Table of Contents for this Episode
Category: French History
[00:00:00]
Annie: This is Join Us in France, episode 600. Six cent.
Bonjour, I’m Annie Sargent, and Join Us in France is the podcast where we take a conversational journey through the beauty, culture, and flavors of France.
Today on the podcast
Annie: Today, I bring you a conversation with Elyse Rivin of Toulouse Guided Walks about one of the most complicated women in French history, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel.
Born into crushing poverty in the Corrèze, she clawed her way into Parisian high society, revolutionized how women dress, created the world’s best-selling perfume, and then collaborated with the Nazis. It’s a story you won’t soon forget.
A look back after 600 episodes
[00:01:00]
Annie: Before I get into today’s conversation with Elyse, I want to take a moment, just a moment I promise, because this is episode 600.
I genuinely did not see that coming when I recorded my first episode in 2014. I had no plan, no roadmap, no idea what I was doing. I just knew I wanted to rediscover my own country, France, and share this journey with anyone who cared to listen.
11 years later, here we are. And I want to say a few things before we dive in. The first thing is that this podcast has made me smarter. That sounds strange, but it’s true. My history grades in school were not something to brag about. In fact, let’s just say, the C was a bit generous. And yet, here I am, able to talk about French history with real confidence.
I can walk into a museum, look at a painting from across the room, and know the [00:02:00] period, sometimes the artist, and have something meaningful to say about it. That did not happen by accident. It happened because of this podcast, because of the research I do, because of all the art museums I visit, and because of the conversations I’ve had about art and because of Elyse, of course. I owe her a lot.
And speaking of Elyse, one of the unexpected gifts of this podcast has been how much my friendship with her has deepened. We’ve shared hundreds of hours of conversation at this point. She’s taught me things that I would have never learned otherwise, and she does this with effortless storytelling. And that’s a gift that I deeply admire.
Every time we record together, and I… We did another one this morning, I come away knowing more than I did before, and I’m a better person for it.
I’m very grateful for her.
But it’s not just Elyse, it’s you as well, the people who listen, the people who’ve sat across from me [00:03:00] at the boot camp, the patrons who support the show and trust me enough to reach out. You have taught me so many things. You’ve shared your stories as guests on the podcast, your experiences, your love for France.
I have friends all over the world now, real friends, because of this microphone. That still amazes me. I’ve met people in person at events who feel like they already know me, and in a way, they do. There is something about audio that creates intimacy in a way that very little else does. And let me tell you, I love my job.
I’m not going to pretend there aren’t hard days. There are weeks where everything piles up, and I wonder how I’m going to get it all done. There are episodes that nearly break me, trying to get them out by Sunday. There are things I need to do going forward that feel enormous, and I’m not sure where to begin, but it’s all worth it. Every single week, it is worth it.
And [00:04:00] I want to add something that is very un-French. I’m about to turn 61, and I have zero interest in retiring. None. That’s not a very French attitude. The French are quite sensible about retirement, and I understand that, but I can’t imagine not doing this. What I do want to do is take a break sometimes, block out some days for myself, stop when I need to stop, but the podcast, the conversations, meeting you, I want more of that, not less.
So, thank you truly for listening, for sharing the show, for your patience when something goes sideways, and for still being here after 600 episodes. And if you have listened to every one of these 600 episodes or near th- that many, please send me an email, annie@joinusinfrance.com. I want to talk with you.
It means more than I can say.
Now, no magazine section today because today’s main conversation is a long one, [00:05:00] and I didn’t want to cut anything out. You’ll see why once you hear it. Let’s go, and should you want to support this show, it’s patreon.com/joinus, and to support Elyse, it’s patreon.com/elysart or go to joinusinfrance.com/boutique
Meet Coco Chanel
Annie: Bonjour, Elyse.
Elyse: Bonjour, Annie.
Annie: We have a Coco person to discuss today.
Elyse: Oh, yes, we have a very famous and it turns out extremely controversial person to talk about today, and that is Coco Chanel.
Annie: Yes, the beautiful lady, I must admit.
Elyse: Yes, she was actually quite beautiful in her own fashion. She was rather androgynous and suited the time that she lived in. I have a question for you.
Chanel No 5 Legacy
Elyse: I know you’re not… This [00:06:00] is basically not your thing, but have you ever bought a Chanel perfume?
Annie: Hmm, bought? I’ve put on Chanel Number 5 a few times. Did I buy it myself or was it a gift? I don’t remember.
Elyse: Ah, but you have put it on.
Annie: Oh, yeah, yeah. It’s a beautiful perfume if you want to… if you want to make an impression, it’s definitely suitable.
Elyse: Well, did you know that still today, 104 years after it was invented and started being sold, it is the world’s best-selling perfume.
Annie: Is that right?
Elyse: Yep. It is still.
Annie: That’s surprising because there’s a lot of perfume out there.
Elyse: There’s a lot of perfume out there, but of course, the fact is, and we will be talking about all of her life and other things too, but it turns out today that most people associate her with the perfume and not with the clothing that she designed and the revolution she created in women’s [00:07:00] fashion. I was doing some research, day before yesterday, and sure enough, it is still considered with… in spite of the zillions of other perfumes that exist, to be the best-selling perfume and probably will stay that way.
And we’ll talk a little bit later about why actually it turns out to be such a popular perfume. But I’ve never owned it, believe it or not.
Annie: Why?
Elyse: I don’t know. In my lifetime, there’s only been two or three perfumes that I’ve bought, but it turns out none of them were Chanel Number 5, although I actually like it. I was fascinated to see how popular it is everywhere in the world, you know?
Annie: Yeah. It might have been my sister who put it on me because she’s the girly girl. And so if I’m going to an event where I’m need to be a girly girl, she will, you know…
Elyse: She dresses you up.
Annie: Yeah. She does a thing.
Elyse: She does a thing.
Annie: And she might have been the one that put it on me. I don’t know.
Fashion Revolution Tease
Elyse: But anyway, so I think [00:08:00] everyone in the world has heard of Chanel for that reason. Even though I think today, much of what she did as fashion design is not particularly popular anymore, except with a certain class of people or a certain age of women. The other thing is, is that she really revolutionized the idea of what a woman should wear and how she should behave. And then, of course, there’s a part of her life that we’ll talk about too that has to do with things that are not so pleasant, at towards the end of her life. She lived to be quite old. She was born in 1883. That means she was born 152 years ago.
That’s pretty amazing when you think about how up-to-date, talking about Chanel is, it’s still there, no matter what, you know? It’s quite remarkable when you think about it. And she died in 1971 at the age of 87.
So she did live a very long, very full life, with a lot of very strange [00:09:00] events, and certainly created a kind of mystery around herself. That is actually part of what I want to talk about because in doing the research about her and seeing how she came to be the Chanel that we know, it turns out that a lot of what she said about herself was just simply not true.
Annie: All right. Was she born in Paris?
Elyse: No, she was not born in Paris. She was born in the Corrèze.
Annie: Oh.
A geek… like a bouzarde.
Elyse: Not quite.
Early Life Poverty
Elyse: Her father… Well, oh, so this is… this is the beginning of her life, and this is, of course, has a lot to do with, in fact, who she became and really, it shaped her personality.
She was born in 1883. Her mother, when she was born, was 19, and she already had an older sister. That means that her mother gave birth at the age of 17 for the first time. Very young. Her father, at the time [00:10:00] that she was born… And by the way, we should start off by saying that her real name was Gabrielle. That was… It’s a beautiful name. I actually love that name. We’ll talk a little bit about how she came to be called Coco, which she took on easily as a nickname.
But her full real name is Gabrielle Chanel, and her original name was spelled C-H-A-S-N-E-L, with a silent S.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: And somewhere along the way, she just dropped the S. It just happened that that’s what she did.
But when she was born, she already had a sister who was two years old. Her mother was 19. Her father was probably about 10 years older. They were not yet legally married, although they did get married. But he was a man who worked mostly the foire foraine, which is really kind of lower, lower class.
Annie: Yeah. Yeah. There was probably a lot of Occitan being spoken about and, yeah, La Corrèze, eh, [00:11:00] 1880 je pas combien…
Elyse: They were a bit vagabond. They were extremely poor. I don’t know if there’s much information about the ancestry of both sides, but no, I mean, they were both from basically that kind of really poor level of a class of family, working hard. She worked, and then eventually they started working open-air markets. Between her mother, the mother of Gabrielle, of Coco Chanel, had children starting at the age of 17, and had six children by the time she was 30.
All of whom, except for one, who lived to actually to be adults, and died at the age of 31 of exhaustion, poverty, and having too many children in a very short period of time. And apparently, her father, they had gotten legally married. I mean, he was indeed the father of all the children.
Annie: Yeah, but that doesn’t solve anything.
Elyse: No, it doesn’t solve anything. They were very poor. He worked her to death. [00:12:00] He was apparently someone who was not very stable in general. And so, what happened was that Gabrielle and two of her sisters, that is her sister who was old, two years older than her, and her sister who was eight, so she was 12 when her mom died. The three of them were sent away because her father could not take care of them, and the others were brothers. And I don’t even know if I paid attention to what happened to her brothers later on.
Annie: They probably worked with their father.
Elyse: So this is the beginning, the creation of this person, this Gabrielle Chanel, who is apparently very strong-willed, relatively healthy, we have to say, who has seen what being a child-bearer has done to a woman who works very hard doing some kind of manual work. And somewhere in her psyche, she, without being even conscious of it, I don’t know if you can be at the age of 12, makes a decision that will [00:13:00] really follow her the rest of her life, and that is to never be like that, to ever, ever be like that. To never be a housewife, to never be a mother, to never be in a situation where anybody else can make her life miserable, no matter what.
Annie: Mm-hmm.
Elyse: Then we have the question of what really happened to her at the age of 12.
Mythmaking Origins
Elyse: So this is where we get into the part of the story of Coco Chanel, who was a woman who made up stories, and this apparently was what her father did. So in spite of everything, she was greatly influenced by the personality of her father. And I don’t know if it is because he was… he favored her or what, but she took on a lot of the same attributes, and that is she made up stories about herself and about her family.
And so one of the stories that she told for years that came out in a biography that was written about her, believe it or not, in 1974, so this was notes that were taken because this was published [00:14:00] just after she died, but she had told this story all her life, was that she and her two sisters were placed in a convent, a Cistercian convent, and that they were brought up in this terrible, strict environment by these horrible nuns. And she lived there for six years, from the age of 12 until she was 18, and that the only thing she got out of that was to learn how to sew, which is of course the one thing that she did know how to do. And that she was totally obsessed with the idea that there was no color around her. Cistercian abbeys tend to be colorless, you know. And so it became her taste in color to use beige, gray, black, and white, and not use a lot of color. And she insisted that this was what happened to her between the ages of 12 and 18. It turns out that it is not what happened to her.
Annie: Oh.
Elyse: Because somebody else decided, for various reasons, apparently there were rumors and [00:15:00] rumors and rumors all through her life that she made up stories. I mean, she was a very successful person. She was very rich. But there were stories about how, "Don’t believe what Coco Chanel tells you" kind of thing, you know? And so it turns out that another book was written about her where there was a lot of research done with papers that were available that had not been available before, but also because the book of 1974, which was written by a French woman, basically was based on interviews with her where she just told her story. Nobody decided to verify anything. It was just, you know…
Annie: Right, they took her word for it.
Elyse: Took her word for it, you know, and she told all these wonderful stories. And it turns out that the person who wrote the book much later did in fact go back to verify what happened in this convent, what happened, the papers, the official papers left and right, and it turns out that a whole lot of what she said is absolutely, simply not true, you know. But she created her own legend.
Learning to Sew
Elyse: So in fact, she [00:16:00] did not go to a convent between the ages of 12 and 18. She was sent to be with her two sisters, to her mother’s sister, to her aunt’s.
Annie: Okay. That also makes sense, yeah.
Elyse: Which makes sense, right? And it was indeed with her aunt, who was a seamstress, that she learned to sew. So there is a certain amount of truth in all of this, but she had to make it more interesting, and this is part of the mythology that she created.
Annie: And where was this sister living?
Elyse: In the same region. Basically in the same region.
Annie: Corrèze. Okay.
Elyse: Whatever the relationship was, she was very close to one of her sisters, her sister Antoinette. But other than that, all we know for sure is that indeed she was with her aunt until she was adult, 18. And she had learned to be a seamstress.
Escape Marriage Constraints
Elyse: And in order to not be forced into marriage, because it was still, this is working, lower class working family, we’re still talking, how old was she? It was 1901. Can you imagine, we’re talking about a time when still women are [00:17:00] forced to have a role in the family. You don’t have a lot of liberty.
One of the things that she did notice, and this is why this is so fascinating to talk about her, one of the things that she couldn’t stand was not just the idea that women were forced to get married and immediately, of course, have children, with no birth control, right? Was that women were corseted. She could not stand, it’s like it became the metaphor for her of women being constricted. And it really is that, you know?
Annie: They were. They were, yeah. Yeah.
Elyse: Talking 1901. Is that right? Or am I, 1903. 1901, right. And so what she decides to do is she then goes to a convent, and she doesn’t go in as a novice. She doesn’t want to be a nun, certainly. This is not someone who would ever have thought of being a nun. But she decides that that’s the way to avoid being forced into a marriage.
Annie: Ah, yeah. Well, it was a traditional [00:18:00] way. It makes sense. It makes sense. Women have been doing this forever.
Elyse: Forever, right? So what she does is she goes to this convent, which is indeed a Cistercian convent, and it’s in a town called Aubazin, which is in the Corrèze.
It’s a small town. She learns to refine her skills as a seamstress, interestingly enough. So they allow her, apparently that was common anyway, that young women could come in who were not as novices, to become a nun. But she stayed there for two years, and she stayed there with this aunt who was the same age, because they were, the family… there were different ages of the brothers and sisters, so, well, they had lots of siblings. So she actually had an aunt who was close to her age, and the two of them went… And so she stayed there until she was 20 years old.
Annie: Okay, by then she has a good idea of what she wants to do when she grows up.
Elyse: Exactly.
First Job and Hats
Elyse: I don’t know how it works exactly, but the nuns, I don’t know if they gave her an idea, if they contacted somebody, I [00:19:00] really don’t know. But one of the things that happens is that she gets herself a job in a company called Maison Grand-Père, that specializes in trousseau and layette.
Annie: Oh, okay.
Elyse: So it’s for marriage.
Annie: Oh, trousseau is for women who are going to get married, because even when my mother got married, she was given a trousseau by her family, which had, you know, sheets and towels and things like that.
Elyse: So it must have had embroidery or something that she could sew, you know?
Annie: Yeah, yeah. So, on a trousseau you would embroider the initials of the young lady everywhere, and I still have things that say YG for my mother’s initials. I still use them.
Elyse: And I have actually, now that you mention it, I have two handkerchiefs with my mom’s initials.
Annie: Oh. Oh. Anyhow, it was normal.
Elyse: Yes, it was normal. And layette, of course, is [00:20:00] for newborns.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: So she went to work, and this is the beginning of her finally… finally earning some money. And she’s independent.
(Mid-roll ad spot)
Elyse: Now, 20 years old, she’s very pretty but she’s not voluptuous. You know, she’s slim. I don’t know how tall she was, but she was very slim. And she did something that was absolutely unheard of. She cut her own hair.
Annie: Oh, well, yeah, that’s unusual.
Elyse: She insisted. You could see through everything that she did and every attitude she had that what she was not going to do was submit to men, basically. It’s really fascinating to me that this is really how she made her way through her life.
She decided that she was going to become someone. There seems to be this overwhelming need to prove that she can move up in society. She could not bear the poverty that she came out of. And she had no compunctions, and we’re talking about a [00:21:00] time when, I don’t, I mean, even more here in France, I think, than maybe in other places, at the very beginning of the 20th century, 1901, 1902, 1903. I mean, women were not people who went off on their own. Women did not just sleep around, you know? They just, they did not. They just did not. Unless you were going to be considered to be that kind of a woman, you know? A kept woman.
Well, this, in fact, of course, eventually is indeed what she decided to do. But for the moment, we’re not quite there.
Annie: You mean she was, she became, she decided to be a kept woman?
Elyse: Oh, she was kept and kept and kept and kept. This is… yes.
So at 20, she gets this job at the Maison Grand-Père, and she starts by designing hats. People wore hats.
Annie: Well, they wore hats when they dressed up.
Elyse: They wore hats when they dressed up, and … The women wore things, you know. I mean, they had things on their heads all [00:22:00] the time, you know?
Annie: Right. And you went out dressed up.
Elyse: Right.
Annie: Nowadays, you can go out in your pajamas if you want to, but back then you did not.
Elyse: And she decided that, I love the term in French, frou-frou. She started designing hats to add to what they were actually making, because she was bored with the idea of making anything that was like a layette or a trousseau. But she started taking the feathers off, you know?
She started making hats. She lowered the hats so that they came as a kind of what became the signature hat that she had, was this, the cloche, you know, which kind of is, comes down lower on the forehead with, at the best, one feather sticking out of it. And she started, basically, the first couple of years, really making a name for herself by designing hats, not clothing at all.
Annie: This is interesting, because my sister wore a cloche growing up. Like, around her 14th birthday, she went everywhere with a cloche on her head.
Elyse: But, you know, I think if you have straight hair, what Marie has more or less. I mean, it’s not… [00:23:00] It, was it curly? Because I think cloches look nice on some people, you know?
Annie: Oh, she, no, she had curly hair, very curly hair. And the reason why she put it on is because she did not like her curly hair.
Elyse: Ah.
Annie: And so the cloche would straighten her hair a little bit, and then she kept it on a lot. Anyway.
Elyse: Anyway. So here we are. Here isGabrielle Chanel, still Gabrielle, not yet Coco, and she is starting to work, and she’s starting to make a name for herself in this company, and then decides that she wants to be able to have her own shop. But it’s very hard to do that if you are a young woman who is single and who has no family to help you open up a store.
Annie: And besides, at the time, women could not have their own bank account.
Elyse: And they could not do pretty much anything.
Annie: Could not sign a lease… et cetera, et cetera.
Moulins and Coco Name
Elyse: So she’s living no longer in this little town where the convent was, but in the town of Moulins. [00:24:00] Okay?
Annie: Okay, yes.
Elyse: And she has worked her way up to having a little bit of money, and she is starting to earn a reputation as being an interesting hat designer, and she is now 24 years old, 1907. And she just walks around wearing creations that she’s made for herself. She makes her own clothes.
And she has decided that she’s going to, never mind the frills, the folds, the tight waistline, the this and that. And so she creates for herself these pants that are really these large, kind of loose pants, and these tops that she uses, and they look very boyish.
And she does have the kind of body and figure that can get away with this without it looking just like bad sacks, you know?
It makes a difference.
And eventually, later on, when she was interviewed, she said that she got the idea for doing that from the nuns, who wore all this loose, kind of [00:25:00] shapeless stuff, you know?
And, of course, in the Cistercian nunneries, just like in the con… you know, for the men, it’s basically gray, there’s not a lot of color. It coincided with her desire to do something that shows women not being constricted and restricted.
And she starts to hang out in a very famous cafe called the Café de Moulins, which apparently still exists. I saw pictures of it. It’s this absolutely gorgeous art deco cafe. Because…, because in Moulins there is a cavalry regiment.
Annie: Aha. She didn’t hate men that much.
Elyse: Oh, no. No, no. She didn’t hate men. She used men.
Annie: Exactly. She didn’t want them to control her, yeah.
Elyse: So it turns out that this cafe is where all the officers hang out, and she started going there. Whether she went, I’m sure, with a group of young women who were all workers, because there are other activity in Moulins, which is a kind of medium-sized town. I’m sure she didn’t just go all by [00:26:00] herself, certainly in 1907, I’m sure.
But what happens is, one of the things she does is she decides to start singing. It’s a cabaret cafe, and they have evenings where they sing. And so apparently she was good enough to get up on the stage and sing. And one of the songs that she started to sing, that she would sing eventually all the time, was a song that went "Qui qu’a vu vu Coco dans le Trocadéro?"
Annie: I don’t know this song. Hmm, I will have to look it up.
Elyse: We have to look it up. And because every single night she would sing this song, and then the soldiers started singing along with her, they started to call her Coco.
Annie: An excellent name, it turned out.
Elyse: And so what happened was she liked the fact that they called her Coco, and she decided to use that. And that is how she adopted the name of Coco Chanel.
Annie: Very good. And she kept her last name. She just spelled, changed the spelling a little bit. [00:27:00] Yeah.
Exactly, yeah. And I don’t know if they changed the spelling because it was a misspelling once and she left it. Who knows? Exactly. I mean, the pronunciation is exactly the same. Well, yeah. You wouldn’t say the S there as well, yeah.
Balsan and High Society
Elyse: The other thing that happens, and this is the same year, 1907, is that she catches the eye of one of the very young, very aristocratic French officers there, a man named Etienne Balsan, who is a minor nobleman.
And she is now 24. This is even past marrying age for some young women at the time, but you know, she’s not going to fit into any mold that we can figure out, okay? And so he becomes her sugar daddy.
Annie: Uh-huh, yeah.
Elyse: He takes her to his domain. He has a domain. He also, he has a haras, he raises horses. And what’s very interesting about this relationship with this Etienne Balsan is they wind up, in fact going [00:28:00] very quickly from being lovers to being friends. And he stays a friend with, he stays her friend for the rest of her life, or his life until, I think he dies before she does.
But he really winds up being someone who helps form her and become who she eventually became, because he knows very well, I’m sure, what her background is, but he cares enough about her that he teaches her manners.
Annie: Right, because she did not learn this stuff growing up, no.
Elyse: He teaches her to ride. He teaches her how to behave around aristocratic people. He likes her, obviously. I mean, it’s not just the fact that he takes her to bed, but there’s a relationship that develops between the two of them. She has confidence in him, and she is eager, and she wants to be with people who are upper-class people. She wants to be with aristocrats.
She has, in fact, a certain disdain that comes out much later towards anybody who is not, in fact, an aristocrat, which is part of what happens.[00:29:00]
But, so Etienne Balsan and his domain, which is called the Domaine de Royallieu, which unfortunately has a black spot on it later on during World War II, but they become very good lifelong friends, and he teaches her all the manners she needs to not be embarrassed with upper-class people.
Annie: Okay, very good.
Boy Capel Funds Paris Shop
Elyse: And then two years later, after she has advanced a little bit in her work, let’s put it that way, thanks to this man, Etienne Balsan, he introduces her to someone who is a friend of his, who is an English aristocrat, a man named Arthur Capel, who is a baron. He’s an English baron who hangs out with Etienne and they both are into horses and everything, and she falls in love with him.
He has, his nickname is Boy. Boy. Just Boy. Everybody calls him that, and I don’t know why. But this is the one she falls hard for.
Annie: Okay, all right.
Elyse: And they really begin [00:30:00] what turns out to be a passionate relationship that lasts for 10 years.
Annie: Okay, and so she, I suspect she learned English at the time?
Elyse: She learned English, and he is the one who gives her the money for her to open her very first shop.
Annie: Oh, very good. Okay.
Elyse: And her first shop is a hat shop.
Annie: All right. Well, that makes sense. I mean, she, people wore hats, and she liked making hats, so yeah.
Elyse: She tells him, "I will pay you back," and of course, you can imagine, here’s this aristocrat with this young French woman as a mistress, and is going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, never mind. Don’t worry about it." Who knows if he had other people elsewhere. But he allows her to open a store on Rue Cambon, 31 Rue Cambon in Paris. It is still, still, still, still the original home.
Annie: Yeah. Go see it. Go see it. You can go in there, and it’s very interesting, yeah.
Elyse: And the name she gives [00:31:00] to her store is Chanel Mode.
Annie: Why not?
From Hats to Boutiques
Elyse: And she decides it’s time for her to start doing things more than hats. She’s bored with hats. She’s ambitious, and people keep telling her that even though they think she’s very odd for wearing the kind of clothes she does, that it’s kind of interesting, of what she’s wearing.
And she said at one point later on in an interview that some of her ideas came from hanging around horses and the clothing you had to wear to go horseback riding, and you had to wear, like, jodhpurs or pants, and you had to wear kind of loose things. You couldn’t go with these fancy dresses with the tight waist and everything.
And she said all her life, which is, I find really fascinating, she used her environment as inspiration. And so if she was taken to a castle or if she was taken to a spa and she looked at the design or she looked at the colors, they often wound up being transferred into something that she did in her designs for her clothing. But she [00:32:00] wanted things to be comfortable. She said that her idea of women’s clothing was to not be constrained, and constraint is, like, the key word, I think, in absolutely everything.
So she and Boy, her lover, first opened up this shop in Paris, and then in 1913, she opened up a second one in Deauville on the coast.
Which is where all the upper-class people in France would go. It’s the Normandy Nice, let’s put it that way, you know? I, you know.
Annie: Uh-huh. Minus the sun.
Elyse: Minus the sun, right? I mean, this is where, and this is where also a lot of English people would go, not just the French. I mean, it’s across from the cliffs. And she opened up two years later a third boutique in Biarritz, and Biarritz is where really the English hang out, you know?
Annie: Yes, the ones who like sun.
Elyse: The ones who like sun, and all of them, whether it’s Deauville or Biarritz, they’re the ones with money, okay? Just nothing, nothing but money.
By the time she opens up her third [00:33:00] boutique in Biarritz, she has started to make new clothes, and she calls on that, and she changes the name of her boutique, and she says Gabrielle Chanel Stylist.
Annie: Oh, so she goes back to the Gabrielle.
Elyse: Interestingly enough, in her boutique in Deauville, she went to, back to the Gabrielle, and she becomes Coco afterwards back, when she goes back to Paris.
Building a Fashion Empire
Elyse: This is before World War I. By 1916, she has three shops. She has several hundred women helping work for her.
Annie: Sure. A lot of these fashion shops, they had hundreds of women, seamstresses, yeah.
Elyse: Everything was done by hand, and there’s no machines. She said, "Everything I want to do is for comfort and simple elegance." She said this was her motto, comfort and simple elegance. Loose clothes, shorter skirts, no corsets, and neutral colors. No color. No color in her clothing.
Annie: Okay. So it’s really interesting, because I’ve watched The New Look, which is [00:34:00] about Dior as well. But she is featured very prominently in that series. And it’s really interesting to see that Dior was, I mean, the things he designed were beautiful, but it was women with, they looked like, you know, bees. They had no waist. And very f… like, round, beautiful things.
Elyse: That was the whole return to past, in the past, post-World War II, and the femininity coming back out again. It’s very interesting. They hated each other.
Annie: I haven’t… so far in the series, they haven’t met. He sees her across the room at one point and gives her a dirty look.
But it, I haven’t, they haven’t explored that bit. But it’s very striking to see that her stuff is, yeah, it’s like a feminized version of the jacket that men wo- wear.
But it only suit, just like Dior’s stuff, it only suits certain types of women. I mean, you can’t get away with wearing this stuff if you’re heavy at all. It wouldn’t work at all.
Elyse: No. Not even a classic [00:35:00] Chanel suit, unfortunately. Too boxy, you know? It really is, yeah.
Annie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would make you look like a massive rectangle.
Love Lost and Independence
Elyse: By the time we get to World War I, she is already on her way to being a successful business woman. All right? And she wasn’t kidding when she said that she would reimburse the money. She did. Even before the end of World War I, she had made enough money to reimburse this man that was indeed her love, the love of her life, because she wanted to prove that she would never be owned by a man.
It’s really fascinating, all of this. And the tragedy of her life was that in 1919, her lover, this man nicknamed Boy, died in a car accident. But it’s a little bit more complicated than that, because even though they were lovers, and he had set [00:36:00] her up in these shops and she had an apartment, he was an English aristocrat, and he was forced to get married, and he could not marry her.
Annie: Ah.
Elyse: Now, who knows if she would’ve wanted to, but he couldn’t. So in fact, in the year before, his family forced him to get married, and he died in a car accident, leaving her going to meet up with his new wife.
Annie: Hmm. Okay.
Elyse: That didn’t keep her from later on having other lovers. She used the lovers as a way of vehicling her life. I mean, it just became something she did.
Jersey Revolution
Elyse: But by the time she had gotten to 1919, she started to really do things that were really innovative. For one thing, because there was a lack of fabric due to all of the things that had happened during World War I, she looked around her for inspiration for making new things, and she decided that simple knitted [00:37:00] fabric was useful.
And so, interestingly enough, even though even I associate a lot of her design with things that are relatively boxy and straight, what she designed at the end of the 1910s and into the 1920s was much more soft and jersey-like, you know? What we call in French a marinière, a sailor. She designed that for the first time as a woman’s top.
Annie: Oh, I see. Okay.
Elyse: And these very loose-legged pants that were very nice. You didn’t have to iron, you know? It’s using all this jersey.
Annie: I still like that look myself.
Elyse: I love that look, you know? So she created what she called the new silhouette, and it really took hold.
Roaring Twenties Expansion
Elyse: Going into the 1920s, she’s in her 40s. And she is really, really, really rich now, and she’s successful, and her ideas really suit the time. This is the in-between the two wars. Women really wear shorter skirts. They want loose clothing. They don’t want anything restrictive. [00:38:00] Women are starting to leave the house and go out into the work world more and things like that. This is when she rents a mansion on Rue Faubourg – Saint-Honoré.
Annie: Yeah, Rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré where a lot of fashion houses are today. In Paris, we’re talking Paris now.
Elyse: And she rents three houses, one next to the other. So not only does she keep her headquarters at 31 Rue Cambon, which is still…
Annie: Which is really close. It’s right off of Rue du Boulevard Saint-Honoré.
Elyse: She also has these three other houses, she has work done outside of the city, but this is where all of everything takes place. Her shows take place there, all of the displays, the different styles.
(Mid-roll ad spot)
Creating Chanel No 5
Elyse: And she becomes more and more and more ambitious, and she realizes that she wants to do more than just create clothing, which I find really fascinating. So she gets the idea, and I don’t know really how.
Somewhere along the way she decides that what she wants to do, because she’s ambitious, she [00:39:00] really has ambition to be greatly wealthy and to be greatly powerful, she sees that women are still wearing a lot of perfume and using a lot of jewelry, even if the clothing is simple.
And she decides to do something that had not been done before, and that is to go to a perfume maker and have a perfume made that has her name on it. Because in the past, and we talked a little bit about this when we did the podcast about perfume, perfumes were made by perfumers, but they weren’t associated with a clothing designer.
And so she goes to a very famous perfume maker, and she says, "I want you to make a perfume for me, and I’m going to sell it under my name, under the name of Coco Chanel." And they take the noses, or the people, of course, who do the mixing of everything. They go to this family that’s called the Wertheimer or Wertheimer family, who are known for several generations as being manufacturers of perfume, and they make perfumes [00:40:00] for different brands. That’s the way usually it has worked, that you ask a brand that asks for a perfume that’s like this. And she said she wants this, she wants something that is, when you smell it, you know it’s for modern women.
I find that interesting.
Annie: If somebody gave me that as a, you know, "Design something that, when you smell it, you know it’s for modern women," I would not know what to do.
Elyse: You would not know what to do. Well, that’s because neither you nor I is a nose or a manufacturer of perfume. And it turns out that, she keeps checking with them. They, I know this is how it works, they keep giving her these things to smell, to decide. She says, "I want something floral, but with no frills." And this is the same concept she has for everything, floral but no frills, feminine without being frilly. She says, "I want it to be a woman’s perfume, flowery but not overpowering." And so it is the fifth example that they give her that she says, [00:41:00] "Yes, that is the one I want," and that is how Chanel Number 5 came to be.
Annie: Ah, okay. So they, he gave her five possible design… Well, they improved upon the thing, and the fifth iteration was the right one. Okay. Okay.
Elyse: So in 1921, she is the first fashion designer, at least in our world of Western Europe, France, and whatever, to license a perfume in her name.
And so that is when Chanel Number 5 was born. Of course, later on, there are other perfumes that were added into it. And it turns out that the perfume is a huge success immediately. It’s really incredible to see just how rich it made her in the 1920s.
Perfume Profits and Power
Elyse: Now, the problem with this, and I say that with usually question marks or not little italics around the word question, is that the perfume was produced by the Wertheimer family who owned this perfume [00:42:00] factory. And in order to have the perfume, she signed over part of the profits to them because they are the ones who produced it, and this is simply what was normal for perfume. It was a business arrangement, right?
Annie: Yeah, it was a business arrangement.
Elyse: So she received 35% of the profit. They received the rest of the profit.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: By the end of the 1920s, she was a millionaire. She had a house outside of Paris. She had her houses inside Paris. And she had moved on through a series of other lovers, all of whom were aristocrats. Only aristocrats. Thank you very much. Only.
Annie: Pas de bouseux pour, Coco Chanel.
Elyse: No, no, no, no, no.
Tweeds Pearls and Black Dress
Elyse: And it turns out that in the early 1930s, since she seemed to have a tendency to like the English, her next important lover was a duke.
Annie: Ooh. Hmm.
Elyse: Duke of Westminster, thank you, a cousin of the King of… [00:43:00] And one of the things that he inspired in her designs was tweeds, and using the textiles and the tweeds and the country style, which she apparently loved.
So he was somebody who was very important for her at this particular time in her life. And then she created a new motto, which was, "Fashion for active women." I mean, she’s, all these things that we take for granted today that were so absolutely unusual before World War II, you know?
So, we’re coming through into the 1930s. She is the head of an empire. She is even asked to do designs of clothing for movies and for theater. And it turns out, to her great surprise, more and more of her money comes from her perfume.
Annie: Yeah, that’s what I have heard, that she made even a lot more money from the perfume.
Elyse: A lot more money from the perfume. So you can imagine, since that’s only 35% of the profit, given how much was sold, right, yeah.
Annie: Yeah, the other family who, the creators, I guess, were also wildly [00:44:00] rewarded.
Elyse: And she decides to do something else. And that she’s going to start making jewelry. But she doesn’t want to make high-end Bulgari, Cartier or, you know, millions of dollars jewelry. She decides that what women want is to have simple clothes and lots of stuff that is jewelry.
So she makes high-end costume jewelry. She has it made for her. She designs. She loves pearls. She always wore pearls. And she goes to these designers, and she works with them to create what really is exactly that, which is, like, very good high-end costume jewelry, things to wear around your neck, things to wear as bracelets, broach pins to put on things. And this is the moment when she invents the perfect little black dress.
Annie: Aha, yes.
Elyse: Which even I remember growing up was one of those, you don’t have your little black dress in your closet? You know. I guess I do. I mean, somewhere.
Annie: [00:45:00] I’m sure.
Elyse: But this was, her idea was keep it simple and use stuff as accessories.
Annie: Right, right. Yeah.
Elyse: So the little black dress, which apparently shocked a great many people in Parisian fashion world, because black was just associated with mourning.
Annie: Sure, yeah. It’s normally what you put on when you go to a funeral.
Elyse: And here she was going against the trends, basically, you know? And then we come to the debacle of the late 1930s and into World War II.
In 1939, she was how old? She was 39, 49. She was in her middle, late 50s.
Annie: Yeah.
Strikes Prejudice and War
Elyse: Well, it turns out that the other side of Gabrielle Coco Chanel is a whole lot of prejudice and racism.
And two things happen that bring this out in the public. In the 1930s, because there was a more or less socialist government in France, there was more [00:46:00] organization of workers to have decent working conditions. By the middle of the 1930s, she had 4,000 workers.
Annie: Wow, it’s a big company by then.
Elyse: That’s a big company. And she had over 28,000 orders at any given time, and her workers, who were almost exclusively women, went out on strike several times for decent wages. Apparently, they were not paid very well, and the working conditions were not very good. And she never, ever forgave them, ever, for the fact that they did this to her. They did this to her. I mean, I’m putting, you know, this is… this is what happened to…
Annie: Well, to her, yeah.
Elyse: So we come to 1939, and it turns out she has, through her aristocratic friends, whether they were in it in her or not, she has developed certain tendencies to appreciate a more Nazi-like regime. And it goes along with some of the aristocrats that she hung out with. This lifelong friend, Etienne [00:47:00] Balsan, it turns out that his chateau winds up being one of the headquarters of the Gestapo during World War II.
Collaboration and Espionage
Elyse: So in 1939, she decides, with the war imminent, and she can see that it’s about to happen, she does something absolutely astounding. She shuts down her business. She fires every last worker that she has. She decides that she’s just going to live off of the money from the perfume and whatever jewelry, and that she’s not going to worry about all of these people, and she’s just going to worry about taking care of herself.
Annie: Yeah, that’s a major bit of the plot in The New Look.
Elyse: And she starts making friends with some of the people who are really the heads of the new Vichy regime.
Annie: Right. So this is, it confused people because in World War II, if you kept working, you would make stuff to be used by the Nazis and by Nazi sympathizers. And so [00:48:00] she used the idea that, "Oh, oh, no, I closed my shop. I was one of the good ones because I wouldn’t sell to the Germans," when she really liked the Germans, really.
Elyse: She really liked the Germans, and she said later on that she did it as vengeance.
Annie: So she closed the shop as vengeance against the workers, while at the same time being very friendly with a whole bunch of the people who had invaded Paris.
Elyse: And she does something else, or she tries to do something else. In 1939, the Wertheimer family, who owned the rest of the percentages of the money from her perfumes, she had several by this time, not just Chanel Number Five, they happened to be Jewish family. And they left, luckily for them. They went to the US. They went to New York, and they did something extremely intelligent and were able to because they were a relatively wealthy family. They put their business in the name of a very trusted [00:49:00] non-Jewish friend, before the Vichy laws came out that said that Jewish families could not own any businesses. And what happened was that they fled in 1939, and she had the audacity, which is at the point where it got into turning into vinegar even for me reading about this, she went to the Vichy government to see if she could get back the full company, that is 100% of the profits from her perfume, saying that they were a Jewish family, that they didn’t deserve to have this anymore, and that she was the original inventor of this perfume. And it turns out that she didn’t know that they had already transferred the ownership to somebody who was not Jewish, so that exactly that could not happen.
Annie: Right, right, and that’s also a major plot in The New Look, if you watch it.
Elyse: Basically, it didn’t really make her suffer too much because she was still very wealthy. And but what she does do is interesting. Shutting down the business, she moves into a [00:50:00] suite in The Ritz, the fabulous Ritz Hotel, and it turns out that The Ritz is also the headquarters for German intelligence.
Annie: Right. There’s a chilling image in The New Look where you see the statue of Joan of Arc, the golden statue of Joan of Arc, right by The Ritz, and there’s Nazi banners everywhere. I just… It makes you die inside to see that, you know? It’s just chilling. But it’s reality. It happened.
Elyse: It’s reality. Yeah. And so what does she do? Since she can no longer hang out with her Duke of Westminster, she takes on a new lover who is a German baron who is stationed and living in The Ritz, and who happens to be the head of German intelligence.
And they give her a job to do, and they actually give her a code number and name. And they tell her… And how they do this, I haven’t seen the series, but I know that this, I mean, this all of this is, of course, extremely verified. They ask her to take [00:51:00] advantage of all the connections that she has to get involved back with some of the British aristocracy who are very Nazi friendly, and there was a whole lot of them that were. I mean, they were very pro-Nazis. There were members, everyone knew it, it was an open secret that there were parts of the royal family that were not necessarily unhappy about the Germans and the Nazis taking over. And they wanted her to use these people in her connections to get to Churchill, not to kill him, but to see if they could arrange to negotiate a separate peace with Churchill, and influence him.
And it turns out that one of the women that she knew who was English, British, who she thought was a close friend, and that she was telling all of this to because she was asking for her help, she actually told Churchill and the government what she was up to. And so it never came to fruit. I mean, she never got to do this, that she was…it would [00:52:00] never have happened with Churchill anyway, but the fact that she even was willing to do it and try is just quite amazing to me now.
Annie: Right, because in the series anyway, the Germans are always telling her, "In exchange for this, you get your company back."
Elyse: Right, which of course was not possible anyway, and they were lying to her because they couldn’t have done it no matter what.There is a book that was published in 2011 that is called Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War, and it was published in 2011 after sealed documents were finally released, and it was written by a journalist, an American journalist, who in fact had worked in the Secret Service and who says very clearly that it was because he had access to all these documents that they could prove all of this, that it actually happened.
Because just what happened was that as soon as World War II ended, they did try to bring her up [00:53:00] to trial as a collaborator. And in fact, in 1944, she was brought in front of a trial in Paris, but within less than a week she was released, and they say that it was because Churchill put pressure on the French because he knew that some of the people that were in his extended family and part of the royal family would have their names smeared, and they did not want it to happen. And the papers were kept secret, so the papers were not released for 50 years. And it was after that, that it was possible to actually have access and see what they did.
So she was Agent 7124, and she was actually an agent for the Germans during World War II.
Exile and Return to Paris
Elyse: In 1944, as soon as she was released from the trial as a collaborator, she left and she self-exiled herself to Switzerland. She still had money. I mean, she never did not have any money.
Annie: Right, right. So she, in [00:54:00] the series, she complains bitterly that she doesn’t have enough money, but she lives in a chateau and has people and… Yeah, yeah.
Elyse: She lives in a chateau, yeah. I mean, she kept… The fact is that ironically, even though she was a game changer in the concept of what women could wear, her real impact was in the perfume. There’s still Chanel fashion, and there’s still a look that’s a Chanel look, and it’s very much a kind of, you know, stagish kind of upper class thing.
Although, the designers who now work for the House of Chanel have done some really beautiful things. I mean, it’s no longer her, you know, that’s in charge. So she just went off to Lausanne in Switzerland in 1944 with her German baron.
Yeah. So in the series, he disappears for a while, but then he reappears. Yeah, he reappears. I mean, what’s fascinating to me is that, by that time, she’s not a young woman anymore, you know? And she still is able to have all of these lovers, one after the other. I mean, she had to have, in spite of how horrible she seems to be as a human, for many reasons to me, [00:55:00] she still was able to keep all these lovers, you know?
And even beyond the age when you imagine this actually happening. And some of her aristocratic friends never left her side, in spite of all of this.
So she stayed in Switzerland for 10 years, and in 1954, she had kept one space, the 31 Rue Cambon, and she came back to Paris and moved into the suite again in the Ritz, the one that she had lived in during World War II. Basically people, I don’t think they paid much attention to her anymore in terms of… You know, she still had the fashion house. It was given to other designers under her name to work. She was still rich with the money from her perfume and from her bag and accessories, the famous Chanel bag, which I actually think is pretty awful, but that’s my personal opinion about it.
Annie: I can’t even picture what it looks like.
Elyse: It’s padded, and it’s got this chain.
Annie: The gold chain. Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, I get it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Elyse: Yeah. It’s just not my thing. I mean, just, I don’t know. I’d rather see her clothes than see that bag [00:56:00] somehow.
Annie: Sure, sure.
Elyse: And so she came back, and she came back, can you imagine, in 1954, she was 71 years old? And she comes back, and she reenters, for the last few years of her life, the fashion world again.
Annie: Right. She really pushed it. In the series, they show her really being pushy.
Elyse: And she was very, very, very outspoken about how much she hated absolutely everything. She hated Dior’s fashion, that she said brought back all of the constraints to a woman with the tiny little waspy waistline and the full skirts. I think it was more a rivalry.
But then, in her last years, in the 1960s, until she actually died in 1971, the thing she hated the most was hippie time and mini skirts and long hair, and lots of color and lots of chaos, and everything that was not staid, very structured, upper class, aristocratic look. She [00:57:00] talked about it all the time. She said it was disgusting and that everybody looked sick and that they had never, like they’d never washed.
Legacy and Final Reflections
Elyse: It’s a shame that she had the politics that she had, because she was actually a really fascinating woman. And she spent her entire life escaping from the poor lower class that she came out of, you know?
And everything that she associated with it was the worst. She even made a comment, I have to say, I have to put this in because I found this extraordinary. She said she didn’t hate Jews if they were rich, like the Rothschilds.
Annie: Oh, my God.
Elyse: So it gives you an idea, really, of what her obsessions were, you know?
So it’s kind of strange. So we can really thank her for a lot of things in terms of the emancipation of certain elements of fashion and what women can do, and even her very, very amoral, if you want to call it, life, her very free life, you know?
Choosing to have lovers, to not have children.
Annie: Yeah, I don’t know how that, she [00:58:00] managed that, having so many guys in her life.
Elyse: Well, I can imagine. I can guess, you know? No, we’re not going to go into that. But I think that she was someone who was, in a lot of ways, really ahead of her time in terms of the idea of what a woman can be and what a woman can do, and I think some of her design is really interesting, and I’m very glad she helped create Chanel Number 5. And it’s very strange to see how someone can have such a good side and such a bad side at the same time.
Annie: Yeah. And in the series, in The New Look, she is portrayed brilliantly by Juliette Binoche. Absolutely brilliantly. I have no interest in fashion, really. As a personal thing, I don’t care. I’m the sort of person, if I find an L.L.Bean shirt that I like, I will buy the same one in five colors, and I’m done for a while.
Elyse: It’s interesting, because I like the idea of the little black dress, you know?
Annie: Right. But I can see [00:59:00] how her input into fashion has really influenced a lot of things in France. You see her stuff in a lot of places. And she really, like, she’s the classy one. Like, you know, classy women will wear Chanel.
Elyse: And it’s usually, it’s not frilly. It’s not… It’s very sedate. It’s very understated, you know? It’s understated, right?
Annie: Right. Yeah, understated but expensive and classy and well-made and all of that.
In the show, it’s really extraordinary how she completely denies having anything to do with the Nazis when she clearly did. Like, I’m like, come on.
Elyse: So this is the very strange, very fascinating saga of Miss Gabrielle Chanel.
Annie: Very interesting. I did not realize that she started out in the Corrèze. Okay, I’m surprised. Yes.
Elyse: Yeah. Yes, she did.
Annie: Bec ause she really, [01:00:00] I mean, by the time she was famous, nobody would have guessed that she was from such a background. Because she was really very proper and, yeah, aristocratic in her being. She was not an aristocrat, but she acted like it.
Elyse: She learned fast, and she knew what she wanted.
Annie: And she was very smart, and I’m sure she was very smart and hardworking and all of that. I mean, we got to give it to her. She did things that most of us cannot.
Elyse: She died in her flat in the Ritz at the age of 87.
Annie: Oh, wow.
Elyse: And she is buried in Lausanne.
Annie: Ah, Lausanne, where she had her chateau, yeah.
Elyse: Yep. She is not buried in France, which is quite interesting, I think, you know.
Annie: Wonderful. I learned so much, thank you so much, Elyse. You hit it out of the park yet again.
Elyse: Oh, I just… What an interesting, fascinating, somewhat not agreeable story. I mean, but, you know, she was a fascinating woman.
Annie: And she lived through both [01:01:00] world wars.
Elyse: And she lived through, and she came out of what was basically, practically archaic times, you know?
Annie: Oh, yeah. Just getting rid of the accent she must have had. I would have loved to hear her speaking as a kid.
Elyse: I wouldn’t have even known what fork to pick up, you know? I mean, that kind of thing. But it is true that she came through, she was a woman who helped revolutionize idea of how women needed to be and how they needed to act. It’s just a shame that she had the politics that she had.
Annie: And in the movie, in the series, she actually is very close to her sister’s son that she raises like her own.
Elyse: The person who inherited her fortune is her grand niece.
It was her nephew’s daughter, and they are still the people who run Chanel. I mean, they are the people who actually are the gérant. They own the company.
Annie: Yeah.
Thank you, Elyse.
Elyse: You are welcome, Annie.
Annie: Au revoir.
Elyse: Au revoir
[01:02:00]
Copyright
Annie Sargent: The join us in France Travel Podcast is written, hosted, and produced by Annie Sargent and copyright 2026 by Addicted to France. It is released under a Creative Comments, attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license.[01:03:00] [01:04:00]
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Episode PageCategory: French History