Dior, Chanel & the politics of fashion
The New Look on Apple+ reveals how fashion and politics are inseparably knit together.
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It’s Paris 1955, and renowned designer Christian Dior faces a lecture hall full of students peppering him with questions about his refreshing — even scandalous — 1947 debut collection as a solo designer. One young woman stalls the momentum of the event and asks why during the war did he continue to dress the wives and girlfriends of Nazis when Coco Chanel shut down her fashion house in an act of defiance. Worried, the lecture facilitator asks the students to keep design questions, but Dior graciously responds, flashing back to his experiences in Nazi-occupied Paris.
Meanwhile, on the eve of her first collection since 1936, in a salon across town, Chanel jokes with a room of French and American journalists about how she feels sorry for Dior and the students who have to put up with him. So begins the first episode of The New Look on Apple+.
The New Look dives into the complicated wartime story of Christian Dior and Coco Chanel in the aftermath of a WWII Nazi-occupied Paris. Moreover, it also offers unique insight into the politics of fashion.
“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.” — Mark Twain
Let’s drop all pretense and say what we all believe but won’t say aloud: What you look like matters.
Since humans started wearing clothing, we have used fashion to distinguish social rank, wealth, tribal affiliation, educational status and cultural values. Monarchs throughout history passed sumptuary laws limiting purple or yellow dyes to those of the ruling classes. Religious leaders were set apart from their followers by wearing special collars, robes, and hats. Even the cap and gown you wore for high school graduation is rooted in medieval Europe.
While the modern world might be less concerned with denoting social class differences through fashion, clothing tells a story of cultural values and politics like never before. Such was the case for Gabrielle Bonheur “Coco” Chanel and the world she was born into.
Chanel started her career as a failed performer turned dressmaker in an era when women’s lives were restricted. In most countries, women could not vote. Fashionable women’s clothing was restrictive, and even working-class women’s clothing did not allow for much in the way of leisure and sports.
She was a poor child whose father could only be persuaded to marry her mother after her mother’s family paid him off. After her mother’s death, her father married another woman and set off to be a champagne salesman in America, abandoning her five siblings and leaving her and her sister at a convent. In the world on her own, she did whatever she could to stay afloat: danced, sang, made hats, did dressmaking, and had liaisons with wealthy, well-connected men.
By the early 1910s, attempts at making women’s clothing less restrictive were well underway via aesthetic dress and women entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers. But it took a world war, fabric rationing, and the need for women to work jobs typically held by men to catch on.
Then Chanel entered the fashion scene in 1912 with the aid of her lover Arthur “Boy” Capel. She had a vision that changed how women moved through the world. She introduced supple jerseys, provocative little black dresses, comfortable sweaters, and slubby bouclé menswear-inspired suits.
Her style gloried in the newly liberated woman of the 20th century who lived on her own terms. In the world according to Chanel, you needn’t wear corsets. You could sport a suntan because you weren’t expected to be inside embroidering. Unbound by the excess fabric of multiple petticoats, women could go anywhere their legs could take them. And you didn’t need a man to buy you ropes of pearls.
Coco ran her business like a man. And between ostentatious costume jewelry and simple, unadorned silhouettes, it was both aspirational of the lives led by her male counterparts and reminiscent of her austere upbringing in a convent surrounded by habits and rosaries. Up until this point in history, the concept of “fashion” was determined, not by personal values and taste, but by the luxuriousness of your fabrics and labor that went into your clothing.
Suddenly, Chanel and her contemporaries were peddling clothing that told the story of the woman wearing it — not that of her family, husband or social strata.
In the fog of war
The lives of 20th-century fashion designers, if not told through the clothing they designed, were created through rumor and mythologizing their own lives. As such, much of Chanel and Dior’s lives can only be partially confirmed through exhaustive historical research and primary records. During the Nazi occupation of Paris, what transpired in Chanel and Dior’s lives — particularly their intentions — can only be seen through a hazy glass.
Returning to the student’s question in the pilot episode of The New Look, did Chanel shut down her shop refusing to dress Nazi’s girlfriends while Dior continued to work for Lucien Lelong? To some extent, yes. But history, and their actions during war, are complicated.
Christian Ernest Dior’s early life stood in stark contrast to Chanel’s. In 1905, he was born the second of five children into a happy family, too early to have felt the full impact of WWI. His father was well off as a fertilizer manufacturer, so the family could split their time between Granville and Paris. The Dior family had good reason to have high hopes for their son. They encouraged him to become a diplomat to further improve the family name, so he studied political science at the University of Paris, traveled and learned languages.
As with many functional, well-off families, Dior could afford to follow his true passion: becoming an artist. He sold illustrations in the streets and subways and eventually convinced his father to bankroll his first business endeavor — an art gallery where he showed the avant-garde works of Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí.
No one can avoid tragedy forever, and in quick succession, the depression hit, causing him to close his gallery (1929), his father lost his business, his mother died (1931), and the Nazis rose to power.
Chanel also faced challenges with her business after the stock markets crashed. Struggling through menopause, exasperated by aging clients, feuding with Elsa Schiaparelli and on her last nerve with worker’s strikes, she announced the close of her store in 1936, two and a half months before the Nazis marched into Poland. Perhaps a distaste for the Nazis was in there somewhere, maybe in retrospect on her return to Paris many years later, but she could never fully claim to have closed her store because of it.
This is where Chanel’s life looks less like a vintage photograph and more like a cubist painting revealing a complicated woman from many angles. Declassified documents reveal she did collaborate with Nazi intelligence, and she had a sustained liaison with a Nazi officer, yet some documents suggest she also worked with the French resistance.
Chanel’s actions during the war were probably not those of a hardened anti-Semite, white nationalist, or fascist diehard. They were more of someone who spent their formative years learning to survive but never learning to thrive. As much as she could occupy a man’s world, she was still a woman in an age where she required men’s company and money to survive. With very few people depending on her, she knew which side her bread was buttered and looked out for herself.
She did have a run-of-the-mill level anti-semitic attitude (unfortunately, not uncommon for the time) and used Nazi laws to her advantage. The Wertheimers, her business partners, had incredible foresight when the Nazis began to close in. They handed the business over to a Christian businessman, fled the country, and returned after the war was over to reclaim it. (The family still controls the brand to this day.)
Torn between two worlds
Paris under Nazi occupation looked very different from the racy ambiance of Chanel’s heyday and the exuberant post-war era in which Dior’s house flourished. Rations required slimmer-fitting skirts. And while attractive uniforms may have been a recruiting tool for the 1 million or so women who joined wartime efforts, the era was defined by drab silhouettes, utilitarian garments, and dull colors.
After Paris fell to the Nazis, Dior and his sister Catherine, with whom he shared an unusually close bond, retreated to their father’s home in Provence, but he soon returned to Paris to work as a fashion illustrator in the house of Lelong. Shortly afterwards, Catherine met and fell in love with a handsome French resistance fighter named Hervé des Charbonneries and joined him in his cause.
Prompted by a coded message in 1944, she had moved back in with Christian, where they used their 10 Rue Royale apartment — in a fashionable Parisian district crawling with Nazi elites — as a meeting place for fellow members of F2, an intelligence network of French resisters.
There was a horrible moral ambiguity to the war. The Nazis ruled Paris with an iron fist, yet thousands of craftspeople were employed by the French fashion industry and depended on it during a time of heavy rationing. In Pierre Balmain’s memoir, he recalls Dior remarking on it before a show, “Just think! All these women going to be shot in Lelong dresses!”
Whether at work or his home, Dior was surrounded by Nazis on every side. At work, he lived in a world where he created sumptuous dresses from the finest fabrics for Germans, industrialists and black marketeers profiting off the war. At home, he observed what happened outside the atelier’s gilded walls.
Most of us would like to think that if we lived in Europe during WWII, we’d be kicking Nazi’s teeth in, but it’s impossible to know how we would have reacted — especially if the Nazis had leverage on you.
Chanel and Dior both had loved ones captured by the Nazis. Chanel’s nephew — the son of her favorite sister — was captured early in the war. She started a relationship with Nazi officer Hans Gunther von Dincklage (AKA “Spatz”) in 1941, likely as a ploy to get her nephew out of the prisoner camps. Biographer Justine Picardie once said, “I think she would’ve done anything to save him. And that is when she starts having an affair [with Spatz].”
Likewise, Dior’s sister was eventually captured by the Nazis, tortured, and shipped to Ravensbrück, where she was forced to work in a munitions plant, dipping copper bullets into acid, the fumes causing serious damage to her lungs. When she finally returned home, she had become so emaciated that Christian did not recognize her.
A savage purge
The Allies began their march into Paris on August 24, 1944, marking the end of Nazi rule and casting off their oppressive mantle from the city. With the flood of euphoria that came with their freedom also came a fiery rage that lasted decades. People participated in épuration sauvage, the savage purge, where they rounded up anyone accused of collaborating with the Nazis.
The hardest hit in this witch hunt were women, particularly those accused of “horizontal collaboration” with the Nazis. The glitzy houses of Chanel and Lelong were not the only ones that had to make moral compromises during the war. Many women — particularly those whose husbands were in German POW camps and had children to feed — found themselves making harder decisions than whether or not to design an evening gown for a Nazi’s girlfriend.
Angry citizens rounded up these women, shaved their heads, and paraded them through the country to be spat on, stoned, and, in around 6,000 cases, killed.
Chanel likely saw her own future on display. Even if her relationship with Spatz was purely out of necessity, scarcity-mindset or loneliness was hardly the point. Coco “Westminster” Chanel used her connections to Winston Churchill to broker a separate peace deal with Britain. A poor, single mother of six who was coerced into a sexual relationship with a soldier could probably be forgiven. But the French were unlikely to forgive, let alone forget, someone who actively helped a Nazi ploy. She spent the following years in a self-imposed exile in Switzerland in a long, protracted battle over her perfume business with the Wertheimer brothers.
“New Look,” old look
Christian Dior — the perfect combination of Dieu and Or, God and Gold — seemed to have the Midas touch. He had always been a sought-after fashion illustrator, and when Marcel “the King of Cotton” Boussac approached him about starting his own fashion house, he couldn’t refuse.
It’s not uncommon for people to comfort themselves after an era of great political and social turmoil by reflecting on simpler times. Soldiers returned home to get married and have babies. Women removed their factory uniforms and returned to the kitchen. And with one touch, Dior turned Chanel’s revolution on its head.
If Chanel changed how women moved through the world, then Dior changed how women were perceived. Instead of practical, boyish silhouettes popular in Chanel’s golden era, Dior borrowed from an era she tried to destroy. In 1946, he created a hyper-feminine collection of voluptuous full skirts, nipped waists, high busts and sloped shoulders.
It was scandalous to French audiences. They had just survived a time of intense fabric rationing, yet Dior sent out models in the shapes of figure eights and flowers in full bloom, hips swinging provocatively. The skirt of his “Chérie” dress was made of an entire bolt of fabric, selvage to selvage. The even more iconic “Bar Suit” (so popular that Dior still sells it today) was structured to give no doubt of the underlying model’s femininity.
Even more notable was the length of the skirts. An American journalist once said, “[Mr.] Dior is the man who can lower forty million hems by lowering his pencil.” Chanel’s shortened skirts existed to show the world a liberated woman unburdened by extra fabric and modest sexual mores. Dior showed us an untouchable woman — whose reserved sexuality made her ever more desirable.
Dior’s “New Look,” dubbed by Bazaar Editor-in-Chief Carmel Snow, percolated through the fashion world. Just 25 years earlier, Singer introduced the first fully electric sewing machine, which continued to evolve into a portable version. It sped up the production of mass-market clothing and made it possible for home seamstresses to mimic Parisian fashions. In 1949, Vogue began to produce home sewing patterns that were direct reproductions of designs from the top Paris fashion houses.
Chanel, known for her rather one-sided disputes with other designers said, “Only a man who never was intimate with a woman could design something that uncomfortable.” Nevertheless, from Mad Men to the Stepford Wives, Dior’s silhouettes became an enduring cultural icon of an era marked by economic growth and conservative social values.
Don’t call it a comeback
Chanel returned to Paris in the early fifties. Because of her close connection to Winston Churchill, she narrowly avoided charges of treason.
Her colleagues were not quick to forget her spotty record during the war. As soon as Cristóbal Balenciaga caught wind that she wanted to design a new collection, he sent her a rather funereal box of roses in the shape of a heart.
The reviews for Chanel’s 1954 collection were mixed. American publications praised the cardigan jackets, boater hats, and square silhouettes typical of her work. The French press eviscerated it. According to Karen Karbo’s The Gospel According to Coco Chanel, “They said she was stuck in some interminable year in the 1930s,” and otherwise all too happy to nail her Balenciaga-rose-covered coffin shut.
Dior went on to design for some of the world’s most powerful and visible women, including Princess Margaret, Marlene Dietrich, and (perhaps somewhat ironically) Eva Perón, wife of the fascist Argentinian dictator Juan Perón calling her the “only queen I ever dressed.” But if Dior was ever due for a downfall, he didn’t live long enough to see it. He died of a heart attack in 1957, leaving his young assistant Yves Saint Laurent at the reins.
Of fashion and politics
What we wear sends a message to the world.
Former presidential hopeful Nikki Haley recently bucked the trend of wearing jewel-toned skirt suits and wore a Ralph Lauren’s iconic cotton crewneck sweater emblazoned with an American flag. Hunter Schwarz wrote it was “the perfect look for a candidate trying to convey conservatism but also a new, forward-thinking vision for the Republican Party.” (Notably, Chanel pushed fashion forward by taking clothing intended for poor sailors, the sweater, and elevating it to high fashion.) Haley’s sweater retails for $398.
If buttoned-up Neoconservatism isn’t your style, there is a never-ending list of eco-friendly brands, power suits and political t-shirts to show which side of the political divide you’re on.
If you’ve spent any time on an American college campus or on Gen Z-dominated TikTok, you’ll notice stark trends in youth fashion. You can almost always accurately guess someone’s stance on social politics based on a Gen Z girl’s hair dye. On one extreme of the political spectrum, you have pussy hats, pronoun pins and shapeless, genderless clothing. As a direct reaction on the other side, you see “trad” influencers embracing mid-century styles and bell-shaped skirts.
Neither Chanel nor Dior’s original visions went out of style. In spite of the numerous books, essays, and think pieces written about Chanel’s Nazi liaison — and even Karl Lagerfeld’s inability to shake his own controversial views — could not keep the house from thriving. Chanel is even popular in conservative Jewish circles. For all of its impracticality, even silliness, Dior’s vision of bell-shaped skirts and feminine silhouettes, for better or worse, frequently resurface after eras of turmoil.
If you ever need to detect the current tone of politics, just look around and see what people are wearing.
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