Chanel Biography : The Occupation, The Nazis, and The 50
The Second World War had a profound impact on the industries of the European and American fashion. With the German invasion of Paris in June 1940, the world’s fashion capital was then isolated.
Chanel boutique had closed its last year, just start a war, but remained in Paris during the Nazi occupation until 1945, when he moved to Switzerland to escape a possible crackdown in those years have rubbed the Germans.
According to a book recently published by journalist Hal Vaughan (Sleeping with the enemy), Chanel have been collaborating with Nazi intelligence during the occupation.
Hans Günther von Dincklage , Nazi spies and military intelligence officer, was his lover during that time and their relationship with him was essential to remain in his rented studio in the Hotel Ritz, then Nazi living center. In addition, he is credited another lover of the SS. But undoubtedly the most controversial story of his biography is an attempt to remove the license of your perfume with its partners, the Jewish family Wertheimer, backed by the law of Aryanization forbidding any Jew to perform trade operations and transferred its business to other Aryan people.
In 1954, more than seventy years Chanel returned to Paris and the fashion business, reintroducing back your faithfully aesthetic criteria, adapted to the sensitivity of the moment. Paradoxically, his return was only possible thanks to funding of Pierre Wertheimer, a member of the Jewish family that years ago tried to dispossess.
In this decade in their collections met most of the Chanel brand elements that are still shaping his aesthetic code and his imagination: the suit, the shoe bicolor, gold chains, buttons with their initials, tweeds, camellia, jewelry fantasy, the bag padding, the queue or the boater.
Coco Chanel was a dandy of his time. Aware of the grammar of the fashion system, the archetype of genius and personality of the artist applied to the seam, he learned to look at reality with the sensibility of modernity and change the world of fashion forever, confirming the model of the brand stylist Paul Poiret, or which had pioneered Worth.
Baudelaire said that beauty always contains an element eternal and unchanging and other ephemeral and circumstantial. Something that Chanel has implemented since its inception and continues now under the artistic direction of Karl Lagerfeld.
His strong personality, symbolized an era when women began to walk the path of emancipation. But its history also leaves a sour taste and shows us, sometimes, the dark side of greed and individualism.
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Tags: Chanel, Coco Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld, Nazi, Nazism, Paris, Pierre Wertheimer, World War II