Coco Chanel appears in countless guises, as befits the greatest-ever queen of fashion. She has been revealed in turn as the courtesan lover of Picasso, Stravinsky and the Duke of Westminster, a pioneer of cross-dressing, a feminist hero, a Nazi collaborator, and most recently a probable French resistance operative, to say nothing of her roles as the inventor of the tan, the diet and “the little black dress”. And all of these contrasting Chanels, it turns out, are pretty much true.
Now a new BBC film is to invite the real Coco to finally step forward in a documentary that unmasks her as an arch opportunist and gifted influencer, a woman who steered herself from poverty to great wealth with the most effective piece of consumer branding the world had yet seen.
