Women's History Month

 Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel was born in 1883 in the charity hospital run by the Sisters of Providence — a poorhouse — in Saumur, France. Wikipedia Her father was a traveling street vendor who married her mother a year after Gabrielle was born. When her mother died in 1895, eleven-year-old Gabrielle was sent to a convent-run orphanage in Aubazine in central France. It was there that she learned to sew. Encyclopedia Britannica

The orphanage was austere and spare. The walls were whitewashed. The doors to the dormitories were painted black. The orphans wore white blouses and black skirts. The nuns wore white wimples and black skirts. Time Gabrielle absorbed it all. She spent nearly seven years there. For the rest of her life, she never used the word "orphanage." She told people instead that her father had gone to America to seek his fortune and would come back for her when he was rich. Time He never came back. She never stopped inventing a better version of the story.

At 18 she left for Moulins, became a seamstress, and began performing in cafés. She earned the nickname "Coco." Through a series of relationships with wealthy, well-connected men, she opened her first hat shop in Paris, then a fashion house, then changed the silhouette of women's clothing for a century. Her elegantly casual designs inspired women to abandon the complicated, uncomfortable clothes of the era — petticoats, corsets, elaborate structure — and replace them with something clean, practical, and free. Encyclopedia Britannica The Chanel suit. The little black dress. Chanel No. 5. Each one permanent.

Then came the war.

When the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, Chanel did not flee. She stayed in France and collaborated with the occupiers. Wikipedia She moved into the Paris Ritz, which had become headquarters for the Nazi elite. She began a relationship with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage — a German propagandist, special attaché to the German embassy, and Abwehr spy. PBS Through him, she was registered as Agent F-7124, code name "Westminster," after her former lover the Duke of Westminster. Biography

Her motivations were partly personal, partly financial. Her nephew André had been captured and held in a German prisoner-of-war camp. She used her Nazi contacts to secure his release. Biography At the same time, she saw the opportunity presented by Nazi "Aryanization" laws — which forced Jews to surrender their businesses — to reclaim control of Parfums Chanel from the Wertheimer family, who had backed the perfume line since 1924. Biography

In 1943, she and her SS superior devised a plan for her to carry a peace overture to Winston Churchill — a man she knew personally — proposing that Britain negotiate a separate peace with the SS. Wikipedia The mission collapsed when a friend she'd recruited as an unwitting courier arrived in Madrid and immediately denounced Chanel to the British Embassy as a Nazi agent.

After the liberation in 1944, Chanel was interrogated by the Free French Purge Committee, but was not charged as a collaborator — reportedly due to the intervention of Winston Churchill. She fled to Switzerland. Wikipedia She returned to Paris in 1954 and rebuilt the House of Chanel. She was never publicly questioned about her relationship with Dincklage, nor was her collaboration with the Abwehr brought to light during her lifetime. PBS She died at the Ritz in 1971, at 87.

The interlocking CC monogram may have been inspired by motifs from Aubazine's stained glass windows. Officialauthentication The stark black and white of her aesthetic came from the orphanage walls. The chain strap of the iconic Chanel bag echoed the keys worn by the nuns who raised her. She built an empire out of the place she was most desperate to escape — and then spent a lifetime pretending it never existed.

She was brilliant. She was ruthless. She changed fashion permanently. And she was, by her own country's accounting, a collaborator.