I was a rebellious child, a rebellious lover,
a rebellious fashion designer, a true Lucifer.
Did I have any idea of the revolution
that I was about to stir up in clothing?
One world was ending,
another was about to be born.
An opportunity beckoned - I took it.
She would have been looked down upon as a tradesperson
and she takes her revenge on the respectable women of her era
and she turns the trade into an art
and she turns the art into a multimillion dollar fortune,
and she turns the little orphan girl into the most glamorous woman
of her age, who's recognised by one name.
It represents luxury and money and affluence.
You know, she took the masculine idea but kept it very feminine.
I mean, you can be knotty and look wonderful in Chanel.
She modelled the clothes better than anyone else.
When she was dying, she was furious.
She wanted to live forever.
That her vision has been somehow projected onto you and me
and everyone else who is a woman today
is a level of will, desire and power.
There's one person I think we can compare Chanel to
and that's Steve Jobs.
People think in simplistic terms about figures like Chanel.
So she's either, you know, a feminist heroine or a Nazi spy.
It's a rags to riches story.
There's something fairy tale about it, but with a darkness.
And there is a darkness at the heart of all great fairy tales.
We are in the main storage of Patrimoine in north of Paris.
Patrimoine is a kind of magical collection
of one-century-old Chanel with more than 100,000 items.
So it's really a kind of magical museum
with already nearly 1,000 looks
dating from the moment of Gabrielle Chanel.
Her real name, of course, was Gabrielle Chanel,
and her nickname was Coco Chanel.
We have 150 books written about Chanel.
You have also personal development book,
so if you want to be empowered as a woman,
look at the empowerment of Gabrielle Chanel.
You have also child's book.
But still, every year, my team is approached by writers
who want to write something.
There is a kind of inexhaustible appetite for Chanel's life.
It's much better to be mysterious
if you want to leave an image of glory.
I mean, if people know everything that's down-to-earth about you,
you have no interest any more.
You're just like everybody else.
It's very clever.
She's one of the most painted and photographed icons
and yet to approach, as a biographer, a woman like Chanel,
is an enormous challenge
because she's always holding something back.
Jean Cocteau, who was a great friend of hers, draws her without a face.
And I think that some of that mystery clearly relates
to her own sense of shame about her past.
There's so much about her past that she kept hidden.
This evening, it's in St Moritz that I begin telling you
the story of my past life.
It's in a brightly-lit hotel, where the rich take their pleasure.
But, for me, in the Switzerland of today,
just as in the Auvergne of yesteryear,
I have only ever found loneliness.
It is loneliness that has forged my character.
My hair is still black, rather like a horse's mane.
My skin is dark like the lava from our mountains.
And my character is as black as the core of a land
that has never capitulated.
When I observe
how early happiness handicaps people,
I do not regret having been deeply unhappy to begin with.
INTERVIEWER: So what did she tell you about her childhood?
Nothing.
She never talked about her childhood.
Why was that, do you think?
Well, I think that she didn't want to reveal herself.
She didn't tell people about herself.
She's born in 1883, illegitimate,
in Catholic France.
She was born in a poor house.
Her mother was a washerwoman.
Her father was a rogue.
An itinerant peddler who was travelling around
the country market towns of France.
He sold little bits of ribbon and needles and threads and lace,
but he was unsuccessful.
You know, he drinks too much, he's incorrigible, womaniser,
and she just grew up in chaos and poverty and squalor.
Her mother died probably of a combination of pneumonia,
of exhaustion, of too many pregnancies.
The five children were alone with her
and would have been with her as she was dying.
BELL TOLLS
Chanel told stories to keep herself going
and they always varied.
She was obsessed with erasing the facts of her childhood
and early life, which make it very difficult for any biographer.
At the age of six, I'm already alone.
My mother has just died.
My father deposits me like a millstone at the house of my aunt
and leaves immediately for America,
from which he will never return.
She, at times, said she was six when her mother died.
In fact, she was 11.
And she says that her father went to America to seek his fortune,
which isn't true.
He just carried on on his reckless journeys
around the market towns of France, drinking a lot.
She says that she was brought up by two very severe black-clad aunts.
But what seems likely is that the aunts
become a different way of talking about the nuns at the convent.
The three girls were actually deposited in an orphanage.
This very, very remote place in the mountains of central France
that was run by Catholic nuns.
Hello.
All of this park here was the orphanage.
Where would Chanel have slept?
Under the eaves,
which had been turned into a dormitory.
She never really wanted to say that she was here.
And I can understand why.
She was not an orphan.
Her father said, "I'm going to make money
"and I will come back and get you."
But he never came back.
Chat Chanel. Chat Chanel.
Now we have Chat Chanel
and the abbey belongs to him.
At that time, the women, they exist because of men.
But the girls, when they leave here,
they all had a "metier".
Erm... A job.
Upstairs was where they learned how to sew,
and they were well known for their embroidery.
They were making money selling the marriage trousseau
to the rich people of Brive.
This is a girl who watched her mother suffer and die,
and I think she learned from the nuns that a woman needed
not to depend on a man and that the only person
she could really rely on was herself.
It's so clear where Chanel's aesthetic comes from.
The black and the white, which is so famous.
That's what the nuns wear.
A string of pearls is like a rosary.
You know, you hold it for comfort, perhaps.
So, yes, you could say, well, why does she hide all this?
But she doesn't. Everything is revealed in her designs.
And fashion has no power
without some inner truth.
And there is its inner truth - in Chanel's childhood.
I have been ungrateful to the wicked aunts.
I owe them everything.
A rebellious child makes for a well-prepared
and very strong human being.
The double C intertwined...
..represent the circle of our life on Earth
with the life eternal.
When she is looking for a distinctive sign
for her house of creations,
erm, I think this is going to come back to her.
Well, she was looking at a very grim life as a seamstress
in the provinces, probably marrying a farmer or a shopkeeper.
She was, of course, respectable as a convent girl.
But at 20, when she was sent to work in a garrison town
that was dominated by the army and hot young men,
and she became the darling of the officers
and was singing in cabarets.
She lost whatever claim to respectability she might have had,
and that was the beginning of her real life.
She never really explained where the name Coco came from.
She said that her father called her Coco. "Mon petit Coco."
But there was a moment when she was singing in cabaret
and the song she was singing
was Qui C'est Qu'a Vu Coco Dans l'Trocadero.
"Coco was a little dog", you know?
So maybe it's this Coco? We don't know.
In a nightclub, she meets her first known lover, Etienne Balsan,
who was this rich, dashing young cavalry officer,
and he offers her a way out of being a seamstress.
She then goes to live with him.
He has a chateau near Paris and he's got a string of racehorses
and he plays polo. He's also got a string of mistresses.
And she arrives in this world
and she's not the main mistress at this point.
There's another, more important mistress.
Emilienne d'Alencon, who was one of the great horizontals
of the Belle Epoque, and she was sort of a mentor to Chanel,
and Chanel would have learned all kinds of tricks of the trade.
I'm not talking about sex so much,
but how you make your living by your charm.
Keeping one of these women was a great status symbol
for men of the upper classes.
What were the women doing in return?
They were providing the kind of sex that they couldn't get
from their respectable wives.
And they were providing the kind of glamour
that they couldn't get from respectable women at all.
But also, she would have learned about the precarity
of these relationships.
These were working women. They were working for their lovers.
They gave the illusion of being in control,
and I think that was part of their erotic attraction,
but, in fact, they weren't.
They could be dropped at any point and often were.
It's possible that she got pregnant by him.
It's possible that she had a botched abortion
or miscarriage, which made it impossible for her to have children
later in life.
It's also possible that she had a baby boy.
What we do know is that both her sisters died
in very tragic circumstances.
One of a suicide, the other drank herself to death.
And she brought up Andre,
who she said was her sister's son, like a son.
She loved him like a son.
One of the many mysteries that we'll never know about.
I had followed Etienne and I was living in Compiegne.
I was very bored, constantly weeping.
The only happy times were those I spent on horseback in the forest.
I learned to ride.
I met an Englishman, more than handsome.
He was magnificent.
I fell in love with him.
I had never loved Etienne.
The name of the handsome Englishman was Boy Capel.
Boy Capel. From him, that's where the great Anglophile influence
in Chanel's life, tastes and clothing, comes from.
These men, in their jodhpurs, in their hunting jackets,
with their britches, with their boots,
the glamour of that world, of country life and of the sobriety,
which she understood was a facade for, erm, hedonism.
And mastery.
They walked through life with an assurance
in their beautiful, tailored clothes.
They walked through life with this swagger...
..that Chanel wanted in some deep way to claim for women
and to claim for herself.
She began to dress herself with jodhpurs,
with the little vest of the "garcon d'ecurie",
and she began the natural look,
which amazed everyone.
She rejected the look of courtesans and other kept women,
and instead adopted the look of her male protectors.
There is a photograph of Chanel at the races from 1907
and she's wearing a borrowed men's overcoat
and a very simple straw boater hat,
which just has a little ribbon around the brim,
and it really is quite a departure
from what the other people at the races were wearing.
When he met Chanel, Boy understood that she needed to express herself.
And she wanted to make hats
because all the beautiful friends of Etienne love the hats
that she was fabricating in her room.
And Boy gave her her chance.
1914 - the war.
Capel persuaded me to withdraw to Deauville,
where he rented a villa for his ponies.
Many elegant ladies had come to Deauville.
Not only did they need to have hats made for them, but because
there were no dressmakers, they had to be properly attired.
I only had milliners with me.
I converted them into dressmakers.
Arthur Capel saw her beyond a mistress,
he saw her as a kind of business genius,
and he was the one who bankrolled her first shop.
What was needed was simplicity, comfort and neatness.
Unwittingly, I offered all of that.
Within the Deauville boutique, she was able to offer these garments
made of jersey, which were her first garments.
She had looked at men's underwear and really seen the value
of a fabric that was really seen as quite a humble material previously,
and she was quite radical in this because jersey was not seen
as a fabric for fashionable women to wear.
In a way, the secret of her genius is what her great rival, Poiret,
called "misere de luxe", which is "luxurious poverty".
Very simple, common fabrics - cotton jersey,
not luxurious fabrics at all.
She took the deprivation of her childhood
and she turned it into something sumptuous and desirable.
By inventing jersey, I liberated the body,
I discarded the waist, I created a new shape.
In order to conform to it,
all of my customers, with the help of the war, became slim.
Slim like Coco.
Women came to me to buy their slim figures.
It's really Earth shattering.
It's a change in body shape, it's a change in diet,
it's a change in, erm...in movement.
It's paradoxical. On the one hand, it frees the body,
on the other hand, it puts the pressure on you
to have a body that can support itself.
Corsets held up your bosom, they held in your waist.
You take away the corset and you have to develop stomach muscles
and you have to be slim,
so it creates an anxiety for women that they didn't have,
even as it gives them a freedom they didn't have.
Women want to look like Chanel.
They want to dress like her.
The idea of branding is thought of as a very modern concept,
but Chanel becomes her own brand very early on.
I was working towards a new society.
Up until then, there had been clothes designed for women
who were useless and idle.
I now had customers who were busy women.
She really understood what women needed because she needed it.
She lived her life at her fullest.
You know, she wanted to be able, I think, to party
and to go horse riding.
And I think the freedom of moving also gives you
a freedom of thinking, you know. It's really empowering.
You know, her hair was cut short, she liked to tan,
she would wear trousers when everyone was wearing a dress.
It was so avant-garde at the time.
It was clothes to be comfortable, to be elegant,
and to be able to live your life as an independent woman.
It's clear that Chanel always felt like an outsider.
She was looked down on for her poverty,
for her being a kind of demi-mondaine when she was young,
and then later for not being a member of elite society.
Her friend Paul Morand said that she came into Paris
like those village girls inspired with a spirit of vengeance.
She perpetrated a fashion revolution on a society that had seen women
as pretty and frilly, decorative things, and she presented herself
as being like a man in many ways.
Like an androgynous dandy.
Boy Capel was well aware he didn't control me.
"I thought I'd given you a play thing, I gave you freedom",
he once said to me in a melancholy voice.
He has effectively turned her into Mademoiselle Chanel,
the woman who earns her own living.
The woman who is independent.
The woman who never stops working.
Bonjour. It's a pleasure to welcome you here.
We are in 31, Rue Cambon, in Paris.
She had the entire building, with downstairs - the boutique,
on the first floor - the haute couture salon,
her apartment on the second floor.
Gabrielle Chanel used to say that an interior
is the natural projection of the soul.
So by visiting the apartment,
we'll have a better understanding of who was Gabrielle Chanel.
We have many books, and some of them belonged to Arthur Capel.
He wanted to introduce to Gabrielle Chanel a world of spirituality.
She would surround herself with Buddha, with Chinese screens,
with crystal balls.
Also with the cards you see,
like a fortune teller looking into the future.
One of the biggest myths about Chanel
is that she was the first female designer.
Chanel, in fact, was one of a regiment of women
who came into fashion in the 1920s and '30s.
But Chanel really captured the imagination
because she was a personality before she was a couturiere.
She was already famous for being the sort of stylish mistress
of a handsome, polo-playing man.
And in that way, she separated herself from the other dressmakers.
She was the best advertisement for her own clothing
and she was the first, in that sense, the first influencer.
You think of the other great couturieres - Madame Vionnet -
I can't tell you what she looked like.
I mean, you know, very vaguely.
Karl Lagerfeld once said that Jeanne Lanvin
was a great, great dressmaker
but by the '20s she was a nice old lady.
You had Elsa Schiaparelli who came from a very elite Roman family.
Schiaparelli was working with different surrealist artists,
she was doing very new and attention-grabbing fashions,
and was soon Chanel's biggest competitor,
which drove Chanel crazy.
Chanel dismissed her and said,
"She's just that Italian artist who makes clothes."
Meanwhile, Schiaparelli described Chanel
as "that dreary little bourgeoisie".
It may be an apocryphal story, but there is a reference to Chanel
meeting Schiaparelli at a fancy dress party
and manoeuvring her backwards into a lit candle
so that Schiaparelli's costume went up in flames.
I think she was dressed as a Christmas tree, was she?
A dress is neither a tragedy nor a painting.
It is a charming and ephemeral creation,
not an everlasting work of art.
Fashion should die and die quickly in order that commerce may survive.
Very young, I had realised that without money you are nothing.
That with money you can do anything.
Or else you had to depend on a husband.
Money is the key to freedom.
Arthur Capel married a woman of his own social station,
which was crushing to Chanel,
even while she knew all throughout their relationship
that he was seeing other women.
But it did not end the relationship because she remained his mistress.
Very tragically, the real end came when Boy Capel
was killed in a car crash.
She insisted that a friend of Capel's drive her through the night
to the site near the Riviera where the crash happened.
He's the only man I have loved.
He was the great stroke of luck in my life.
I had met a human being who did not demoralise me.
He shaped me.
She goes back home to her villa on the outskirts of Paris
and she wants everything painted black.
She wants the shutters of the house painted black.
She wants her bedroom painted black.
She says she will wear only black.
And then, somehow, this strength within her
that always emerges and defines her,
and she says, "I am going to wear black
"but I am going to wear it as a symbol of strength and freedom."
And she designs her first little black dress.
And the little black dress becomes synonymous in the 1920s
with the independent woman, with the jazz age,
with the Roaring Twenties, with the Flappers.
She symbolises that independent woman
who is emancipated,
and she's come to that point in her own life through trauma.
And she has made it a source of strength
in her life as a designer.
The Chanel little black dress is now a museum piece
because it has acquired the status of...
..an artwork.
So this dress was designed by Chanel for the actress Delphine Seyrig
in the film Last Year At Marienbad.
But, of course, it is ultimately this Chanel little black dress.
I imposed black.
It's still going strong today.
For black wipes out everything else around.
Eccentricity was dying out.
I hope, what's more, that I helped kill it off.
One of the most enduring relationships of her life
was with her friend, Misia Sert,
a famous muse in Paris.
She'd been painted...
..by numerous artists, including Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec.
She was known for her beauty,
especially her bosom!
In Misia, Chanel found an entree into a world
that was kind of artistic avant-garde.
I mean, everybody gossiped in Paris.
They knew everything that was going on.
They gossiped morning, noon and night, for Christ's sakes.
There were some rumours that Chanel and Misia
were lovers as well as great friends.
And when Misia married for the second time,
to Josep Maria Sert, a Spanish artist,
Chanel went on honeymoon with them.
She loved to have objects always going by pair,
such as couple, you know.
These very famous couple of deer,
two lions on the chimney.
She was never married, you see. She was called Mademoiselle.
So maybe she had for this wish of couple spirituality.
She became very good at finding couple friends,
and she tended to dress the woman and seduce the husband.
Picasso, she explained it, it was, you see, something like
a kind of, how do you say, "attirance" in English, you see.
They were looking for each other but they were not free at the time.
By this point, Chanel has an extraordinarily grand townhouse
on Faubourg Saint-Honore, the grandest street in Paris.
It was said that Picasso had his own bedroom there
just to be able to retreat.
It's really interesting when you think that she starts
as a young woman who has nothing, who is dependent on men,
that then, by 1920,
she is supporting men.
There are a number of great writers and artists and musicians
who would have starved without her.
She was supporting the French poet Pierre Reverdy,
who was a progressive, intellectual, deeply religious man,
who was constantly torn between his faith, his Catholic faith,
and his wish to be faithful to his wife
and his complete fascination with Chanel.
Here you have a book by Pierre Reverdy.
He used to be a lover for Gabrielle Chanel.
Cocteau is a morphine addict
and so Chanel pays for him to go into rehab.
She's also financially supporting Diaghilev and Stravinsky
in the Ballets Russes.
And as you see Modernism develop,
whether it's through the paintings of Picasso, the plays of Cocteau,
the designs of Chanel, they are all working together,
so she's at the heart of Modernism.
I came to know Stravinsky.
He was very Russian in his ways,
with the look of a clerk in a Chekhov short story.
He was young and shy. He found me attractive.
Russians fascinated me.
Every Westerner should have succumbed to Slavic charm
to know what it is.
I was captivated.
It's almost certainly Misia Sert who introduced Chanel to Stravinsky.
In 1920, you'd just had the Russian Revolution.
Russian artists and noble classes gravitated to Paris,
and Stravinsky went from being an incredibly successful artist
to being completely impoverished and uprooted
and without a home.
Chanel invited him to stay with her
in her country house in Garches, outside of Paris,
and she invited not only Stravinsky, but his wife Katherine,
who was terminally ill with tuberculosis at the time,
as well as their four young children.
So it was quite a thing.
And the first thing that was installed in the house was a piano.
It was a very deliberate move on her part
to support him artistically.
Stravinsky pursued me.
"You're married, Igor", I told him.
"When Katherine, your wife, gets to know."
And he, very Russian,
"She knows I love you.
"To whom else if not to her could I confide something so important?"
It's an extraordinary set of circumstances, really.
The love of Chanel's life, Boy Capel, had died.
Chanel was in grief,
so I think they both felt the need for love.
I think Stravinsky liberated Chanel culturally and artistically
and I think Chanel liberated Stravinsky sexually.
But I think the inspiration was mutual.
Stravinsky taught me about music.
The little I know about it, I owe to him.
They meet at the piano, they play at the piano,
they make love at the piano.
I think there's a correspondence between the black and white
of the piano, the black and white of Chanel's designs.
Stravinsky composed Five Easy Pieces,
and, in 1921, he composed
Five Finger Exercises, which they almost certainly
played together on the piano in Garches,
so this number five is kind of resonating.
At the time of Gabrielle Chanel,
the world of perfumes and fashion were completely separated.
It's not visual like music.
Perfume flows in the air. You can never really grasp it.
She conceived the perfume as if it was a part of her fashion
and she had the take of a fashion designer.
Prior to this, perfumes smelled overtly like flowers,
they came in ornate flakons.
Chanel wanted all of that gone.
She went to Ernest Beaux, who was a perfumer working in south of France,
in Grasse, and she asked for an abstract scent
she felt could express something of her style.
She says she wants the scent of a modern woman
and he...
..astonishingly, is able to express that.
She was a Leo, and you may know that the Leo sign
is the fifth sign of the Zodiac.
Ernest Beaux must have shown her certain perfumes,
or at least a modification of each other.
And she picked lucky number,
which was the fifth bottle.
She launched the perfume Chanel No 5
in this building in 1921.
And if you focus on the iron structure,
you will discover the number five.
Long before people talked about influencers,
Chanel figured out what an influencer was
and how to use that...system.
So instead of trying to market her perfume right away,
she simply started just spraying it around.
She would spray it in a restaurant
and have people just walk through a cloud of her perfume.
And inevitably some would say,
"Oh, my, what is that amazing scent?"
And she was giving it particularly to her most affluent,
beautiful friends, and they would sort of waft through
their society world, trailing clouds of Chanel,
and nothing could have been more effective than that.
Then she started selling it.
Chanel was the first to figure out that if she put her name
on the perfume - no-one had ever done that before -
it was a way of saying, you are buying a fragment of me.
Share my life, share the scent, enter into my...
..atmosphere.
Chanel No 5 inspired very different artists.
Andy Warhol used to wear No 5, to use No 5 himself.
There was this unexpected story with Marilyn Monroe,
who was asked, "What do you sleep in at night?",
and she mentioned that she was just sleeping with a few drops of No 5.
I have a letter from the Queen Elizabeth.
"I want to thank you very much indeed for the birthday present
"of the Chanel scent.
"I'm already using it and I hope smelling all the better for this."
You don't have to ask for it.
He knows what you want.
Chanel.
To make a perfume that is identified for decades,
for a century, with allure,
says something about the person who invented it.
Grand Duke Dmitri would have come to Garches
and lived alongside Stravinsky and his family,
so it must have been an extraordinary moment.
He was a kind of swashbuckling figure.
He was one of the assassins of Rasputin
and then he'd fled Russia.
He was associated with the Court and the Romanovs
and must have swept Chanel off her feet.
They both liked riding. Stravinsky didn't ride.
Grand Duke Dmitri was a rider, and so they would have been taking
long rides into the woods together.
She was having a sort of romance with this man who was younger
and whom she was supporting financially because he had nothing.
In a very friendly way, I said to him,
"I have just bought a little blue Rolls. Let's go to Monte Carlo."
We set off.
Misia was watching.
She immediately sent a telegram to Stravinsky in Spain.
"Coco is a 'midinette' who prefers grand dukes to artists."
They stayed at the finest hotels.
Dmitri loved to gamble at the casinos of Monte Carlo.
She was behaving the way rich men did
by, you know, picking up this aristocratic
but impoverished Russian prince
and subsidising his gambling and his high living, etc.
This orphan girl from the Auvergne could pay for her own pleasure,
she was happy to, and it increased her sense of independence.
She also employs his sister, the Grand Duchess Maria,
in her embroidery workshop.
Grand Duke Dmitri's sister was not a glamorous woman, let's say,
and so Chanel essentially adopted her, forcibly,
took her in and told her she had to get rid of what she called
"the brioche" she was wearing on her head, cut her hair,
guided Maria, apparently, on weight loss techniques,
so Maria wound up slimmed down with a chic Paris-style,
Chanel-style haircut, and became the director of her embroidery atelier
and was producing the beautiful textiles
that wound up being in several of the seasons in the 1920s.
I sometimes call Chanel "vampiric"
because she would sort of get in there and suck out
what was the most interesting, delicious and life-filled
in other people aesthetically, intellectually, artistically,
and then make use of it in some way.
The Grand Duke had no money, but he may have had some baubles left,
and it's said he gave her a strand of Romanov pearls,
which she promptly had copied and turned into paste,
and that's where we get...
..erm, knock-off pearls
as a normal, everyday motif that women wear.
But we're also really looking at the remnants
of Imperial Russia when we look at that.
It's a remarkable vector.
Money adds to the decorative pleasures of life,
but it's not life.
It's like jewels.
Why allow yourself to become obsessed with a beautiful stone?
You might as well wear a cheque around your neck.
She's sort of the launcher of the costume jewellery industry.
But the idea that you can have fun,
that you can mix the precious and the fake.
Let's say that that's a metaphor for Chanel
because, you know, she in some ways is the fake pearl.
Here's this child of an orphanage, abandoned by her father,
her mother dies, makes her way in life,
probably very gruelling with a lot of humiliations,
and she turns herself into sort of the richest woman in the world.
And then, of course, there's a real pearl there.
The real pearl of her genius.
Real pearls form around grains of irritation,
so all the irritants of her life, the genius,
layered them with this nacreous and beautiful
and glamorous and valuable shell.
So wearing those pearls together is a statement of her identity.
It refers to the price of women.
Women who were priced.
They were like racehorses in the world of Etienne Balsan, Boy Capel.
And so she makes herself into a woman without a price.
When Chanel met the Duke of Westminster,
it was Christmas 1923.
Chanel was 40.
She was immensely wealthy but he was much, much richer.
The Duke of Westminster was probably the richest man in Europe.
He was a playboy. He had a reputation.
But he really pursued Chanel.
He invited her onto his yacht in Monte Carlo,
which was the biggest private yacht in the world.
She brought Dmitri with her because she was still with him,
and then quickly this sort of evolved into her next relationship.
To marry into his world would have made her a duchess,
it would have made her part of the British aristocracy,
it would have meant the kind of apotheosis of her social ascent.
By the spring of 1924, they were an item.
He had an estate in Cheshire, which was called Eaton Hall,
which was the size of a small town.
It was normal to have dinner for 60 or more people at these vast tables
and whole orchestras would be brought in to entertain,
and she was the lady of the manor.
The idea of hunting, shooting and fishing
was something that she really took to.
And she spent time with the Duke at his estates in Cheshire,
his hunting lodge in France and also in Scotland.
She becomes an expert fisherwoman.
She's actually catching even more than the Duke of Westminster
and his close friend Winston Churchill,
and she starts appearing in Winston Churchill's correspondence.
Churchill says, "Oh, I've met the charming Coco.
"She's a really great woman, capable of ruling a man and an Empire."
She began to borrow the Duke's jackets, for instance -
tweed jackets - and she began to experiment it.
She was really quite inspired about what could be done
with this usually humble fabric.
And she met with William Linton of Linton Tweeds in Carlisle
in the mid-'20s, and they began this incredible relationship.
My dad came here in '63 as the mill manager.
It was originally the Linton family,
but then it became our family business.
I did find letters backwards and forwards between Chanel
and Linton Tweeds.
But this one in particular epitomises the relationship.
"Mademoiselle Chanel, having expressed the wish to see
"your Collection, we would appreciate it if you could arrange
"to come over early next week, preferably Tuesday."
So that kind of defines our relationship.
Basically, they ask us to jump and we jump.
She refused to stop working and that used to annoy the Duke
because he wanted her undivided attention.
In fact, once he arranged for all her seamstresses
to come to Cheshire, to Eaton Hall, to work there,
so that she could also be there to entertain at a house party.
And she was producing, you know, two big collections a year.
In 1927, the fashion press report on the fact that
she has set up a salon right in the centre of London
and a team of English workers overseen by the French premier,
so the head of the work rooms, were brought over from France
to make sure that everything was to her specification.
ARCHIVE: The Duke of Westminster loans his house and well known
members of London society lend their services
for this elegant fashion display for which Mademoiselle Chanel
crossed the Channel in order to give to British materials
her experienced Paris cut.
This is Lady Pamela Smith, who shows you how attractive one can look
in a simple red and white striped calico beach suit.
Miss Hilary Charles wears a white cotton frock, spotted red and black.
People said I was an anarchist and that I took an evil pleasure
in humiliating people of standing by placing them under my command.
I have employed society people not to indulge my vanity
or to humiliate them -
I would take other forms of revenge supposing I were seeking them -
but because they were useful to me.
She was the queen of reverse power dynamics.
It was a way
to turn the tables on people who made her feel so inadequate
for so long.
The Duke and Chanel went on trips along the Riviera
in one of his yachts, and they came across a piece of land at Roquebrune
and decided to build a house.
The house was called La Pausa.
Chanel wanted to replicate, in this house,
the staircase at the abbey where she'd spent her childhood.
It was a place for both of them.
But sadly, by this point, their relationship,
the cracks were really beginning to show.
They still had these glittering house parties,
but people would hear terrible rows.
Chanel undoubtedly tried to get pregnant,
but it didn't happen.
He'd clearly decided that he needed to find a young bride
who could give him a male heir.
Which, by the way, he never got.
But he did get his young bride, who was called Loelia Ponsonby.
She was the daughter of a quintessential
British courtier.
He actually took her to meet Chanel in Paris
as if to get her looked over.
Er, so this is a dress that belonged to Loelia Ponsonby.
Erm, and as you can see,
it has this sort of Chanel signature.
The line is very simple.
It's just a V neck with straps.
The sequins are stitched and then they're punched through.
So you get this transparency sort of at play.
Loelia Ponsonby married the Duke in 1930,
and this Chanel dress is from 1932.
The two women weren't particularly friends,
but, you know, her clothes were such that Loelia,
who was a very elegant woman,
was very happy to wear Chanel's designs,
and Chanel was very happy to design for her.
Ten years of my life have been spent with Westminster.
Beneath his clumsy exterior, he is a skilful hunter.
You'd have to be skilful to hang on to me for ten years!
I loved him, or I thought I loved him,
which amounts to the same thing.
He still belongs to a generation of well-brought-up men.
All English men, for that matter, are well-brought-up -
until they reach Calais, at least!
In Mayfair, if you look at the old lampposts,
they have what looks like a double C on them,
and a W.
Is that just urban myth
that the double C is for Coco Chanel and Westminster,
the Duke of Westminster?
Anyway, it has an emotional truth to it,
even if it's a fairy tale.
The 1930s was a very polarising period in France,
when part of the population was becoming more and more
right wing and anti-Semitic.
CHANTING
And the other part was becoming more and more radical and leftist.
And there was a huge labour movement and people were going on strike.
Chanel's workers went on strike,
and she just completely exploded.
And she tried to fire them all.
She did fire them all, but they refused to leave.
They occupied her atelier,
and eventually she had to back down, which she really hated.
You see that someone who grew up poor
nevertheless didn't identify with any of her workers at all.
By the 1930s, she lives at The Ritz
and she's in a relationship with a designer,
an illustrator called Paul Iribe.
She was undoubtedly right-wing,
and Paul Iribe was very, very right-wing.
Chanel was someone who'd very much absorb the politics
of those around her.
Boy Capel was a great progressive liberal,
but by the time she got to Iribe,
she was very ripe for the kind of nationalism
that he represented.
And she bankrolled his journal,
which was unmistakably a proto-fascist,
arch nationalist, right-wing
but interesting, artistic journal.
He used Coco as the face of Marianne,
the allegory of France,
shown martyred on the cross
or drowning in blood or her eyes gouged out.
I think she was sort of the cover girl.
She bypassed Tsarina, Duchess,
and went straight to allegorical emblem
of the entire nation of France!
Really, I don't know where you go from there!
The most complicated man I ever knew was Paul Iribe.
My relationship with Iribe was a passionate one.
How I loathe passion!
What an abomination!
What a ghastly disease!
She was going to marry Iribe.
He took the Train Bleu to join her at La Pausa.
And when he arrived, he went down to the court de tennis
and he was, you know, white.
And she came and she saw him...
..fall down. He was dead.
He dies in front of Chanel.
Again, the loss of somebody that she loves.
She couldn't sleep any more after that.
She was terrified that death was really
taking such a power in her life.
When war is declared,
Chanel flees Paris
and she goes to stay at the home
of her nephew, Andre, in the countryside.
REPORTER: And now the Nazis entered Paris.
This had been the dream of a Kaiser in the last war.
Hitler achieved it.
Paris is occupied.
Calm is apparently restored.
And like many inhabitants, she goes back.
She wants to return to her rooms
where she's lived at The Ritz since the 1930s.
But her former suite, at the grand part overlooking Place Vendome,
is occupied by German officers.
She somehow manages to persuade the manager of The Ritz
to let her have a room at the very back,
an attic room on the Rue Cambon side,
which was where her business is.
And she keeps a low profile.
Baron von Dincklage, also known as Spatz,
was a German officer
who Chanel may have met years prior.
He had been a spy in France before the war,
and he'd been sent to France by the Germans
to infiltrate French society.
He'd been on the Riviera at the same time that Chanel,
he sort of presented himself as a tennis pro
or a businessman to learn about what was seductive
to French women. In particular,
how to tailor Nazi propaganda to make it palatable.
And I think he used that to his advantage
with Chanel, among others.
And he and Chanel started a romance during these years
when he spent a lot of time at her apartment in The Ritz.
She did claim innocence.
There's a apocryphal story that she said to Cecil Beaton.
"When a lady my age has a chance at a lover,
"she does not ask to see his passport."
And it's true.
You know, he did have an English mother
and they did speak English
and she always had a soft spot for an Englishman.
So perhaps she convinced herself
that he was more English than German.
But in fact, he was a German agent.
Andre, who was her nephew, or possibly her son -
we will never know, even he may never have actually known -
was in the French army and had been captured
and was in a German prisoner of war camp.
Of all the people in her life,
she was most attached emotionally to Andre.
It was his picture she kept in her purse all her life,
no-one else's.
And she was desperate to get him released.
Chanel got news from him that he had TB
and was very, very sick.
And this was what had killed her mother.
And it is at this point that she becomes involved
with the German agent - that the affair begins.
And I think - I'm speculating, of course -
that she would do whatever it took to save Andre.
He was duly released from the prisoner of war camp
and he did return to France,
and she probably saved his life as a consequence.
And yet,
the relationship continues with Spatz
and then Chanel becomes involved in this frankly implausible plot.
It was a kind of spy mission designed to broker
a separate peace with Churchill,
around the back, if you will, of Hitler.
Her Nazi handlers had a name for her cooperation with them.
It was called Operation Modelhut,
which means "fashion hat" in German.
Through the Duke of Westminster, she'd been a friend
of Winston Churchill.
And she'd somehow fantastically volunteered as a go-between
between the English and the Germans,
if you can imagine Chanel doing that,
shacked up at The Ritz with her Nazi officer.
One thing you learn from the world of the courtesans
is to be an exquisite opportunist.
Her code name was "Westminster", which tells you everything.
Her connections through the British aristocracy
were prized by the Nazis.
She's going to meet Churchill in Madrid
and deliver this message
that Schellenberg and others in Berlin
want a negotiated peace settlement.
She was in over her head,
but I think she imagined herself the saviour of Europe
and the kind of heroine who brought an end to the war -
on German terms.
This, of course, is doomed to failure.
It seems highly unlikely,
in the midst of trying to save the free world from the Nazis,
that Churchill was going to have time to meet with Coco Chanel.
So this implausible and frankly hopeless plot went wrong.
REPORTER: Yes, sir. Liberation looks like this.
This was Paris again after four years
of a foul grief.
When the tide turned and the Allies came and retook Paris,
Chanel quickly understood
that she was going to have to change allegiances.
She was nothing if not flexible,
and she understood that she was at risk
for being tried and accused as a collaborationist.
And French citizens who had been involved in helping the Nazis
were severely punished.
She received a visit from Malcolm Muggeridge,
who was a British spy working for intelligence in Paris,
and he was rather interested in meeting the famous Chanel.
And he went to have dinner with her in her apartment,
where they had delicious food and wine,
but she didn't eat very much.
He said she was impossible to pin down.
Chanel was briefly arrested for her being a collaborator
by the free French,
and then she was let go quite rapidly,
possibly through the intervention of Churchill.
Not only had he been her friend
when she was with the Duke of Westminster,
but also more likely because she might have said things
about other pro-Nazi British aristocrats,
including the Duke of Windsor.
She was gone for a few hours
and came back to her suite at The Ritz
and soon thereafter was able to pack up her belongings
and hightail it to Switzerland,
where she would spend the next more than a decade.
She was a great survivor.
She had survived the traumas of her childhood.
She had survived bereavement.
And she was going to survive the occupation.
And she did what it took.
Perhaps the worst thing she did during the occupation
was to try and get back complete control
of her perfume company.
She only owned 10% of it.
The remainder of it was owned by the Wertheimers.
The perfume part of her business was owned
by a very, very rich Jewish family, the Wertheimers.
And during the war, she tried to get the business back from them -
they had fled to America -
by invoking the Nazi race laws against this Jewish family.
She didn't succeed.
But... But she tried.
She had no sense of loyalty to them.
They had made her the equivalent of billions of dollars.
So, erm, yeah, that was...
That was the Chanel of the 1940s.
Somehow, despite all these ups and downs
and legal actions and war and peace,
she remained friends with them,
remarkably.
So when she makes her comeback in 1954,
after a long period of inactivity,
it's financed and backed by the Wertheimers.
And Pierre Wertheimer stands loyally by her side.
She was valuable property,
and I think the Wertheimers probably encouraged her also
to start up after the war,
because at the very least, even if she failed,
it would give temporary publicity to the perfume.
That voice that gushed forth from her mouth like lava,
those words that crackled like dry vines,
I heard them all over entire evenings
in the hotel in St Moritz
where I met her in the winter of 1946,
unemployed and with nothing to do
for the first time in her life, chomping at the bit.
She had gone into voluntary exile,
unsure whether to return to Rue Cambon
and waiting to become wealthy again.
Chanel, the volcano from the Auvergne,
which Paris was mistaken in believing was extinct.
REPORTER: From Paris come the first pictures of
the controversial new Christian Dior fashion.
After the war, Christian Dior
becomes the most successful designer in the world
with his famous New Look.
And it is the antithesis
of everything Chanel has stood for.
Dior does this highly romanticised vision of femininity,
which actually, although it's called the New Look,
really looks back to La Belle Epoque,
an era that Chanel remembered all too well,
where women wore corsets and long skirts.
And Chanel was so enraged by this.
The sight of a woman in a New Look dress,
one of her friends said, was like waving a red flag
in front of a bull.
She did, in fact, launch a new line
in '54 to much, much anticipation.
How was it received?
Total flop.
It was an enormous disappointment.
The press was vicious.
"She is living in the past.
"This is boring.
"She's lost her touch."
It was met essentially with a big yawn.
But it was also clear that there was a collaborationist cloud
around her that was very difficult for the French to accept still.
Another person might have been disheartened and said,
"Well, you know, I tried and it's not my moment any more."
But that was not her reaction at all.
Even though at this point she's in her 70s,
her vision is recognised by some American fashion editors
who said, "Yes, actually, this looks rather youthful and appealing."
In 1957, Coco Chanel took a trip to the United States,
to this very city of Dallas, Texas,
at the invitation of department store magnate Stanley Marcus.
Dallas is home to the great fashion emporium Neiman Marcus,
and Stanley Marcus knew the power of Parisian fashion
and the influence it was already having in America,
and he made sure that she was feted within an inch of her life.
Here, she and Stanley Marcus are at his ranch.
Chanel is wearing a fur stole.
But it's September in Dallas.
But for style, she kept it on.
Stanley Marcus staged a bovine fashion show
for Coco Chanel,
in which cows were dressed in pearls
as a kind of blending of their two worlds.
She went dressed in a kind of cowgirl outfit.
I like to say that Americans are very amnesiac,
and they managed not to think about Chanel's wartime connections.
And the breezy, casual, athletic look of Chanel's clothes
struck a chord with postwar America.
They loved France,
and suddenly, the French seemed American.
And Chanel found herself the toast
of American fashion.
Unlike many couturiers,
she didn't mind the Chanel look being copied.
She thought imitation was the sincerest form of flattery.
When she came back in the '50s and '60s,
she was far and away most famous for these tailored suits.
And over here, we have a copy.
The department stores in New York
would proudly have fashion shows showing their licensed copies.
They'd even proudly put them in the window saying,
"Couture, 400.
"Our version, $35."
TILL RINGS
You could buy the prestige of having a Chanel suit
by buying a licensed copy.
It was presciently modern.
It sort of anticipates sampling, right?
It anticipates the sampling of the art world,
the sampling of the music world.
It was the sampling of the fashion world.
It's a form of immortality.
If you consider it a battle between the Dior aesthetic
and Chanel's aesthetic,
it's very clear that Chanel won that battle.
She's dressing Jackie Kennedy,
one of the most famous women in the world.
She's dressing French movie stars.
She's dressing Elizabeth Taylor.
She becomes incredibly famous again.
She's synonymous with chic in the 1950s and '60s,
just as much as she has been in the '20s and '30s.
These suits became a new kind of haute bourgeois uniform.
The first year I bought Chanel couture,
I think that was '59.
I found a suit
that I must have worn for...
..eight or ten years.
It was totally classic.
It was very like this colour,
but without the silver woven in.
I just felt wonderful in it.
And I loved the fact...
I bought a lot of tweeds there
because of travelling a lot - they don't wrinkle.
I managed to make it two or three times a year to Paris
to see the whole collection.
In those days, it was so different than now.
It was quiet.
There was no music, there were no celebrities.
I mean, there'd be an actress,
and usually the wife
of the President of France would go.
I remember she would sit up on the stairs
just intensely watching the mannequins,
and then she'd quickly vanish.
I had done the movie Otto E Mezzo - Eight And A Half.
We went over to Paris for the weekend
and I ran into my great friend who I adored - Salvador Dali.
And he said, "You've got to go and see Mademoiselle,
"and why don't you work there?"
I said, "How the hell am I going to work for HER?"
He said, "She's looking for models."
I said, "How fabulous!"
So I called up and they said, "Please, come right away."
So I ran there and she stood at the top of the stairs,
lauding.
HAUGHTY LAUGHTER
Saying, "Wonderful shoulders."
She came down the stairs and she hired me.
We all wanted to be the favourite.
We all think we were the favourite, in fact.
That's the, the cote...
The mischievous side of Chanel.
To get everybody under control.
She played the seduction with everyone.
I was her favourite. There was no-one else.
I was numero uno.
Chanel called me the American Cowboy.
In this apartment, you will see no bedroom.
Because actually Gabrielle Chanel was living at the Hotel Ritz,
which is just across the street.
It was very practical for her.
She would be at The Ritz,
and she'd leave there around 12 o'clock
to come down to the salon.
And everybody would say, "She's coming, she's coming!
"And clean the stairs and make sure everything's immaculate,"
da-da-da-da!
And someone was here to welcome her.
And before they would spray the perfume Chanel No 5
in the staircase, in the haute couture salon.
It was very important for Gabrielle Chanel
that the perfume No 5 would precede her.
And then she'd arrive!
And I'd start working with her immediately.
She never drew. She always fit them on me.
Always the high armhole close to the body.
You know, she'd try this, try that.
You know, it took hours.
How was that? Boring as hell!
We all knew that she was a genius,
that she had such a strong personality,
that she was a difficult person,
very capricious.
So everybody was trembling a bit.
But that was part of the excitement.
You know, she talked.
Chanel talked and talked until she couldn't talk.
She just never shut up!
She would basically work into the evening,
eating nothing, subsisting on cigarettes
and many, many cups of coffee,
assisted by, among other people, Lilou Marquand.
She was going to come to America for the opening of Coco,
the show.
She thought that Audrey Hepburn was going to play her.
I mean, it was not.
It was the older one.
What do you...?
Katharine Hepburn.
And she was furious.
Why's that? Because she was too old!
She didn't come.
I got all dressed.
She made me a beautiful suit.
And she never arrived.
I didn't see her again after that.
And she never did see the musical?
Never!
Oh, it didn't exist for her!
You know, she wanted to...
To tell her own story herself.
And this is what she did in her fashion.
I think people still hear of Gabrielle Chanel
because the House Of Chanel wants it as well.
Virginie Viard really...loves the story of Gabrielle Chanel
and her designs,
and she revisits her designs in a very modern way.
Chanel still owes so much to Coco Chanel.
Her codes are still there,
her iconography is still there
and remain alive long after the founder's death.
She was an entrepreneur when it wasn't the time to be one.
I mean, she was avant-garde
and she paved the way for so many women and designers.
When people buy a Chanel bag today,
they're buying a piece of the Chanel legacy.
It was really Coco Chanel that first popularised the shoulder bag.
And of course, every time you see a shoulder bag,
you can think that designer was influenced by Coco Chanel,
whether or not they know it.
And they probably DO know it.
What I like about the flat bag
is they're quite easy to access
compared to, like, you know,
other bags that maybe you have to...
I like the way you can be holding a glass
and smoking a cigarette
at the same time.
One of my, like, key obsessions growing up
was Mum's Chanel jewellery collection,
because it was the most bold and, you know,
over the top thing that I could kind of find in her closet.
These are old ones.
Chanel. But they're fake, yeah.
Costume. I wear a lot of fake jewellery.
I mean... But it's still expensive.
You know?
Coco Chanel got women wearing trousers and suits.
I think she was a great feminist,
and I think she had an amazing sense of glamour.
You know, simple, chic,
beautiful, timeless.
This is a favourite.
This Chanel belt,
as you can see, it's tiny, tiny.
This almost looks like a choker or necklace.
But this is one of my first belts, and I loved it.
It's just so luxe and heavy.
I mean, this thing, you can knock someone out with it.
Chanel probably was conservative,
but the way I saw it was just affluent.
And as we experienced success and, you know,
and started making money, the first place we went to was Chanel.
I mean, we would wear chain Chanel belts and a white wife beater
and a baseball cap and combat boots.
So we surely turned it on its head.
So if it was conservative, it was not any more
after we got done with it.
The way that we used Chanel in hip-hop culture
was very similar to the energy of Miss Coco Chanel.
She was rebellious.
She was a gamechanger.
She was all about freedom of expression for women.
And she did that through fashion.
And so I connect with that all the way.
I wonder how much people know about the real Chanel.
What does the name Chanel mean to them? Does it mean CC?
Does it mean the intimidating boutique
where you kind of dare not go in?
What does it mean?
All kinds of girls are now called Chanel.
Are they naming their daughters after the suit, the brand,
or are they naming their daughters after the woman?
And they're not naming their daughters after the woman
about whom they don't know much.
They're naming the daughters after an ideal
of consummate glamour.
But two-dimensional Chanel is in a way
more valuable than a three-dimensional Chanel,
for which you need the paradoxes.
In order to keep something exclusive,
you have to keep the palace gates guarded.
And that includes guarding the three-dimensional woman.
You have to keep Chanel's ghost out of the palace.
The modern tendency to want our heroes to have been nice people
is understandable, but also unrealistic.
In many ways, Chanel was not a likeable person,
but it would be very hard to have someone who was as ambitious
and as complicated
to be all a nice, nice person.
The success of her clothes, in a way, is a tribute
to the sort of brutal incisiveness of her approach.
I think the reason Chanel's story still speaks to us today
is it is of the struggle for independence,
of not being defined by one's role as a woman.
And yet it is also a story of love and loss.
And love and loss are the great emotions
that we all share as humans, and which define us.
The last word on the L'hotel du Ritz when I left her,
the last Sunday we spent together,
she told me...
This was her last word.
And then I saw in that transparency where she disappeared.
That was the last time I saw her.
I have been responsible for some wonderful and useful inventions.
I have been reviled.
I have dressed the whole world,
and today it goes about naked.
All of that satisfies this deep taste
for destruction and evolution that is within me.
Life is recognisable through its inconsistencies.
The world is nothing but struggle and confusion.
I would make a very bad dead person
because, once I was put under,
I would grow restless
and would think only of returning to Earth
and starting all over again.
She knew what she wanted on that gravestone.
She wanted lions.
Lions' heads.
And there are five of them,
five being her special number.
A gravestone, of course, is normally centrally placed
at the head of the grave,
and hers is to one side,
at her request, specifically,
because Chanel believed that she would need a way out.
She left space for herself to escape death.
And I think, in many ways, she succeeded.