Some biographers and historians have vilified her for all this, including the late Hal Vaughan in a lurid 2011 book called Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War. Rhonda Garelick, one of the most careful and astute of Chanel biographers, concludes in Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History (2014), that she probably believed in the Nazi cause, and was also motivated by expedience, self-interest and antisemitism. “Patriotism had always meant less to her than power,” Garelick writes, and says, “Never did she acknowledge the implications of having tried to invoke the heinous Nazi Aryanisation laws against her own business partners.”
However Justine Picardie, whose Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life was published in a new edition last year, and who has also written a biography of Catherine Dior called Miss Dior (2021), tells BBC Culture, “It’s too easy to say…
