Clothes hound that I am —ARF-ARF.— Women’s History Month takes my mind toCoco Chanel, the woman who made fashion history back in the 1920s. Chanel taught women how to live in their clothing rather than be constricted by it, a concept unknown at the time. Out with corsets and crinolines! On with pants! Little black dress, here we come.
Though my fashion background is more knockoff Sixth Avenue Garment Center (once a Jewish enclave for the needle trades, and home to my dress designer/patternmaker father for 70 years), than haute couture/Champs-Élysées, I’ve long been drawn to Chanel. Not that I can configure or cut out a pattern, but Idoknow scale, texture, and color. I’ve always been drawn to design, which led me to a long career as an interior designer and, years later, a teacher of decorative arts.
大约15年前返回，同时研究了我的课程艺术装饰风格of the ’20s and ’30s, I kept bumping into Chanel. The more I learned about her, the more she continued to impress me: Her parents were unmarried street peddlers but she ended up as one of the most powerful women of the 20th century. Hooked by my dolman sleeve, I began to study her. And what a study she was. She draped us in球衣— pre-Chanel, jersey was only used for underwear — slung rows of pearls around our necks, and made it chic to wear junk with the real thing.
I decided she was worthy of her own lecture. Coco Chanel: The Woman, The Legend, I would call it, and I voraciously dug into her life.
Daring and audacious, she bedded毕加索- 除了其他 - 和猎杀野猪与温斯顿丘吉尔，谁在他的妻子的一封信中说：“她非常愉快 - 真的很棒，坚强，适合统治一个男人和帝国。”一位精明的女商人，她在她的购物袋上撒布了她的名字，几十年前是设计师做的事情。
我想到了一个女人，并占据了我的室内设计企业思考我如何促进它。我在图书馆和犹太教堂谈论（或秋天的春天）谈论;我在分类部分宣传犹太周（在它之前online only）;我为当地纸写了一个设计栏。Chanel帮助了我建立我的品牌， 像他们说的那样。但正如我继续研究的那样，我对她的印象开始改变。
年代he was sexually bold and had both women and men as lovers, and yet she openly scorned gays. She had a vicious temper and never forgot or forgave a slight. A known反塞米特— perhaps something she learned in her convent school and never unlearned? — she warmed her bed with like-minded bigots. Her lover for many years was Baron Hans Gunther von Dinklage, “Spatz,” his pals called him, a Nazi intelligence agent posing as a sun-worshiping tennis man while building an espionage operation to spy on the French navy. It got worse: She was not only a “horizontal collaborator” — someone who slept with German soldiers — Chanel herself was anactual agent，aka＃f-7124，代码名称，威斯敏斯特。
当我发现这个时，我感到震惊。作为一个犹太女人，我很厌恶。我仰望香奈儿。我钦佩并从她那里学到了。但现在，哦，我的上帝，她是纳粹！最糟糕的？！我该怎么办？甚至可能爱工作并恨工人吗？我不确定。
起初，一旦我意识到她是卑鄙的一个人物 - 她在她的角色看来没有错 - 我想知道我是否应该取消我的谈话。如果我与演示文稿向前搬家，我会和魔鬼一起做生意吗？如果我这样做，我会“现在”关于她的纳粹附属机构我并不是为了诽谤我所知道的，因为它打破了我的演示文稿的容易节奏 - 而不是我的高领毛衣和后卫的袖口，她的两种时尚创新为来自男士服用的女性。
Fortunately, I began to see my discovery as an opportunity, a responsibility as Jew and educator to let the world know (or, at least the 25 to 75 people who typically came to my talks) about how she lived in her apartment at the Ritz Hotel and palled around withHermann Goering, Hitler’s second-in-command, who ran the German operation from his suite there. How she tooled around town in her snazzy Rolls Royce while, blocks away, Parisians were eating out of garbage cans. How, yes, I had once desperately coveted those quilted bags and nubby tweeds, but now I saw them as tainted.
年代ure enough, at synagogue one morning, after they announced I’d be giving my presentation the next day, a woman jumped up from her seat. She demanded to know how anyone could give a talk about an antisemite in a synagogue.
How could I not? I thought. I said from my seat, “I wondered about that, too. Come tomorrow and you’ll find out!” She didn’t show, but she piqued the interest of many who wanted to learn about this fashion icon/antisemite.
And there was Chanel in my talk, laid out in all her glorious and inglorious light. And she’s been there since, in all the talks I give to libraries, synagogues, and continuing ed classes. Guaranteed, she’ll be there in my next one, outed for all she was worth.
多年来，传记商一直在争夺Coco Chanel的遗产：她是纳粹;她不是;每个人都在战争期间做了事物。当Hal Vaughn的与敌人睡觉：Coco Chanel的秘密战争came out 2011, documenting herNazi past, the brand discredited it. But as recently as October 2020, the House of Chanel grudgingly opened its shutters. In aForbes该品牌表示，杂志文章涵盖了她在Palais Galleria的工作的回顾，“一些据报道的行为，无论是今天的表现。自那个历史上，香奈儿的房子已经远远超出了其创始人的过去。“
今天，香奈儿由此拥有Wertheimer兄弟们— who are, ahem, Jews. In 1924, their Grandfather Pierre funded Chanel No. 5, the perfume, and garnered a major share in the business. As sales skyrocketed, Chanel used the Nazi dictum that Jews couldn’t own business and tried to take back the company. But Pierre and hisYiddishe kupsaw it coming and sold his shares to a gentile friend — who then sold the shares背部to himafter the war.
关于为什么Papa Wertheimer与已知的Antiemite做生意的问题留给我们思考。然而，它是否会削减一些懈怠，并给我们一些余地喜欢女士的商品？这是值得努力的，但还有这个：kvell关于如何，目前，香奈儿的净资产之家是一些$15 billion,并由Wertherimers完全拥有。作为“法国第一人类时尚”Didier Grumbach，告诉了时代2002年，“设计师会来，但香奈儿将永远是香奈儿。而Wertheimers将永远在它后面。“拿那, Coco!
Header image by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
