I want to start by saying that I’m not opposed to inaccurate historical fiction. There are a lot of great things that can be done with inaccuracies in historical fiction: highlighting figures who never got their due, crossing a modern story with a setting that imposes un-modern limitations. I love Our Flag Means Death, one of the least accurate works of historical fiction out there.
However. The possibilities for wrongdoing are there as well, and the effects of the writer’s choice of inaccuracies on the audience’s view of the period or particular people in it are important.
This is about Chanel, of course.
The New Look opens a decade after the end of World War II, with Christian Dior being celebrated at the Sorbonne and Gabrielle Chanel being interviewed by the press on her comeback to the Paris fashion world. A student challenges Dior: “Is it true that, during the German occupation of Paris, Coco Chanel closed her atelier and refused to design dresses for the wives of Nazis, while you kept designing and making money?” This question sets off a philosophical rumination from Dior about how “there is the truth, but there is always another truth that lives behind it.”
It seemed odd to me at the time that Dior responds in such a vague way to such a direct attack when there is a very clear defense to be given against the comparison. That is, while Chanel closed her couture house, she then became romantically involved with a Nazi, living with him at the Ritz and even taking part in an attempt to broker peace between Germany and the United Kingdom — which seems a lot worse to me than just continuing to sell dresses to Nazis’ women.
After finishing the series, I think the overall point was to defend Dior’s decisions and to tarnish the pristine image the public has of Chanel. But in doing so, it still clings to an interpretation that lets her off the hook for all of her decisions.
I want to note before I dig in that I enjoyed the scenes that focused on Dior and his family. (Which are, in fairness, at least half of the show.) He’s a quiet man dedicated to his art, someone who’s put in his time designing for others and is becoming ready to hold his own as a couturier; he’s a queer man with a long-term partner in a society where that sort of relationship must remain discreet; he cares deeply for his little sister, Catherine, a member of the Resistance who is sent to Ravensbrück and returns terribly traumatized.
This is simply a good story about the fashion industry and the home front, and an uncommon one — people don’t tend to tell stories about men in WWII outside of the military, about historical queer men where the queerness isn’t the point, or about recovery after the trauma of a concentration camp. Stories where artists gradually work for their dreams through incremental success, rather than blasting out in a blaze of glory, are also pretty thin on the ground. I quickly came to care about him as a character, and would watch an entire season focused on him and Catherine! (The representation of his 1947 collection is also excellent and very accurate.)
But the half of the show that depicts Chanel’s experiences is another story.
What did Chanel really do during World War II?
Let’s start by laying out the reality of Gabrielle Chanel’s activities in the 1940s, in order to contrast it against the show’s version of events.
When war first broke out in 1939 with the German invasion of Poland, troops still far from France, Chanel closed her fashion house and fired all of her workers. (Hal Vaugn suggests in Sleeping With the Enemy that this was as much a punishment against said workers for their massive strike three years previously as it was about the war itself.) She was still wealthy, with her savings from the years of active work and her income from sales of her perfume and accessories in her remaining retail shops, and continued to live lavishly at the Ritz.
As the Nazis drew closer to Paris, however, she fled for safety to the Pyrenees, where her former lover, Etienne Balsan, had an estate where she and her extended family could stay. Once the French government fell in 1940, she traveled to Vichy to find out about getting her nephew, André Palasse, out of a German prisoner-of-war camp; from there, she went back to Paris and moved into the Ritz again. The hotel was reserved for high-ranking Nazis and those said Nazis put on the list, and it’s likely that the person who put her on the list was Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a German intelligence officer who had been active in France since the 1930s and who seemed to become her lover from the time of her return. For the wealthy who were on good terms with the Nazis, there was still a glittering high life in occupied Paris.
In early 1941, Dincklage arranged for Chanel to meet with other intelligence agents and to become involved with their espionage. She wanted to secure André’s release and to get control of her perfume, Chanel No. 5, back from the Wertheimers, Jewish French businessmen who’d bought the rights from her in the 1920s — the Nazis wanted to make use of her contacts. She and another agent, Baron Vaufreland, traveled to Madrid to try to drum up new agents for the Nazis, and on their return, André was freed.
After this, she was keen to focus on the perfume, meeting with the leader of the seizure of Jewish assets in France with the assistance of Vaufreland. The Wertheimer family had, fortunately, fled the occupation before they could be murdered, and also transferred the perfume company to Pierre Amiot, who was not Jewish, which prevented the Nazis from taking it. Leaving the country and beginning to produce and sell No. 5 in the Americas, they vastly increased sales.
In 1943, Dincklage took Chanel to Berlin to meet with high-ranking SS officers. Then she went back to neutral Madrid along with Dincklage as well as an English woman married to an Italian officer, Vera Bates Lombardi, who, like Chanel, had connections to Churchill and the aristocracy. This time, Chanel was to try to get through to the British government (“Operation Modellhut”) — but she failed and returned to France after being reported as a Nazi agent by Lombardi.
As it became clearer and clearer in 1944 that the Axis was losing, the Nazis, including Dincklage, abandoned Paris. The French Resistance had known of Chanel’s activities for several years, and brought her in for questioning by the autumn; her stay was brief, and she claimed that Churchill saved her. Reportedly, she escaped the kind of immediate consequences doled out to other collaborators by giving out perfume free to American soldiers. She immediately went to Lausanne, Switzerland, where she was soon joined by Dincklage, although they may not have been on the best terms, and she began to bribe people who had information on her past activities. In 1946, she was summoned back for Vaufreland’s trial, where she claimed to have never had anything to do with Germans and didn’t know why she was on their books as an agent. This went generally under the radar due to the volume of trials at the time, and she was never tried herself.
How does this compare to what we see in the show?
After the 1955 framing scenes in the first episode, we flash back to 1943, and Chanel and Vaufreland bargaining with Nazis in the woods at night for André’s life. She cries, she offers money, she cowers in fear. She’s very clearly not in league with them, and they have no sympathy for her. Then we see her arguing with a banker about funds the Wertheimers are keeping from her, which she desperately needs: Pierre Amiot won’t let her have the money. Vaufreland suggests she try the Nazis for help, and she tells him off in disgust — but she also looks like she’s thinking about it because of her great need.
And indeed, this is closely followed by her introduction to Dincklage. She isn’t disgusted by him, but there’s a clear sense in their meeting that this is a transactional relationship. Almost immediately, she’s sent into an anxious tizzy when Elsa Lombardi (obviously based on Vera) is kidnapped by Nazis from Rome and the two are forced to rush to Madrid to try to get through to Churchill, even though Chanel thinks this is an idiotic plan and is terrified that she’ll be punished for failing to do the impossible. Lombardi insults her high-handedly and then leaves, and when Chanel goes to talk to the British ambassador, he reveals that Lombardi turned her in.
Despite the failure of Modellhut, Chanel lives on, and once Paris is liberated, everything seems fine … for about five minutes, until she sees the vicious punishment doled out to women who slept with Nazis. Fame doesn’t save anyone, as even her friend, the star Arletty, is stripped and shorn in public. (In reality, Arletty was spared this kind of punishment.) Chanel flees to Lausanne, where Lombardi quickly turns up and blackmails Chanel into allowing her to hang around as a “business partner”.
Because the Wertheimers have been selling “counterfeit” Chanel No. 5, Chanel tries to get her hands on the real deal to sell in Switzerland, having crates shipped in from Paris. She’s annoyed to find that one’s broken in transit. (This scene is directly contrasted to Dior meeting a train with former prisoners from Ravensbrück that his sister is supposed to be on and hearing that many died in transit.) Her car is beset by robbers and she runs away, abandoning her chauffeur and being forced to walk miles to get back to the hotel.
Even the Wertheimers end up in Switzerland! They throw a party and invite Lombardi just so they can have Chanel turned away at the door. Pierre Wertheimer goes to talk to her in private, reminding her that her tiny share in the perfume company was decided back in the 1920s with her assent because she wanted their production and distribution capabilities to make her rich, which they have. In anger, she tells him that all Jews are good for is making money and that he doesn’t understand her, but later he comes to her bedroom and it’s strongly implied that they sleep together. Then she plays on his new sympathies for her by asking him to help her get to Paris to see poor sick André, though she’s actually going to get some more Chanel No. 5 to sell.
Finally, Dincklage returns: she meets with him clandestinely and brings him back to the hotel, where he hits on Lombardi and helps her get more drugs (Chanel introduced her to morphine earlier), then kisses his German contact, who clearly views him as tricking Chanel.
After a brief flashback to 1905 to show Chanel and Lombardi’s early friendship, the latter dies of a drug overdose with Dincklage’s involvement. Chanel’s lawyer fights the Wertheimers, and in a last conversation with Pierre, she tellls him about how hard it is to be a woman after he points out that he and his family narrowly avoided genocide. Dincklage beats up André in a scene mirroring Chanel’s introduction in the woods, threatening the young man’s life while trying to make Coco admit to having worked for the Nazis, putting the violent button on their relationship. Chanel is in exile from France, defeated and chained to a violent, ruthless man.
So, what to make of this?
The beginning of Chanel’s storyline is an extreme whitewashing of her actions. She’s presented as being pushed into association with the Nazis against her inclination by Vaufreland, after several years of occupied life — in reality, she actively pursued connections with Nazis almost as soon as France was occupied, and met Vaufreland through them. She’s shown as disgusted at the idea of using Nazi laws against the Wertheimers, but forced by their poor treatment of her to do so — in reality, she was a virulent antisemite (with multiple deeply antisemitic lovers) with no financial need to regain control of her perfume.
Throughout the series, she continues to be buffeted to and fro by forces beyond her control, each new situation resulting in her having to make a decision that leads to more moral compromise. This means an acknowledgement that Chanel did cooperate with the Nazis, which is more of an admission than many have been willing to make!
But at the same time, the responsibility is taken from her shoulders. While the ending seems to condemn her for collaborating and therefore bringing all of this down on her shoulders, at every moment in the preceding episodes, this collaboration was presented as her only real choice. And I almost feel like we’re supposed to sympathize with her statement that being a wealthy businesswoman was comparable to (or worse than!) being a Jewish person in Nazi-occupied France.
I’ll be happy if The New Look increases awareness of Chanel’s cooperation with the Nazis, but I have a strong suspicion that any such awareness will be counterbalanced by a belief that she was unenthusiastic and forced into it.
Mimic of Modes 
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