Were it not for the Nazi collaboration, it would be hard not to warm to the woman who declared “How I loathe passion! What an abomination” and hoped she had “helped kill off” eccentricity, even before you got to the talent that would see her rise from impoverished, brutalised, motherless child raised by nuns to global icon who built a business empire and changed how women dress for ever.
Coco Chanel Unbuttoned, a film-length documentary about the life of the designer, concentrates as you might expect rather more on the fashion side of things than the involvement of Gabrielle (as she was born) with the Germans in wartime Paris. Facilitated by commentary from various experts in fashion generally and Chanel specifically – biographers, former assistants, friends and models – the film works through her indubitably fascinating life in stern chronological order. From that unhappy beginning we see her escape the dutiful life the nuns had planned for her by moving to the garrison town of Moulins and becoming, effectively, a courtesan (photographs of Gabrielle in full Edwardian fig bring home the scale of her eventual influence brilliantly). Those years may have resulted in the birth of a son, Andre, passed off as her sister’s child. It is a measure of the thoroughness with which Chanel obscured the facts of her life that no one has ever been able to confirm it.
