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Image fashion love5/6/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() In his book Années Erotiques (Erotic Years), the French journalist Patrick Buisson describes how the crushing victory of the Nazis left the French in a state of what he calls "erotic shock". The well-established image of Chanel living it up with her Nazi patrons may be wrong, but it reflects a more interesting truth. But her most recent biographer, Justine Picardie, claims that the true story is far more nuanced: Chanel was also close friends with Winston Churchill before the war, her German lover was half-English, and she seems to have made an attempt to broker peace talks between Walter Schellenberg, the Nazi foreign intelligence chief, and the British. She took a German officer as a lover and was briefly arrested after the Allies re-took Paris she also took advantage of the law expropriating Jews to try, unsuccessfully, to claw her perfume business back from the Jewish-owned firm to which she had sold it. "If fashion says skirts are short, you will not succeed in lengthening them, even with the guillotine." The Nazis wanted Berlin to displace Paris as the capital of style, and set about it with typical tact and subtlety, looting the industry's Paris archives.Ĭoco Chanel is routinely attacked for having made money out of the Nazis during the war. is destined to fall before fashion," Mussolini remarked in 1930. But equally important was its prestige: it was a power in its own right. Fashion had economic weight: one exported couture dress, it is claimed, would pay for a ton of imported coal, and a litre of exported perfume brought in the financial equivalent of two tons of imported fuel oil. Germany did not conquer France to get its hands on Fashion Central, but it was a not insignificant extra. Such images, disturbing in themselves, are a particular problem for fashion because of its entanglement with the Nazis during the Second World War. His appalled denials were in vain: once a label like that sticks, it's very hard to detach. It's a horrible image for fashion, because they think that every designer and everything in fashion is like this."įive years later, the Belgian designer Martin Margiela thought it would be neat to have his models walk down the aisle of a train parked in a Parisian railway depot: disco mirror balls notwithstanding, Women's Wear Daily was sure Margiela was evoking the Nazi death trains. I'm furious that it could happen, because the question is no longer even whether he really said it. Only Karl Lagerfeld, head of Dior's arch-rival Chanel as well as his own label, emerged to spit: "I'm furious, if you want to know. The big names in the fashion business disappeared below the parapet. ![]() ![]() Yet when the news broke of Galliano's drunken rants – as recorded on camera he told strangers in a Paris bar that he "loved Hitler" and that their parents should have been gassed – his employer, LVMH, which owns Christian Dior, reacted like a scalded cat, suspending him instantly and sacking him soon afterwards. He is a great human being who grew up surrounded by prejudice and told me he had never met anyone remotely like himself until he went to St Martin's school of art." "There was never anything remotely bigoted going on. "I would never in a million years have thought this would happen," said a colleague. One of the cruel ironies of the John Galliano "I love Hitler" scandal, is that, according to his friends, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. ![]()
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