An Homage... To Coco Chanel

What would you do if you saw someone flaunting this Camélia Ruban bow watch by Chanel? The price, undercounted, is $233,000 at the Chanel store in Beverly Hills. This is how it was described by Modern Luxury:

The Bowed and Beautiful

So mesmerizing, Chanel's dazzling Camélia Ruban bow watch is enough to stop time. Feuturing more than 1,500 black and white diamonds set in 18K white gold, this stunning sparkler dazzles. Bit don't let the silvery siren fool you-- it is far more than just a pretty face, as was Coco Chanel herself. As a symbol mademoiselle held most dear, the piece's bow motif pays elegant homage to her too.

Nice of them to remind us that Coco-- born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel in 1883-- held bow motifs dear. They neglected to mention that Chanel was also a prostitute, a drug addict, an elitist snob, a right-wing extremist, an anti-Semite, a virulent homophobe (and a lesbian!) and, inevitably, a Nazi collaborator. She used her status as an "Aryan" during the German occupation of Paris to seize control of Parfums Chanel from the Wertheimer family, who she denounced as Jews. A typical right-winger she sold out her country and worked as a Nazi spy during World War II and worked directly for General Walter Schellenberg, chief of SS intelligence and traveled to Berlin to talk strategy with Heinrich Himmler. Author Hal Vaughn, who discovered much of the documentary evidence of Chanel's work for the Nazis pointed out that "A lot of people in this world don't want the iconic figure of Gabrielle Coco Chanel, one of France's great cultural idols, destroyed. This is definitely something that a lot of people would have preferred to put aside, to forget, to just go on selling Chanel scarves and jewelry."

Yes, like the $233,000 bow watch with the 1,500 black and white diamonds. So do you see yourself doing-- even if just metaphorically-- if you see some L.A. lass, sporting one? Would you admire it and tell her how lovely she looks with it on? Would you quietly lust for it yourself? Or, on the other end of the spectrum, would you shoot her in the face and chop off her arm and have a taxidermist prepare it for a place over your mantle? Or something else?




UPDATE: Another Look

Rhonda Garelick's exhaustive biography, Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History, doesn't paint a very flattering picture of the fanatic right-winger, pointing out that she "lied constantly to everyone, about everything-- even trivial matters-- never bothering even to keep her many fictions consistent."

By 1920, she had a new lover, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov. An exile from the Russian Revolution, he gave her one of the few heirlooms he still had: a strand of Romanov pearls that inspired her trademark jewelry. Her relationship with Dmitri coincided with Chanel's politics becoming steadily more reactionary-- and with the launch of the world's first synthetic perfume, Chanel No. 5, which she designed to smell like "a bouquet of abstract flowers." Ms. Garelick claims that, "with her new double-C insignia Chanel responded-- consciously or not-- to the heavy royalist nostalgia, militarism, and early fascism that saturated Dmitri's world, effectively inventing a new crest for herself-- an emblem suggesting her command of a private fashion regiment of her own, or an alternative line of 'family' descent through style."

...In 1923, in Monte Carlo, she met the Duke of Westminster, an outspoken anti-Semite, with whom she had a decade-long affair. In the 1930s, Chanel financed the resurrection of the journal Le Témoin ("The Witness"), which was a platform for xenophobia and hard-right nationalism edited by another of her lovers, Paul Iribe. Week after week, Iribe depicted Chanel as Marianne, complete with Phrygian cap: "She had become the very embodiment of francité-- the deeply rooted essence of national culture and pride."

Chanel's 1940s were a notorious disgrace. Not only did she live at the Ritz alongside the Nazi occupiers, have an affair with one of them and participate in pillaging at least one Jewish home for furniture and artwork, she even tried to "Aryanize" the substantial share of her company that was owned by the Jewish Wertheimer family, whose members had fled Paris for New York before the Germans arrived. Ms. Garelick suggests that it was Winston Churchill who intervened to stop Chanel being punished as a collaborator after the war, on account of what she might reveal about English Nazi sympathizers to whom she had been close, not just the Duke of Westminster but also the Duke of Windsor. But there is no new evidence for this hypothesis, only the anecdote that after she had been questioned and released by the Free French Purge Committee, Chanel claimed, "Churchill had freed me."