The Real Story Behind Coco Chanel And Christian Dior's Rivalry And WWII Involvement
If you know anything about fashion — and even if you don’t — you’ve probably heard of Coco Chanel and Chrisian Dior. They are best known for their enduring brand names and an epic rivalry that overshadowed their complicated personal lives. Despite their differences though, during WWII both fashionistas found themselves embroiled in a fight to bring their family members home from the Nazis.
Murky waters
You may have seen The New Look, a TV series on Apple TV+ focusing on Chanel and Dior’s involvement in World War II. Whether you agree or disagree with the show’s interpretations of those famous fashion giants, there’s no denying it raises some questions.
And it’s not surprising, considering how murky the waters are when it comes to Chanel’s and Dior’s allegiances in the war. Still, one thing is for sure: both designers had their families threatened by the Nazi army.
A meteoric rise
But how did fashion designers get involved with the war? Well, besides how WWII affected virtually everyone at the time, both designers were massively influential. Their rise to power was nothing short of meteoric.
Let’s start with Gabrielle — or as she would later be known, Coco — Chanel, portrayed in The New Look by Juliette Binoche. The origin of the name, much like much of her life, is shrouded in mystery, but one theory is that it comes from songs she performed as a cafe singer.
Social networking
Chanel was also a prolific socialite, which helped her build a business from the ground up. Her relationships with famously rich partners such as Arthur “Boy” Capel helped fund her ventures, which included first a small hat business in Paris, and then a sportswear boutique.
Chanel’s new applications for established fashions, such as her success reintroducing the Little Black Dress, or LBD, as a fashion item— at a time when black was a color widely associated only with mourning— assured her future. But it was a famous fragrance that really set her career rolling.
The smell of success
If you guessed the now-household name Chanel No.5, you’d be right on the money. Until Chanel, no fashion designer had ever introduced a fragrance, but all that changed in 1921.
Chanel enlisted the help of successful perfumer Ernest Beaux to mix the popular scent, and partnered with several businessmen — including department store owner Théophile Bader and cosmetic specialists the Wertheimer brothers — for its sale and distribution.
The upheaval of war
Still, Chanel got the short end of the stick in the contract, at least in her opinion. The partnership only granted her 10 percent of the royalties from fragrance sales, but such was the perfume’s popularity that even those numbers earnt her a fortune.
And then came World War II. The landscape of daily living changed considerably, let alone the upheaval for many business-owners. Chanel was no exception; she closed her fashion business in 1939.
A poor reputation
To say Chanel’s activities during WWII were controversial is an understatement. In 2011 The New York Times described her as “a wretched human being. Anti-Semitic, homophobic, social climbing, opportunistic [and] ridiculously snobbish.”
That certainly lines up with how most accounts paint her. So is there any truth to this reputation? As with much of Chanel, it’s hard to say for sure, but history doesn’t speak kindly of her personal life.
Mixing with the Nazi elite?
For example, in 1940 Chanel lived in the Ritz Paris hotel when it came under Nazi occupancy, and she allegedly walked among the Nazi elite there. Lisa Chaney, the author of Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life, offered some insight to Time magazine in 2024.
“Chanel definitely socialized with them,” Chaney said of the Nazis. Still, she maintained that “there is no proof that she was in any way actually a Nazi by herself.” Other people have different views, though.
Born of necessity?
According to Justine Picardie, who wrote Coco Chanel: The Legend and The Life, Chanel had nothing to do with the Nazis except when she wanted something. But what could she possibly need from the soldiers?
That’s where things get complicated. You see, Chanel’s nephew André was a member of the French army and found himself captured by the German forces. Apparently, he was a driving force behind Chanel’s decisions.
Gestapo spy
As shown in The New Look, Chanel is infamous for her relationship with a Gestapo spy called Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, otherwise known as Spatz. This much is true, but some experts debate the details.
The Netflix series paints Chanel as a reluctant collaborator, someone who only became intimate with Spatz to help free André in 1943. Still, Picardie insists they have a lot of these details somewhat muddled.
Was it a plan?
Picardie says that the Spatz-Chanel affair actually began years earlier in 1941 as part of a premeditated plan. In 2024 she told BBC Culture, “I think she would've done anything to save [André]. And that is when she starts having an affair [with Spatz].”
Experts largely agree this was Chanel’s motivation, and it worked too — though her machinations did take 18 months to come to fruition. All the same, after that time André was free thanks to wheels greased by Chanel.
Did power come first?
So does that mean Chanel was in favor of or opposed to the Nazi regime? Rhonda Garelick, the author of 2014’s Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History believes the former.
“Patriotism had always meant less to her than power,” Garelick said. And without her couture house, Chanel still held significant sway over the upper echelons. Did you know she counted Winston Churchill among her friends?
Friends in high places
Chanel and Churchill shared a common buddy: the Duke of Westminster. Churchill was a regular visitor to Paris, so he got close to Chanel. They even shared a passion for fishing, which they sometimes enjoyed together.
As the Prime Minister of the U.K., Churchill was an influential ally for anyone in power, and the Germans knew Chanel had connections with him. They even tried to use this friendship to their advantage on occasion.
A message for Churchill
Picardie told Time that the Nazi elite had “hoped [Chanel] would get a message to Churchill, saying that there were people within the German high command who had become profoundly disillusioned by Hitler.”
She was supposed to meet Churchill in Madrid, but those plans fell through. Thankfully, that meant that the whole plan was a bust, so they couldn’t use Chanel as a spy.
Legal recourse
And while the Nazis were using Chanel, she was leveraging their power in turn. Remember how we mentioned her unhappiness with the Chanel No.5 contract? She fought to overturn the deal.
She used the Nazi policy that Jewish people weren’t allowed to own property in an attempt to grasp full control over Chanel No.5. Her argument had been that her Wertheimer partners were Jewish.
Resistance role
Whether Chanel’s actions were motivated by unhappiness with the business deal or antisemitism is anyone’s guess. But regardless, her attempts ultimately failed, because the Werheimers no longer had shares in Chanel No.5!
Perhaps Chanel was just looking out for number one instead, because she also played a role in the Resistance. According to Picardie, that’s something that The New Look, well, overlooked.
Cellar network
Chanel owned a Riviera villa in the south of France called La Pausa, designed by an architect called Robert Streitz. During WWII, he was also a member of the Allied resistance.
Streitz knew the extensive cellar system beneath Chanel’s villa would be perfect for his movement, and she let him take it over for his cause. It turned out to be an effective hideout.
Hidden transmitter
Not only could resistance members hide Jewish refugees who’d made it across the French border in those cellars, they even installed a hidden transmitter to send coded communiqués to other resistance cells.
In 2023 Harper’s Bazaar revealed that after the war Chanel had been listed as a member of the official French Resistance. She was also listed in a file of Allied intelligence providers codenamed ERIC.
Poet and lover
Then there’s Pierre Reverdy, a poet and one-time lover of Chanel. He was an involved Resistance member and close personal friend to the fashion designer, both during the war and after it. Was she involved because of him?
Speaking of the liberation of France, even when WWII was over, no one was sure whose side Chanel was on, if she even had one. There were suspicions though: she was pulled in for questioning in 1944.
Released without charge
The Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, or FFI, wanted to know about Chanel’s links with the Nazis. Yet she was released without charge, a move which some people attribute to her friends in high places.
It’s alleged that Chanel’s friendship with Churchill had helped smooth over any doubts regarding her allegiances. Whatever the truth of where her true feelings lay, perhaps her role in the Resistance had also given her some influence?
Swapping fighting for fashion
As for Christian Dior, portrayed by Ben Mendelsohn in The New Look, his career began during WWII. It took a drastic turn from his initial start as an officer in the French forces, though.
In 1940 France fell under German rule, and at that point Dior hung up his uniform in favor of a career in couture. His first position was working under the famous designer Lucien Lelong.
Clothing the Nazis
Times were just as hard for fashion houses under the Nazis as they were for other businesses. If they were allowed to remain open at all, they had to dedicate their work to the Reich.
As a result, even though Dior got the chance to work alongside future fashion giant Pierre Balmain, they were both required to provide clothes for the loved ones of the Nazi elite.
Sister agent
You can imagine how difficult it was for a former member of the French army to work under enemy rule, but despite his reluctance Dior had little choice. Instead, his family fought back in other ways.
Catherine Dior, Christian’s younger sister, worked for the Allied resistance as an intelligence agent. She signed up in 1941 and used her brother’s apartment for anti-Nazi meetings with other Resistance members.
Arrested and tortured
The Gestapo arrested Catherine in 1944 and tortured her, as described in Picardie’s book, Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture. Despite this vicious treatment though, she didn’t give up her allies.
Picardie wrote, “Catherine’s responses to the barrage of questioning evidently protected her colleagues in the Resistance, as well as her brother, for none of them were arrested.” Apparently, the physical abuse inflicted upon her was so brutal that it left her infertile.
Twist of fate
So in an ironic twist of fate, Dior found himself in a position similar to his future fashion competitor. The Nazis held one of his family members and he had to fight to get them back.
In his line of work, Dior had built up a network of contacts in the Nazi regime which he called upon to help his sister… all to no avail. Instead, he found assistance in his French-Swedish diplomat friend, Raoul Nordling.
Deported to Ravensbrück
Nordling eventually managed to use his influence with the Swedish state to protect Catherine, but it already seemed too late. She’d been deported to Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp, where she was in all likelihood marked for death.
In 1945 Catherine was one of the prisoners who was scheduled for “evacuation,” which is widely thought to be another term for the death march. If that’s the case, she was saved in the nick of time.
Saved from the camp
Before she was “evacuated” Soviet troops liberated the concentration camp, and Catherine was returned to her brother. Yet when he met her at the train station, she was — understandably — a completely different woman.
Picardie said that when Dior saw her “such was her emaciation that he did not recognise her at first.” In the following years, Dior would take inspiration from his beloved sister to bring his own cosmetics brand to new levels.
The House of Dior
Dior established his own couture house in 1946 ; by 1947 he even had his own fragrance to rival Chanel’s own called “Miss Dior.” It’s thought that this name was a tribute to Catherine.
The year 1947 was also the moment Dior released his New Look collection, from which the Netflix series takes its name. The new lines were a massive success at the time, and they raised more than a few eyebrows.
New Look
For the duration of WWII shoulder pads and short skirts had been all the rage, but Dior’s new clothing flew in the face of all that. Instead, he went for fuller skirts, smaller shoulders and narrower waists, completely defying the conventions of contemporary fashion.
The collection got its name from Carmel Snow, who was Harper Bazaar’s editor-in-chief at the time. He announced that Dior had designed the next “New Look.” The phrase went down in fashion history.
Back on the map
Dior’s fashions put Paris back on the couture map, even though there was opposition to this “New Look.” Some people thought his use of material was wasteful, given that the world was still recovering from WWII.
Others believed that Dior’s more sensually shaped forms were anti-feminist, and they resisted his designs on that basis. Yet the overwhelming public popularity of the New Look took the world by storm all the same.
A stay in Switzerland
Despite Chanel avoiding any charges of collaboration, she still left France for Switzerland following the country’s liberation from the Nazi regime, where she lay low for eight years. Then in 1954 she returned to the fashion world, apparently because she was “dying of boredom.”
Of course, there were also rumors that Dior’s rising success in the industry had been the true driving force behind Chanel’s return. Either way, you’ll never guess who financed her comeback: it was Pierre Wertheimer once again.
Polar opposites
We know from history that Chanel had an epic rivalry with Dior, and it wasn’t just the financial competition. Their aesthetics were polar opposites in many ways, something about which Chanel was very vocal.
Dior’s clothes designs championed style over comfort, while Chanel put comfort above all else. She apparently considered his designs somewhat sexist, claiming “Dior doesn’t dress women. He upholsters them.”
A one-sided rivalry?
For Dior’s part, he never said a bad word against Chanel or her designs, at least not in public. So perhaps the rivalry was slightly more one-sided than most people assume!
That wouldn’t be much of a surprise, though. Chanel was famously catty about other designers, and in some cases — as with her remarks against Cristóbal Balenciaga, for instance — she seemed just downright misandric: that is, biased against men.
An enduring legacy
Chanel’s success in design and fragrance often overshadows her more unsavory personality traits and past habits. But that’s not the only thing that has given her couture house an enduring legacy since she passed away in 1971.
A large portion of the brand’s longevity comes from her successor, Karl Lagerfeld. He took over in 1983 and until 2019 he remained in that position, keeping Chanel alive, so to speak.
Life after Lagerfeld
Since Lagerfeld’s death, the fashion house has changed hands a couple of times. The rightful successor was Lagerfeld’s colleague of 30 years, Virginie Viard. She remained its creative director until 2021.
In turn, Viard has since passed the torch on to Leena Nair, who is Chanel’s current Global Chief Executive Officer. Under her guidance, alongside expanding its products Chanel is moving towards more eco-friendly cosmetics.
Yves takes over
Dior actually passed away much earlier than Chanel: he suffered from a weak heart, and a third cardiac arrest claimed his life in 1957. His passing left the Dior without leadership, a situation which could have brought down the house.
Yet House Dior veteran Yves Saint Laurent, who Dior himself had recruited into the company, was appointed its artistic director. He proved to be the correct choice; doubtless his work since would have made his predecessor proud.
Bohemian faux pas
Dior had set a precedent for the direction he wanted the fashion house to go in, and Saint Laurent delivered in spades, staying true to the original vision, but adding a touch of comfort to the designs.
Still, over time Saint Laurent’s ambition saw him over-reach, and he started making mistakes. His largest was his 1960 Bohemian line, which received harsh criticism from, among others, Women's Wear Daily.
Bohan to the rescue
Saint Laurent was called into the French army, and House Dior eagerly waved him off. His successor, Marc Bohan, took over in 1960. Today he is widely credited with saving the label from disaster.
Bohan led Dior through some of its most successful phases, introducing the Christian Dior Homme men’s clothing line and the “Black Moon” watch. Notably, under his leadership, Dior dressed several VIPS at the 1981 wedding of the future King Charles III to Diana, Princess of Wales.
Maintaining the brand
Throughout the years, Dior has remained a big name in fashion even if its lead designers have changed many times. Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, and Raf Simons are among Dior’s various house heads.
One thing that has remained is Dior’s dedication to providing fashion for both men and women; so much so, that they currently have two artistic directors. Maria Grazia Chiuri leads the women’s division, and Kim Jones heads up the male designs.
At the top of haute couture
Times have changed and so have tastes, but both these fashion powerhouses have endured not only the test of time but also WWII. Not many haute couture houses can claim that.
Even in the modern era, Chanel and Dior are household names to the extent that we’re still watching TV shows about them today. And no doubt their legacy will endure for years to come.