what Coco tries to set up. That's why the Germans get Vera out of prison. But Vera is kind of pissed off that she's been arrested by the fascists and put in a prison camp. She does not like this, so she's actually not gonna be a very good partner

to Coco in this Nazi scheme of cocos. Yeah, and I'm gonna yeah, it's pretty funny. I'm gonna rote quote next from a write up by PBS. Nazi leaders contacted Dinklage and told him it was time to leave Paris and Chanel behind. Unwilling to be left alone in Parish Channelle decided to devise a new plan with Dnklage, attempting

to leverage Vera Bate's connection with Winston Churchill. Citing French historian Hendry Goodell, Vaughn writes, Mademoiselle Chanelle thought she could barter her friendship with Winston Churchill to persuade the Nazis that she and Dnklage had the contacts to broke her a separate piece with Britain. Goodell believed the Duke of Westminster, well known for being pro German, along with many other senior British politicians and royals, feared that the Soviet Union

would grab all of Europe. The Duke encouraged Channell to act as an emissary between Berlin and London. However, the plan went horribly awry when Chanelle's friend Vera Bate, upon arriving in Madrid, confessed to the authorities her part as a German agent in the final hour, naming Chanelle as an informer. And so they get to Madrid and Vera's like, this bitious a Nazi. We're working for the Nazis. I don't want any part of the ship. Fuck these fascists, right,

I respect. That blows it all up. I mean she did kind of come late to not liking the Fascists, to be fair, but where you know, however you get there, right. I was just watching this thing and it's crazy how many people are traders and double agents are ours. It happens all the time, constantly. So the fact that she has been exposed as a Nazi agent causes difficulty for Coco Chanelle. After Paris is liberated in nineteen forty four, she is quickly arrested by the Free French Purge Committee

and accused of being what's called a horizontal collaborator. Now this is a serious allegation, and we know it's a true one. People were imprisoned and in some cases beaten or killed for less than what Coco did. Yet, after several hours of questioning, Coco is released, and nobody really knows why. There is suspicion that Winston Churchill negotiated her release, possibly is payment or to hush up the underground work she'd done with the Nazis protecting the assets of wealthy

British people on the European continent may have happened. If it did, it means that Churchill himself was guilty of violations of his own Trading with the Enemy Act. But you know, we'll never verify this one way or the other. But pretty cool. Interesting, Yeah, yeah, some Churchill tea there, which I guess is just normal tea because he's English, but probably tea with gin, probably just gin with a

tea bag in it actually. So at any rate, Chanelle gets out of this first thing with this French committee and she bounces. She goes to fucking Switzerland. She's like, and I staying around to see if this winds up being cool in the long term. Tim OTTs summarizes what comes next. After the war's conclusion, Chanelle appeared in a French court to account for sworn testimony from arrested German officers.

That tied her to the ab There she managed to wriggle her way out of trouble, confirming that Raferland had promised to get her nephew out of prison, but otherwise denying the extent of their interactions. According to Sleeping with the Enemy, Chanelle also took care to erase evidence of her actions where possible. Upon learning that an ailing Schellenberg was planning to publish his memoir, ll paid his medical bills and and ensured his family was on sound financial footing.

The subsequent memoir had no mention of her involvement as an agent. So when this old Nazi general is dying, she makes sets his family up. She gives them a fortune so that he doesn't write about her in his autobiography as a fucking Nazi spy shrimp shripe, very rude. So the fight over control of the Channel Perfume brand continues. You might think that Coco's involvement with the Nazis would have benefited the Wertheimer's case. This is not really the case.

So so the Perfume is in their control legally, and they also have the recipe. But this is kind of their weakness in this court case. With her because probably if they were to fight this, they could like point out, you were working for the Nazis, we should get all of the money from their perfume. But this is Chanel

number five. If Coco gets sort of dragged through the mud as a Nazi, people aren't gonna want to wear Nazi number five perfume, right, So the word him is there kind of an a vulnerable position here too, So they reach in Rather than like taking her to the fucking matt, they reach an arrangement with her, and a

pretty weird one. Not only do they give her millions in back pay from the war years when she hadn't been making channel money, but Pierre Wertheimer agrees to pay all of her personal living expenses for the rest of her life. Weird us, Yeah, I mean weird. It's weird, but it's a complicated situation. She always winds up on top. You got to say that for fucking Coco, even after

she's been caught. Is that, even even when she is fighting in court with the Jewish family she tried to like rob during the Holocaust, she wipes up on top. They're doing the same deal with her though kind of They're like we'll pay for all your shit if you just give us what we want. We'll pay for your shit if you'd stop fighting us in court, and if we don't have to actually fight you in court and thus distre roy your good name, right right, because no

one else knows. The French society does not know. It is not public knowledge that she was working for the Nazis, right. The Vertheimer's know because they've got the people to do the digging. There's some folks in government and in the spy agencies that are aware, but publicly it is not known. And so the Vertheimer's just kind of decide, let's keep working with Coco because there's a lot of money in Coco.

And in fact, the Verteimer family plays a major role in helping her return to the fashion industry in nineteen fifty four. They basically like put a bunch of money into her rebranding and like putting out new lines of stuff. She continues to be a massive success in an influential part of the industry until her death in nineteen seventy one. No public acknowledgement of her work for the Abvare was made until two eleven, when Sleeping with the Enemy was published.

The pr campaign around that book and the well deserved buzz that generated created problems for the Chanelle brand. As Forbes summarizes, the brand described in the book a speculation and said it will, no doubt always remain a mystery. Today, the brand seems more open to acknowledging the standpoint while distancing the current brand from it. A spokesperson told me, Gabrielle Chanelle was a daring pioneer, and the House of

Chanelle upholds and extends her extraordinary legacy. Her influence on many designers has been significant, and she continues to inspire new generations. However, her actions during World War Two are the subject of discussion in many publications and biographies. The actions that some have reported in no way represent the values of Chanelle today. Since that time in history, the House of Chanelle has moved forward, well passed well beyond the past of its founder, not quite saying yeah, man,

she was a Nazi. That's fucked up, Like, can we still keep the stock high? Though? Please? We grew from her being a Nazi. We moved on from the founder being a Nazi. Now, the Chanel Corporation's attitude is not a universal belief, particularly among people inclined to analyze the fashion industry through a more skeptical eye. Tansy Hoskins, author of Stitched Up, the Anti Capitalist Book of Fashion, disagrees that we can separate Coco from her clothing. Quote. It's

clear that Chanelle's far right ideologies influenced her designs. She championed minimalism and the austere. It's very white European and that's the note we're gonna end on. Okay, well, listen, I don't know if her style. That last thing on her style. I don't know much about style at all. This is just what someone said. Yeah, yeah, yikes, Well that's a life. That's a life. Yeah, you're gonna go pick up some channelle number five Courtney. Yeah, I can't

wait to smell like that bitch. Yeah right, that's actually not a bad ad, just like a lady walking and like a perfume bottle. Can't wait to smell like that bitch. She's got a fucking red arm band with a swastika on it. Hell yeah, that's how you do still smell good after all that hell of her perfume. M hm, Well, coordinate how you feeling you know, I feel just so much internal conflicted feelings about this feminist icon who was a horrible person. But yeah, you know, that's what this

show does. Was there was there anything uh to do with her, like the logo of Chanel? Yeah, Nazism. No, no, it's not a Nazi thing, it's her, it's Coco Chanel CC Well, I got a lot, yes, but I was just wondering if there was anything anything more to it than just that I don't know this shit in it. In both of the books about her her logo, I didn't find it interesting, so I didn't. I didn't include it, Sophie, because I'm a hack in a fraud. Now I don't.

You're If you didn't find it interesting, then I no longer care. I was all about the Nazism stuff, all about all about that. Well, probably shouldn't say that. Don't be all about Nazism, she don't. Don't. Don't be about Courtney co Sacks plugables right now? Yeah, Courtney, what do you got a plug? Oh? You guys, if you like podcasts, I make a ton of podcasts. I make a new podcast for podcasters called podcast Bestie, and for writers, I make a podcast called The bleeders and for horn dogs.

I make a podcast called Private Parts Unknown, and I am winding down my only fans, so you can go get some last pick sneak a peek at me naked at Coco peep Show. M hm, check it out. Check out Coco peep Show. Not to be confused with Yeah. I mean Courtney very famously during World War Two, you fought for the French underground. Um. I like that, Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, um, yep, that's that's so support this Coco. Don't support the other Coco who was dead. Um, so I guess it doesn't matter.

I guess at this point there's nothing you can do to harm her either way. So I mean that is kind of the thing, right, She won, like she she won. She played a hell of a hand, Yeah she did. She got she got a dog shit hand and like a terrible person, but god, you have to like admire the skill with which she played a zero hand, not a single fucking asset, but whatever was inside her head and made it work. Yep, yeah, yep. All right, Well, this has been a series of episodes about a fascist

who was kind of impressive while being a fascist. Yay, behind the bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit her website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.