Friday 21 Lifestyle | Features Friday, January 8, 2021
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Friday 21 Lifestyle | Features Friday, January 8, 2021 hen Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel died in Chanel began working for Dincklage’s col- Dincklage forced to hot-foot it out of Madrid her suite at the Ritz in Paris 50 years leagues in Germany’s Abwehr military intelli- when English socialite Vera Lombardi, who Wago this week, the world mourned the gence in return for her young nephew Andre was carrying Chanel’s letter to Churchill to the greatest fashion designer of the century. What Palasse being released from a German stalag British embassy, denounced them as German A file photo shows a handbag by French design- no one mentioned was that Chanel had spent after being captured defending France’s spies. er Gabrielle Chanel displayed during the exhibi- World War II in the luxury hotel with her Maginot Line. She became Abwehr Agent F- Chanel had arranged for Lombardi-a mutu- tion “Gabrielle Chanel, fashion manifesto” at the German officer lover working as a spy for both 7124 in 1941, codenamed “Westminster” after al friend of hers and Churchill’s-to be released Galliera Palais fashion museum in Paris. German military intelligence and the SS. After her longtime lover the Duke of Westminster, from an Italian prison where she was being the war, Chanel-who had risen from grim Britain’s richest landowner. held as a British spy. Lombardi had been Thousands at funeral childhood in an orphanage to befriend, and close to Chanel since the 1920s, introducing On Wednesday, January 13, a crowd of sometimes hang out with, some of the richest Dealing with the devil her to her friend, the future king Edward VIII, several thousand people gathered in front and most powerful men in the world-did her More darkly, Chanel began pulling strings an admirer of Hitler, and the cream of London of the Madeleine church in Paris for the utmost to cover her tracks. So successful was to claw back the rights to her perfumes from society. funeral. Most of haute couture’s big names her rewriting of history that AFP, like the rest of the Jewish Wertheimer brothers, who had fled were there, but not Pierre Cardin, whom the world’s media, was taken in. to the US when the Germans invaded. She Coco Chanel had criticised many times, “At the beginning of the war, Chanel closed hoped to use the Nazi’s “aryanisation” laws to AFP wrote. Fashion journalists, customers, her couture house and withdrew to the shores take back control of the perfumes that she models and all the 250 staff of the Chanel of Lake Geneva, where she lived for 15 years signed away to the Wertheimers in 1924. But fashion house were out in force. All paid on the royalties of her perfumes,” it reported the brothers had foreseen the danger and hommage to Coco, an orphan from a hum- after her death, quoting her official biography. signed their business over to a non-Jewish ble background who had many unhappy The reality was quite different. Although businessman before fleeing France. love affairs, and who was one of the first Chanel did close her famous studio on the rue Chanel’s work as a spy involved wining and women to cut her hair short “because it Cambon once the French capital was occu- dining British diplomats in neutral Spain. But annoys me”. She was also the creator of pied by the Nazis, her perfume boutique as the tide of the war turned against Germany, what has been the dubbed the “perfume of stayed open so German soldiers could buy and her efforts to get her brand back were the century”-Chanel Nº 5. bottles of Chanel Nº. 5 for their sweethearts. frustrated, Chanel set her ambitions still high- er-on ending the war itself. German lover Soon Chanel, then 57 but just as glamorous ‘Operation Modelhut’ as ever, was on the arm of an aristocratic In April 1943 she made one of two visits to attache at the German embassy, Baron Hans Berlin to see General Walter Friedrich Guenther von Dincklage. Dincklage was 13 Schellenberg, the head of SS intelligence. He years her junior and a spy. The two took up wanted to send word to Chanel’s old friend, together in the Ritz where Chanel had lived British prime minister Winston Churchill, that since 1937, and which had been requisitioned senior SS officers wanted to negotiate a by the Germans to serve as their headquarters peace. But “Operation Modelhut” (meaning and to accommodate the luxury-loving head of fashion model’s hat, after Chanel’s famous the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering. boater) ended in farce with Chanel and Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster at Chester Races with Coco Chanel, 1924. Saved by Churchill When Paris was liberated in 1944, Chanel was arrested by the French Resistance but released a few hours later when Churchill intervened. She was soon safely out of the country in Switzerland when she set up home In this file photo taken on January 1, 1960 in a luxury hotel in Saint Moritz. She didn’t return until 1953, when she made a comeback French fashion designer Coco Chanel poses at 70 and reopened her fashion house, having onboard of a plane at Paris airport. — AFP done a deal with the forgiving Wertheimers. It wasn’t until the French writer and Resistance Her label would eventually be turned into heroine Edmonde Charles-Roux published her a $100 billion business by Karl Lagerfeld. book, “Chanel: Her life, her world, and the The coffin disappeared after the absolution woman behind the legend she herself creat- under a heap of white flowers, including an ed”, three years after the designer’s death, immense wreath of camelias-her favorite- that the truth began to trickle out. from producers of the Broadway operetta In 1995 the French weekly L’Express about her life, “Coco”. She was then taken uncovered more compromising testimony, to a cemetery in Lausanne, Switzerland, which its German counterpart Der Spiegel where she had spent the war, to be buried added to in 2008. But the veil was truly lifted in in private. Her tomb there with its ever- 2011 with the publication of “Sleeping With the changing floral arrangements has become Enemy” by the American Hal Vaughan.—AFP a place of pilgrimage for fashionistas ever Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill with his son Randolph and Coco Chanel in since. — AFP the forests near Dieppe. — Getty Images.