Book review - Chanel: An Intimate Life

ALTHOUGH fashion libraries are already bursting with Coco Chanel biographies and style tomes, autumn has delivered another five books on the couturière. In one, Sleeping with the Enemy, Hal Vaughan accused Chanel of being a Nazi agent.

These allegations have made the timing of Chaney’s book unlucky. For though Chanel’s relationship with German spy Hans Gunther von Dincklage during the Second World War is explored, Chaney lets the designer off lightly. She argues that Chanel was ignorant of her lover’s role, while attributing her horizontal collaboration to self-preservation: Like many another who had started out poor, she feared returning to that state. But the relationship continued after her country’s liberation, while Chanel by 1940 was so successful she would not have needed the help of a lover, even in occupied France.

Though too quick to forgive her subject her flaws, Chaney’s research is laudable, uncovering fresh details of Chanel’s well-trodden rag trade to riches story. After the death of her mother, Chanel’s feckless father abandoned his children and she was cared for by nuns. At 12, Chanel had the epiphany which guided her life: without money you are nothing, money is the key to freedom.

Having fled the convent for Vichy, Chanel began the first of her financially rewarding relationships, living as mistress to the wealthy ex-cavalry officer Etienne Balsan. However mercenary her motives, she did fall in love: with Balsan’s friend, Arthur “Boy” Capel. Boy may have finally broken her heart, but he gave her her career, providing financial backing to her early millinery efforts which eventually morphed into her fashion empire.

After Boy, Chanel admitted: “My love life got very disorganised, because the person I loved had died.” This disorganisation meant a long list of lovers, including the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, the Duke of Westminster and other women.

Impressive as Chaney’s research is, the problem with this book is that she asks us to buy too much into the cult of Coco.

• Chanel: An Intimate Life, by Lisa Chaney. Fig Tree, 512pp, £25