Speaker 1: Um, what's uh, Coco my Chanel. That's not a very
Speaker 1: good introduction. What's What's what's Coco Cosack? What's Coco? My
Speaker 1: Courtney co Sack our guest for today on Behind the Bastards,
Speaker 1: a podcast about the worst people in all of history
Speaker 1: that this week is talking about Coco Chanelle Courtney. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the program. Thank you. I am honored by this alliteration.
Speaker 1: This is great. Yeah, we worked really hard on it.
Speaker 1: First off, it's been a bit since you've been on.
Speaker 1: Congratulations on the engagement. Thank you. Yeah, that is getting
Speaker 1: married is widely considered to be the second most significant
Speaker 1: bond two people can engage in the most significant, of course,
Speaker 1: being podcast partners. And this is Sophie and I's fifth
Speaker 1: anniversary of doing the show. I just upstaged your engage
Speaker 1: anniversary to you, guys. No, this is why US is
Speaker 1: like six months old. Um yeah, congratulations, coordinate. What do
Speaker 1: you know about the fashion industry, the world of high fashion?
Speaker 1: You're always so well dressed, as Sophie said, that's why, Uh,
Speaker 1: that's why I was shocked that someone thinks I'm well dressed.
Speaker 1: You always look amazing. Thank you. It is very a
Speaker 1: low maintenance effort, and I know nothing about fashion honestly.
Speaker 1: That is that is appropriate because that is the kind
Speaker 1: of fashion that was pioneered by the guests or the
Speaker 1: subject of this week's episode, Coco Chanel. Um. The other
Speaker 1: thing she pioneered was being a Nazi collaborator. So mixed bag, Courtney,
Speaker 1: do you know much about Is she someone you know
Speaker 1: much about or is it just sort of like a
Speaker 1: name on a brand, which I think is the case
Speaker 1: for most people. I think it's Yeah, it's the brand.
Speaker 1: It's like the vibe, it's the Chanel number five, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's so fascinating because having gone through this, we're about
Speaker 1: to start. But like the act the fact that she Now,
Speaker 1: like when you say Chanelle, you think rich people spending
Speaker 1: way too much money on clothing and perfume, right, you
Speaker 1: think like walking into a really high end mall, you
Speaker 1: think like a six thousand dollars pants suit, like that
Speaker 1: sort of shit. I get Like the second you say
Speaker 1: the word Chanelle, a smell that's what happens for Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that is, to be honest, like, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a testament to her success. She has about the saddest,
Speaker 1: bleakest early life story we have ever covered on this podcast.
Speaker 1: You you cannot start lower than Coco Chanel starts life.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, I mean again, this is Behind the Bastards.
Speaker 1: It doesn't end in a good person, but we're all
Speaker 1: going to be kind of rooting for her at the
Speaker 1: start of this here Coco, Baby, Coco, Baby, Coco. So
Speaker 1: my considered opinion, Courtney, after I don't know five years
Speaker 1: of Behind the Bastards, is that we can kind of
Speaker 1: broadly file away nearly all of our subjects into two categories.
Speaker 1: Category one is people who suck complete ass, and category
Speaker 1: two is people who still suck complete ass but are
Speaker 1: also impressive in some way. Right. So, for example, Choochescu,
Speaker 1: the dictator of Romania, just sucked complete ass, right, l
Speaker 1: Ron Hubbard sucked ass, but he was also incredible, right,
Speaker 1: he just had some amazing talents. Yeah, just wonderful author.
Speaker 1: I like the way personally he summoned the Antichrist in
Speaker 1: the desert by masturbating with the guy who invented rocketry.
Speaker 1: But well, there's a lot of oh yeah, quite, We've
Speaker 1: got some episodes on it this week. Our bastard is
Speaker 1: from the sucked complete ass but was also objectively impressive category.
Speaker 1: That is Coco Chanel in a nutshell, She's an incredibly
Speaker 1: impressive person. Um, terrible, but very impressive. So what's your
Speaker 1: quick question on that scale of after five years of bastards? Yeah?
Speaker 1: How many have this tragic early life? Like? Is this
Speaker 1: really a case for more social programs? A decent number
Speaker 1: of them? You know, we talked aout like Saddam's early
Speaker 1: life was so bleak that he had to like hold
Speaker 1: his teacher at gunpoint to learn how to read. Oh god, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Hitler's early life was a nightmare. You know. Hitler's a
Speaker 1: really really tough childhood. Um, I would you know, I'm
Speaker 1: never going to be I don't know, Like there's this
Speaker 1: there's this thing going on. A colleague of mine, Will Summer,
Speaker 1: who has covered a lot of you know, the same
Speaker 1: kind of dysinfobeats and stuff for putting on qan On
Speaker 1: just wrote a book about it. Um. Gave an interview
Speaker 1: to I think Jacobin recently where he was like, well,
Speaker 1: a lot of the problems we have with qan On
Speaker 1: wouldn't be happening if there was like socialized medicine in
Speaker 1: this country and people could rely on good mental healthcare,
Speaker 1: and I feel I'm mixed about that. I don't want
Speaker 1: to like put everything on because I think that all
Speaker 1: that can kind of put the onus on, like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's mental illness that causes these problems, And I actually
Speaker 1: don't think the nut of these, like our most bastardry
Speaker 1: is mental illness. For one thing, if I get a
Speaker 1: sense that, like we're writing about someone who is just
Speaker 1: mentally ill, even if they did shitty things, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna like focus on them. Like I don't think Hitler
Speaker 1: was mentally ill. I don't think Saddam was, I don't
Speaker 1: think l Ron Hubbard was. Like they're just shitty people,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, but like Kanye, you're not like reporting
Speaker 1: on another yeah, exactly, Like Kanye is a bad person,
Speaker 1: but also a lot of his badness is due to
Speaker 1: the fact that he is a deeply sick, unmedicated person.
Speaker 1: And like, I don't want to yeah, I feel like
Speaker 1: ways about that. This is all very complicated and beyond
Speaker 1: the competence of a guy who professionally makes dick jokes
Speaker 1: on the internet. So I'm not gonna but I will
Speaker 1: say I do think there is a significant case for
Speaker 1: d Like I think there is a case for you
Speaker 1: have fewer people like Coco is somebody who because of
Speaker 1: how rough or upbringing is, she grows up hard as
Speaker 1: fuck um and kind of and and I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people would have been less hardened and less
Speaker 1: cruel and maybe less motivated in ways that led them
Speaker 1: to bastardry if they had been able to rely on
Speaker 1: like sufficient food and stable housing and that sort of
Speaker 1: stuff when they were little kids. I don't think that's
Speaker 1: a non But also, I will say most of our bastards,
Speaker 1: it's far more common for us to have a bastard
Speaker 1: who like grows up rich than it is to have
Speaker 1: a bastard who grows up poor and desperate. So I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't know where to take this. I
Speaker 1: have no like solid stance on this shit. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Sometimes people just suck. Sometimes people suck
Speaker 1: and they make great fashion, you know, they make a
Speaker 1: great fashion. Yeah, So I have to before we start,
Speaker 1: I want to make a note about the providance of
Speaker 1: most of the information that we're going to be talking
Speaker 1: about today. Because Coco Chanelle was born into gut riching
Speaker 1: poverty and a time and place in which record keeping
Speaker 1: was a lot less robust than it is today. So
Speaker 1: we're heavily reliant on her own memories for information about
Speaker 1: her early life before she became famous, and most of
Speaker 1: this is info that she gave to biographers in fashion
Speaker 1: industry journalists decade decades after it happened when she was famous.
Speaker 1: She is a veteran liar. She was an incredible liar,
Speaker 1: and she would often lie about the same thing several
Speaker 1: times within an interview. For every significant development in her childhood,
Speaker 1: there are two or three contradictory stories, all of which
Speaker 1: you're based on things that she said. So the two
Speaker 1: books that are going to be the bulk of my
Speaker 1: sources for these episodes are Coco Chanelle, The Life and
Speaker 1: Legend by Justine Picardy, which covers pretty exhaustively all of
Speaker 1: the contradictory claims about her past. It provides really good context,
Speaker 1: but it's also really frustrating because she'll tell you one
Speaker 1: story and then another, and it's like, well, I have
Speaker 1: no way to know which of these is true, Like,
Speaker 1: you know, what the fuck? My other source is Sleeping
Speaker 1: with the Enemy by how Vaughan, which suggests Vaughan is
Speaker 1: the guy who reported on her Nazi ties, and he
Speaker 1: basically just kind of like picks what is probably the
Speaker 1: likeliest version of her story and goes with that, but
Speaker 1: he doesn't really give you context on the other things.
Speaker 1: He claimed. I'm going to be kind of mixing both
Speaker 1: of these narratives up in order to try and give
Speaker 1: you the best context I can. So the official record
Speaker 1: states that Coco was born Gabrielle Chasnell on August nineteenth,
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty three, and most what is most commonly referred
Speaker 1: to as a poorhouse in the town of Saumer her mother,
Speaker 1: and this is in France, by the way. Obviously, her mother, Eugenie,
Speaker 1: is about twenty years old when she has Gabrielle, and
Speaker 1: her father is a guy named are Albert, and he
Speaker 1: was twenty eight years old. And as you might have
Speaker 1: guessed from the fact that she was born in a poorhouse,
Speaker 1: they did not come from money. Gabrielle was delivered into
Speaker 1: this world members of the Sisters of Providence, which were
Speaker 1: an order of nuns who ran a series of these
Speaker 1: poorhouses across France. Basically all social welfare programs are run
Speaker 1: by the Catholic Church in France. In the eighteen hundred
Speaker 1: likely right like there's not You're not going to like
Speaker 1: a government poorhouse. Generally, you're something that the church is running.
Speaker 1: As an adult, Cocoa didn't like to talk about her
Speaker 1: birth and her early life, but Justine Piccardi notes one
Speaker 1: story that she told often enough that we can probably
Speaker 1: glean something from it. Quote. She did occasionally mention a
Speaker 1: train journey that her mother had undertaken just beforehand before
Speaker 1: her birth, in search of her elusive father. What with
Speaker 1: the clothes of that time, she remarked to her interviewer,
Speaker 1: with her customary circuitous vagueness, I suppose no one could
Speaker 1: see that she was about to have a baby. Some
Speaker 1: people helped her. They were very kind. They took her
Speaker 1: into their home and sent for a doctor. My mother
Speaker 1: didn't want to stay there. You can get another train tomorrow,
Speaker 1: the people said, to soothe her, you'll find your husband tomorrow.
Speaker 1: But the doctor realized that my mother wasn't ill at all.
Speaker 1: She's about to have a bab he said. At that point,
Speaker 1: the people who had been so nice to her were furious.
Speaker 1: They wanted to throw her out. The doctor insisted that
Speaker 1: they take care of her. They took her to a
Speaker 1: hospital where I was born. Oh so you get a
Speaker 1: lot about the culture. Right, this is a sick woman.
Speaker 1: Let's say, oh she's pre Fuck this bitch, she's pregnant malone.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's my nightmare. Yeah, it's pretty rough. Like I said,
Speaker 1: it doesn't start much harder than Coco's early life. So,
Speaker 1: depending on who you ask, the name Chassnell, because again
Speaker 1: her original name is not well, the name on her
Speaker 1: birth certificate isn't Channell. Depending on who you ask, this
Speaker 1: is either because Chassnell is just a misspelling or it's
Speaker 1: an earlier medieval version of Chanel. We don't really know.
Speaker 1: Either is pretty reliable or pretty possible. Interestingly enough, Gabrielle's father,
Speaker 1: the son of a peddler, had been born himself into
Speaker 1: a poorhouse in eighteen fifty eight and also had his
Speaker 1: name misspelled on his certificate, but in a different way.
Speaker 1: It was listed as Charney. So it's likely that, just
Speaker 1: like nuns aren't great at reading in the eighteen eighty,
Speaker 1: it's just been involving this whole time. Yeah they're not. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just like a bunch of fucking half illiterate nuns
Speaker 1: handling healthcare because no one else is going to do it.
Speaker 1: So Coco's father, gab Gabrielle. At this point, her father, Albert,
Speaker 1: made his living such as it was, by selling junk
Speaker 1: on street corners. He's literally like a trash dealer, right,
Speaker 1: Like he's kind of like finding whatever he can and
Speaker 1: selling it for what he can. He's got a little
Speaker 1: horse drawn cart and he's like taking goods from town
Speaker 1: to town. Gabrielle's parents were eventually wed about fifteen months
Speaker 1: after her birth, but there this was not a stable life,
Speaker 1: so she's not She is born out of wedlock. Right.
Speaker 1: They're not married when she gives birth, but they do
Speaker 1: get married soon after. But her dad is not in
Speaker 1: the picture often he either just doesn't care about having
Speaker 1: a kid or is just so married to this traveling
Speaker 1: salesman life that he's gone basically all the time. The
Speaker 1: junk is just so important. The junk's calling me, honey,
Speaker 1: you can't you can't lock me down. I got it
Speaker 1: so trashed on the street. The junk is his art. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very funny. I mean it's not. It's tragic, but
Speaker 1: it is kind of funny. Um. So, her father's gone
Speaker 1: all the time, and in order to like survive, Coco
Speaker 1: and her mom have to live with relatives. Um, and
Speaker 1: these this is not you don't get the feeling. This
Speaker 1: is a super close family. Like a lot of times
Speaker 1: when they're living with an aunt or an uncle, it's like, well,
Speaker 1: what else are we gonna do? You know, we can't
Speaker 1: we can't kick her out in the street, but we
Speaker 1: don't really want her here. Everything everybody's poor as shit.
Speaker 1: She had numerous brothers and sisters. Her youngest brother, Augustine,
Speaker 1: died as an infant in eighteen ninety one. All the
Speaker 1: evidence suggests that Coco's father was basically absent most of
Speaker 1: the time, but she had a habit later on of
Speaker 1: claiming that she was his favorite and that he had
Speaker 1: given her her nickname Coco because he disliked the name Gabrielle.
Speaker 1: This is not true. We'll talk about where the name
Speaker 1: comes from a little bit later. She just lied about
Speaker 1: her dad loving her for reasons that I shouldn't have
Speaker 1: to like talk about, right, Like, that's that's bleak. It's
Speaker 1: important to note, but like, like, yeah, you can't throw
Speaker 1: shade on somewhat for that. It's understandable. Um, it may
Speaker 1: be true that after one trip away from home for work,
Speaker 1: her father gave her a present she talked about. There's
Speaker 1: present that he gave her a lot um. It also
Speaker 1: tells you a lot about the time because the present
Speaker 1: was a human knucklebone that had been turned into a pinholder.
Speaker 1: There's just bones all over there. This is like you
Speaker 1: can still hang out in Paris if you wind up
Speaker 1: in some markets and find human bones on sale. I
Speaker 1: have been there. I didn't buy any bones. I don't
Speaker 1: engage in the human bone trade. But it's not. If
Speaker 1: you're going to buy human bones and you have cash
Speaker 1: to spare, you can find like some monks, skulls and
Speaker 1: shit in markets in Paris. It's doable. Don't do this,
Speaker 1: but you can, That's all I'm saying. Um. So this
Speaker 1: knucklebone that she gets from her dad has like the
Speaker 1: Eiffel Tower printed on one side and Notre Dame on
Speaker 1: the other, which is so it's like some weird turist
Speaker 1: shotsky made out of human remains. Says again, so much
Speaker 1: about the late eighteen hundreds. Also just Paris, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: and Paris and stuff they love easy to get bones, right,
Speaker 1: there's bones all over the fucking place. Um. Now, Coco
Speaker 1: is a weird fucking kid. Um. She is kind of
Speaker 1: goth as fuck, and so when she gets this knuckle bone,
Speaker 1: she buries it in a cemetery as an offering to
Speaker 1: the dead. Um, which is fucking rad. Look, it's hard
Speaker 1: not to love little kid Coco, and by age six,
Speaker 1: she would later claim she spent all of her free
Speaker 1: time in a graveyard like that is her playground as
Speaker 1: a kid graveyard. Yes, she's very Wednesday Adams. Yes, she
Speaker 1: told one biographer. Every child has a special place where
Speaker 1: he or she likes to hide, play and dream. Mine
Speaker 1: was an Auvergine cemetery. I knew no one there, not
Speaker 1: even the dead, And yet the dead seem to come
Speaker 1: alive for her there, although they remained as silent as
Speaker 1: the graves. I was the queen of this secret garden.
Speaker 1: I loved its subterranean dwellers. The dead are not dead
Speaker 1: as long as we think of them. I would tell myself,
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I kind of love that. She's kind
Speaker 1: of a dope kid. Yeah, she is basically a Pixar
Speaker 1: protagonist at this point in her life. Let's get the
Speaker 1: early Coco Chanelle movie, The Gabrielle. Yeah, you'll have to
Speaker 1: leave out the Nazi stuff. Yeah, but her early life.
Speaker 1: It is hard not to be on this kid's side
Speaker 1: right now. She is particularly drawn in her fucking cemetary
Speaker 1: wanderings to two one labeled tombstones, which she would adorn
Speaker 1: with flowers in the springtime. She had several ragdalls she
Speaker 1: made for herself, and she would bring them with her
Speaker 1: to the graves. She later said, I wanted to be
Speaker 1: sure that I was loved, but I lived with people
Speaker 1: who showed no pity. I like talking to myself and
Speaker 1: I don't listen to what I'm told. This is probably
Speaker 1: due to the fact that the first people to whom
Speaker 1: I opened my heart were the dead. A creepy yeah again,
Speaker 1: goth is hell. It's hard to like see her transition
Speaker 1: from like being this epic Goth Wednesday Adam's figure child
Speaker 1: to the clutching your pearls fabric lady who Nazi. We'll
Speaker 1: get to this. The sad truth is, like so many people,
Speaker 1: she falls in with a bad crowd, and that bad
Speaker 1: crowd is the British royal family. But I'm getting ahead
Speaker 1: of myself, so it's impossible to say which of these
Speaker 1: stories she tells about her childhood are in fact true,
Speaker 1: but it is worth noting that death would have been
Speaker 1: one of the first reality she had to confront. Not
Speaker 1: only did her little brother die when she was like
Speaker 1: eight or nine, her mother is sickly for her entire
Speaker 1: early childhood. Some of her Coco's earliest memories are watching
Speaker 1: her mom cough blood onto handkerchiefs. Probably some sort of tuberculosis.
Speaker 1: We don't really know obviously, Like you're not going to
Speaker 1: get a great, you know, diagnosis back then. Not good
Speaker 1: labs back then. Yeah, they just said she's got the consumption.
Speaker 1: She coughs a lot, like it could have been a
Speaker 1: thousand different things. Tuberculosis is not unlikely. As a result
Speaker 1: of kind of this, The color red features particularly in
Speaker 1: her early recollection. She would always be fascinated by red.
Speaker 1: Coco often recalled this story to interviewers from when she
Speaker 1: was five and her mom had to move her and
Speaker 1: her siblings into the house of an uncle. We were
Speaker 1: shut away in a room covered in red wall paper.
Speaker 1: To begin with, we were very well behaved. Then we
Speaker 1: noticed that the red wallpaper was very damp and could
Speaker 1: be peeled off from the walls. So, being kids, the
Speaker 1: girls start to pull strips of wallpaper off and they
Speaker 1: leave the room eventually like completely stripped bare. The pleasure
Speaker 1: was sublime, but eventually their mother found them, and mom
Speaker 1: doesn't like say anything, but she realizes, like they've destroyed
Speaker 1: this room basically that belongs to a relative. So her
Speaker 1: earliest memory is like gleefully ripping all of this wallpaper off,
Speaker 1: and then her mom sees it and just starts sobbing
Speaker 1: on the bed because they're yeah, it's fucked up, Like
Speaker 1: this is such a sad childhood. She's like a roll
Speaker 1: doll character, Like it's just like endless sadness. Channel's mother
Speaker 1: dies of tuberculosis or something similar in eighteen ninety five,
Speaker 1: when Coco is twelve. Her mom is thirty three years old.
Speaker 1: She dies in so all of the kids are like
Speaker 1: with her in this freezing bedroom in the City of Breathe,
Speaker 1: and her mom just like dies trying to get warm,
Speaker 1: and Coco and her siblings find her, but there's no
Speaker 1: other adults in the house, and we don't actually know
Speaker 1: how long they're alone with their mom's freezing corpse before
Speaker 1: other adults find them and take them away. She would
Speaker 1: never talk about this, Oh, but God, hard to imagine
Speaker 1: a greater trauma. Oh that is terrible. It's fucked up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like I saw my grandma die, but it was the
Speaker 1: opposite a very beautiful experience. This sounds horrible, and you're like,
Speaker 1: one way to survive just dies in front of this
Speaker 1: fucking nightmare. So Dad again is like out and about.
Speaker 1: He comes back every now and then, but as soon
Speaker 1: as mom dies, Dad is like, this is my opportunity
Speaker 1: to abandon my family because once and for all again,
Speaker 1: just as sort of like being a single mother, you
Speaker 1: would get fucking spit on by people. It's also assumed
Speaker 1: that like, well, if you shouldn't be a single father
Speaker 1: raising kids, if like your wife dies, you hand your
Speaker 1: kids over to somebody else like that. That's not how
Speaker 1: everyone did it, but that was not an uncommon way
Speaker 1: to handle the problem at the time, right um and
Speaker 1: and al Albert showed no real inclination to raise his family.
Speaker 1: So he he's like the junk, you guys, I'm sorry, kids,
Speaker 1: it's the junk. He has two sons and like three
Speaker 1: daughters at this point, and he he sells his sons. Basically,
Speaker 1: he basically finds he finds a farm that will like
Speaker 1: take them, and I think he probably gets like it's
Speaker 1: on the verge of human trafficking. It's one of these like,
Speaker 1: if you teach my kids how to do farm work,
Speaker 1: they'll work for you if you let them live here.
Speaker 1: But like it's sketchy, um. But since you know, girls
Speaker 1: are not useful um in this period in time, by
Speaker 1: the by the standards of a guy named are Albert Um.
Speaker 1: And so he sends Coco and her sisters off to
Speaker 1: a fucking nunn. Ray. He's like, go to this or
Speaker 1: phage orphanage run by nuns. Like I have no ability
Speaker 1: to profit off of you. So the extant evidence that
Speaker 1: in prostituting them out, I would say, yes, he definitely
Speaker 1: didn't pick the absolute worst option. So he basically takes
Speaker 1: whatever money he has left and then fucks off to
Speaker 1: the United States to find his fortune, and Coco never
Speaker 1: sees him again. This is the end of her dad
Speaker 1: being a factor in her life. She was never able
Speaker 1: to really admit this, certainly not to biographers and maybe
Speaker 1: not to herself. She would make up stories as an
Speaker 1: adult about all these times her dad had come to
Speaker 1: visit her while she was being raised by the nuns.
Speaker 1: She would also lie regularly and say that he had
Speaker 1: left her with her aunts who had raised her. She
Speaker 1: was not raised by her aunt. She's raised by nuns.
Speaker 1: There's documentation of this, but you can kind of get
Speaker 1: again in the story she tells that are not true
Speaker 1: about her childhood. You can't get pieces of the truth. So,
Speaker 1: for example, even though she would claim it was her
Speaker 1: aunts who had raised her, she would talk about the
Speaker 1: way they raised her and how stern they were, And
Speaker 1: you can assume she's talking about the nuns, right, She's
Speaker 1: just kind of pretending they were a family. So she
Speaker 1: would say stuff like, my aunts were good people, but
Speaker 1: absolutely without tenderness. I was not loved in their house.
Speaker 1: I got no affection. Children suffer from such things, and
Speaker 1: I don't have truth. Yeah, I don't need to fact
Speaker 1: check that last part. I trust that she was suffering.
Speaker 1: Coco had a lot of family in the area. She
Speaker 1: did have aunts, and she's not so this and again,
Speaker 1: this kind of tells you something about the way in
Speaker 1: which life was back then. When you are a kid
Speaker 1: whose parents die or leave you and you're in like
Speaker 1: one of these orphanages run by nuns, you still have
Speaker 1: family in town. She still has connections with her family,
Speaker 1: so she's not isolated entirely. But it's also like nobody
Speaker 1: can really handle the burden of taking care of her,
Speaker 1: so the nuns are going to do it. Yeah. Other
Speaker 1: statements she made later in life hint at her real
Speaker 1: feelings towards how this childhood went. Quote from my earliest childhood,
Speaker 1: I've been certain that they have taken everything away from me.
Speaker 1: That I'm dead. I knew that when I was twelve.
Speaker 1: You can die more than once in your life. Oh god, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fucked up. I'm really curious if these people are
Speaker 1: going to show up again, you know, in twenty years
Speaker 1: or whatever, when she's famous, and they're gonna be like, oh, member,
Speaker 1: when we took care of you. I'm gonna be honest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, she she definitely has like some family who
Speaker 1: get money from her. Her dad never shows back up.
Speaker 1: I kind of think he just like fucked off and
Speaker 1: died in the US trying to strike it rich or something.
Speaker 1: You know, people people died for no reason back then.
Speaker 1: We'll probably never know. He does seem like the kind
Speaker 1: of guy who would come back for money. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm sure he would have if he could have. But
Speaker 1: you know what, never dies, Courtney. The need for capitalism
Speaker 1: and ads. That's right, capitalism so far cannot be killed.
Speaker 1: You know, stay tuned, pay attention to this spot in
Speaker 1: case that changes. But no one's did it yet. Ah,
Speaker 1: those ads were great, a real tribute to the immortality
Speaker 1: of the market economy. So it is worth digging into
Speaker 1: more what kind of place this orphanage was and what
Speaker 1: sort of things Coco and her siblings learned there. Later
Speaker 1: in life, she would tell a story of sitting with
Speaker 1: other children in a wooden pew in the church. Anne
Speaker 1: would poke her with a stick whenever she's saying the
Speaker 1: ave Maria too loudly. She recalled that a hunchback man
Speaker 1: was sitting nearby and told a biographer, I'd have liked
Speaker 1: to sit down beside him and touch his hump and
Speaker 1: tell him that it didn't matter, he could still be loved.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's sweet. That is sweet. Yeah. So again
Speaker 1: you get this feeling that not only is she didn't tenderness,
Speaker 1: but she wants to show it and just is raised
Speaker 1: in an environment where, like they believe, kids are fundamentally
Speaker 1: evil would have to be treated strictly in order to
Speaker 1: bring them up properly. She just has no outlet to
Speaker 1: express or receive affection as a little kid, which is
Speaker 1: not good for kids. Spoiler for those of you who
Speaker 1: have kids, don't raise them this way. It doesn't go well.
Speaker 1: When it comes to what kind of thing she learned
Speaker 1: from the nuns, well, we know that she got what
Speaker 1: was for the time a pretty decent education. In the basics.
Speaker 1: She learned how to read. She learned not a ton
Speaker 1: of arithmetic because she was a girl, but she learned
Speaker 1: enough that she was able to get by. As an adult.
Speaker 1: She runs a large business, So the basics of her
Speaker 1: education are about as good as you could hope for
Speaker 1: at the time given her socioeconomic level. Outside of that,
Speaker 1: the curriculum was rather less wholesome. I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: now from how Vaughan's book. At the turn of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, Catholic institutions such as Aubasine indoctrinated Catholic youth
Speaker 1: to loathe Jews. Chanelle was no exception. She was often
Speaker 1: given to anti Semitic outbursts. Well known French author and
Speaker 1: editor in chief of the French fashion magazine Marie Claire
Speaker 1: Marcel Heydrick tells of a conversation he had with Chanelle
Speaker 1: over his book and Moses created God. Chanelle asked Hedrick,
Speaker 1: why Moses, you can't believe that ancient stories are still
Speaker 1: of interest, or you hope Jews will like your story,
Speaker 1: they won't buy your book. When the conversation turned to
Speaker 1: how new fashion boutiques were springing up like mushrooms in Paris,
Speaker 1: Chanelle declared, I only fear Jews and Chinese, and the
Speaker 1: Jews more than the Chinese. Hadrick observed, Chanelle's anti Semitism
Speaker 1: was not only verbal, but passionate, demoted, and often embarrassing.
Speaker 1: Like all the children of her age, she had studied
Speaker 1: the Catechism, Hadn't the Jews crucified Jesus? The most Christian
Speaker 1: thing I could do is hate another clogi. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is she is up until. I mean, it's probably worth
Speaker 1: noting that, like her early life, this is not unusual
Speaker 1: anti semitism, right, this is a pretty normal amount of
Speaker 1: anti Semitism to grow at the time. French society for
Speaker 1: the time not excusing it. I'm just saying like her
Speaker 1: education is not an abnormal one. A lot of French
Speaker 1: kids in the same period are taught the same things
Speaker 1: she does, grow up to be an abnormally anti Semitic
Speaker 1: person for French society at the time, she is more
Speaker 1: racist than the background level of her society. Eventually, at
Speaker 1: this point, she's just a little kid. So it is
Speaker 1: worth noting that while Coco deeply imbibed the Church's teachings
Speaker 1: on Jewish people, she was less convinced about the existence
Speaker 1: of God. She kind of probably never was really a believer.
Speaker 1: This is probably not surprising given the fact that her
Speaker 1: childhood might be considered to disprove the existence of a
Speaker 1: loving God. But also just like the I very much
Speaker 1: identify with that. When they told me about religion, I
Speaker 1: was like, I don't know. So in age eighteen, Coco
Speaker 1: moves from the orphanage to a Catholic school for girls,
Speaker 1: and the big news story at the time would have
Speaker 1: been the Dreyfus affair, which was focused around the eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety four arrest of a Jewish French artillery officer under
Speaker 1: false claims that he'd been a spy. We have talked
Speaker 1: about the Dryfus affair on several occasions. It is a
Speaker 1: watershed moment in the history of European anti Semitism. The
Speaker 1: gist of it is that there was a massive court
Speaker 1: case one of the first big media circuses around a
Speaker 1: trial in Western history. It ignited an entirely new right
Speaker 1: wing media industry in France, which largely formed around spreading
Speaker 1: anti Semitic propaganda. Hal Vaughan writes, during Chanelle's teens at
Speaker 1: the convent and later in the Catholic community at Mulline,
Speaker 1: anti Semitism was in full froth. The widely read Catholic
Speaker 1: Assumptionist daily Lacroix raged against the Jews. A typical spokesman
Speaker 1: for the church's position was the Jesuit priest Father Dulac,
Speaker 1: the spiritual guide to the anti Semitic publicist Edward Drumont,
Speaker 1: author of Jewish France. Drummont coined the slogan France for
Speaker 1: the French. So not much has changed about right wing politics.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, this sounds very familiar France. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of similarities in France. Now about this shit again,
Speaker 1: nothing nothing changes spoiler alert because people are incapable of
Speaker 1: learning lessons, which is good. It's good that we can't
Speaker 1: learn lessons, but we do get better at building bombs.
Speaker 1: I like that. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, it's good stuff.
Speaker 1: I was actually reading this is completely off topic. A
Speaker 1: very cool story about this This Italian physicist who worked
Speaker 1: with Enrico Fermi, brilliant physicist, considered by like Fermi to
Speaker 1: be like a Galileo level genius. He was probably the
Speaker 1: first guy to really figure out like neutrons and neutrinos
Speaker 1: and like have a real complicated understanding of the kind
Speaker 1: of physics that go into the making of a nuclear bomb.
Speaker 1: And he dis appeared off the face of the Earth
Speaker 1: in nineteen twenty eight, and one of the most likely
Speaker 1: explanations is that, being as smart as he was, he
Speaker 1: realized that nukes were the end result of his research
Speaker 1: and went off to a convent or to end his way.
Speaker 1: Let just to be like, I can't like, I fuck off,
Speaker 1: I'm not doing science anymore. It's a fun story anyway,
Speaker 1: not related to Coco Chanelle. A little related to Coco Chanelle.
Speaker 1: So Chanelle somewhat thoughtlessly adopted the right wing attitude in
Speaker 1: her society towards Jewish people and to what was best
Speaker 1: for French society in general. She's always very conservative. Some
Speaker 1: of this has to do with the company that she
Speaker 1: keeps as a young adult, who are mostly cavalry officers
Speaker 1: and this is don't hang out with cavalry officers. First off.
Speaker 1: At twenty, she gets a job working as a seamstress.
Speaker 1: And so basically the place that she's the school that
Speaker 1: she's going to, is geared towards preparing poor children to
Speaker 1: be productive members of the economy. So the nuns each
Speaker 1: cocoa had a sow so that she can make money.
Speaker 1: And it's kind of worth spending some time on what
Speaker 1: that instruction entailed. So I'm gonna quote from Justine Piccardi again.
Speaker 1: She spoke of being taught to sew by the aunts,
Speaker 1: himming and sing and seeming her trousseau, and of how
Speaker 1: she wore a white shift in which to bathe herself
Speaker 1: because it was a sin to look at one's body.
Speaker 1: She said that she sewed cross stitches on her nightgowns
Speaker 1: to make them look Russian. Sometimes she used to rub
Speaker 1: her nose to make it bleed at night. The blood
Speaker 1: dripped on her white night dress, and when she cried
Speaker 1: out for someone to come to her bedside, Anne would emerge.
Speaker 1: Slashes of red appeared elsewhere in her narratives. Two cherries
Speaker 1: that she stole to eat before her first communion, before
Speaker 1: she panicked and sought absolution from the priest for her wickedness,
Speaker 1: the blood stains on her night dress when she reached puberty,
Speaker 1: not understanding what had happened to her, but believing she
Speaker 1: had hurt herself and her reddened skin when the aunts
Speaker 1: beat her, I remember that they used to take my
Speaker 1: knickers down to spank me. First there was the humiliation.
Speaker 1: Then it was very unpleasant. Your bottom was as red
Speaker 1: as blood. So that's how she learns how to sew again.
Speaker 1: Kind of a nightmare in this period. You know, debatably
Speaker 1: better now. So that's a pretty rough life experience. It
Speaker 1: is worth noting that her time in the convent provides
Speaker 1: Cocoa with enough of a basis in reading. They do,
Speaker 1: I think, a particularly good job of teaching her to read,
Speaker 1: because she is a lifelong reader. She loves fiction. She
Speaker 1: is a huge fan of Like one of her biographers, Justine,
Speaker 1: will note that, like, do you know that short story
Speaker 1: the Yellow Wallpaper? Oh yeah, it's a it's a very
Speaker 1: famous like short story that she kind of transposes into
Speaker 1: some stories about her life. She loves like all of
Speaker 1: these different kind of like romance novels and stuff that
Speaker 1: are popular at the time, she's particularly in love with
Speaker 1: like these, these kind of melodramatic like what you call
Speaker 1: like kind of what you'd find into like an airport
Speaker 1: romance novel today, right, Like that's the kind of literature
Speaker 1: that she really enjoys, and she likes it because she
Speaker 1: she wants to escape for really obvious reasons, like it's
Speaker 1: this u She later tells a biographer quote, I thought
Speaker 1: that it was all awful because in my novels there
Speaker 1: was nothing but silk pillows and white lacquered furniture. I'd
Speaker 1: have liked to do everything in white lacquer. Sleeping in
Speaker 1: an alcove made me miserable. It humiliated me. I broke
Speaker 1: off bits of wood whenever I could, thinking what old
Speaker 1: trash this is. I did it out of sheer wickedness
Speaker 1: for the sake of destruction. When one considers all the
Speaker 1: things that go on in a child's head. I wanted
Speaker 1: to kill myself. Oh so she's like, you know, an
Speaker 1: intelligent kid. She finds fiction, she develops this love of reading.
Speaker 1: She's obsessed with these lights. She's horny, for sure. She's
Speaker 1: obsessed with like these Charles Charlotte Perk Perkins Gilman stories
Speaker 1: about like sickness and kind of the oppression of women,
Speaker 1: and also these stories of like swashbuckling romantic adventure, but
Speaker 1: they just kind of make her angrier and angrier. So
Speaker 1: as soon as she came and she gets this job
Speaker 1: as a seamstress, but she wants more independent, so she
Speaker 1: gets a second job singing at a cafe. This is
Speaker 1: where she meets all those cavalry guys because this is
Speaker 1: like kind of a bar. She's like nineteen twenty at
Speaker 1: this time, so she gets this side job singing at
Speaker 1: this cafe where cavalrymen are known to go drink and
Speaker 1: let off steam. So yeah, this is kind of like
Speaker 1: in cafes in this time, like groups singing sessions kind
Speaker 1: of the early versions of karaoke is a common form
Speaker 1: of recreation. And this is where she picks up the
Speaker 1: nickname Coco. And there's two versions of the story of how.
Speaker 1: One of them is that it's a nickname these soldiers
Speaker 1: give her because Coco is a French name for kept
Speaker 1: women coquette. So basically one is that when she is
Speaker 1: a teenager ish, these adult soldiers are like bitch, looks
Speaker 1: like a like a you know, a kept on and
Speaker 1: she was like, thank you, that is a compliment. This
Speaker 1: is the nicest thing anyw want to said to me.
Speaker 1: And yeah, the other is that Coco the singer only
Speaker 1: new two songs. One is Coco Rico, which is a
Speaker 1: song about a rooster because Coco Rico is the French
Speaker 1: version of cockadoodle doo. And the other song is quiqua
Speaker 1: vu Coco, which is a song about a girl who
Speaker 1: lost her dog. Now, the audience here are all drunk,
Speaker 1: horny soldiers who are more interested in her appearance than
Speaker 1: her voice. So when she would come on stage, they
Speaker 1: tended to greet her with a mix of barnyard noises
Speaker 1: and chance of Coco, which is the name of the
Speaker 1: dog from the song. So probably through some mix of
Speaker 1: all of this is how she accrues her nickname Coco.
Speaker 1: But she's kind of proud of it, Like you know,
Speaker 1: they barked it at me. It was so romantic you
Speaker 1: would not believe. Look, I mean there's problematic aspects to this,
Speaker 1: but her time singing in the bar is the first
Speaker 1: period of her life that kind of sounds like it
Speaker 1: might have been fun. I say that is this like
Speaker 1: how she works her way into the eventual spy stuff
Speaker 1: these No, no, no, much much too early. Yeah. Again,
Speaker 1: this is like barely the nineteen hundreds, right, So she's
Speaker 1: just a little kid at this point. Um, I mean
Speaker 1: she's a young woman, but like, you know, she's little
Speaker 1: world kids. Yeah. So, at age twenty three, after she
Speaker 1: spent a couple of years as a seamstress and singing,
Speaker 1: she runs into a wealthy for former French cavalry officer
Speaker 1: named at the end Balsan. Now she she claims they
Speaker 1: meet when she's on vacation to the city of Vish.
Speaker 1: That might be true, she might have just met him
Speaker 1: at the cafe. Either way, Balsan asks her out to
Speaker 1: a date the next day, and he like kind of
Speaker 1: falls for her, so he takes her to his compound
Speaker 1: because he's a very wealthy man from a very wealthy family. Um,
Speaker 1: and she basically as soon as she's like, oh, this
Speaker 1: rich guy is kind of offering to let me live
Speaker 1: on his rich guy compound as his mistress. Yeah done, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I'm on board totally. Yeah, like, of course, why wouldn't
Speaker 1: you do this. I'm really hate her later, Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's a it's a bummer that this ends with Nazi
Speaker 1: because so far, this is an incredible like fucking you
Speaker 1: could get twenty episodes of a Netflix series out of
Speaker 1: this that would have like a third of the country
Speaker 1: on that the edge of their seats. Oh that's a
Speaker 1: great idea, Robert Ide Yeah, yeah, yeah, take it. Take it.
Speaker 1: So Coco is very lowborn and very poor, so she
Speaker 1: can't marry Balson, right because he's a French noble kind
Speaker 1: of would be embarrassing for him. Yeah yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: but but also Balsan very much loves her right like
Speaker 1: he is. And that is the thing, Like none of
Speaker 1: these all she's going to be kind of a kept
Speaker 1: woman for a bunch of men. They are all absolutely
Speaker 1: mate like maniac for her. Um, she is very very
Speaker 1: good at I mean, she's an endearing person right like
Speaker 1: she they This is not just like a oh, they're
Speaker 1: like lecherous old men who want her around because she's cute,
Speaker 1: Like they fall for her. People will make like these
Speaker 1: very intense sacrifices for her. She has these very intense
Speaker 1: romantic relationships with these men. And this is not abnormal
Speaker 1: in Frenchhise society. Kind of the norm for French aristocrats
Speaker 1: in this period is like you marry some high born
Speaker 1: lady who is fancy enough that like, your family's happy,
Speaker 1: and then you never see each other, and you have
Speaker 1: a bunch of mistresses and chateaus around the riviera and
Speaker 1: other nice places who are like the actual people you
Speaker 1: spend your time with, and everyone is aware of this,
Speaker 1: and that's a pretty normal aspect of life in this
Speaker 1: strata of society. Coco transitions very easily to this life,
Speaker 1: and she likes she really She meets a couple of
Speaker 1: other Cortisons who are like also mistresses of rich guys,
Speaker 1: and she finds them very admirable. She learns a lot
Speaker 1: from them. They're kind of like her mentors. She also
Speaker 1: meets a bunch of French noblewomen who she hates. She
Speaker 1: doesn't like the way they dress, she thinks their makeup
Speaker 1: is shitty, she thinks they smell bad. She likes hates
Speaker 1: these fucking rich lad She's like, fuck, these rich ladies,
Speaker 1: like the Cortisons, are the ones who I want to
Speaker 1: be like, right, Like, obviously that's why the men want
Speaker 1: to spend time with them, for sure. No, some of
Speaker 1: those mistresses are like super impressive to read about. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, yeah, these are this is I mean, more
Speaker 1: a broader and more fascinating history than just cocoa. So
Speaker 1: for a few years she enjoys the high life with Balsan,
Speaker 1: becoming acquainted to high society. She rides horses a bunch,
Speaker 1: she flirts incessantly with Balsan's friends. He cheats on her
Speaker 1: regularly too, but you know, that's their French. But of course,
Speaker 1: eventually the realities of their divergent social situations and Balsan's
Speaker 1: love life outside of her cause issues and they break up.
Speaker 1: They don't wind up being like hating it, like they
Speaker 1: remain friendly. This is kind of another pattern. She tends
Speaker 1: to like stay pretty close with her exes, which is
Speaker 1: interesting to me. Yeah, and anyway, in nineteen o eight,
Speaker 1: at age twenty five, she falls madly in love with
Speaker 1: another aristocrat. And this guy is British and his name
Speaker 1: is Arthur Cappell, but everyone calls him boy Capell, which
Speaker 1: we don't call people boy anymore. It's like a name condescending.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I think it's like he's got like
Speaker 1: a boyish face, like he's yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: think it's like condescending. He doesn't seem to hate it
Speaker 1: or anything. Boy is a very wealthy British aristocrat. He
Speaker 1: falls head over heels for cocoa like everyone else does,
Speaker 1: and he puts her up in a fancy Paris apartment
Speaker 1: so she gets her own place now that he pays for.
Speaker 1: That's very nice. The two are very much in love
Speaker 1: for a time. But as an English aristocrat, he also
Speaker 1: cannot marry a poor frenchwoman, but he pays. He cares
Speaker 1: about her, and he cares about her enough that like,
Speaker 1: not only does he put her up in an apartment,
Speaker 1: but he gives her a chunk of money to invest
Speaker 1: in starting a business so that she can become financially independent,
Speaker 1: which is a sign of actual care as opposed to
Speaker 1: just like you know he doesn't he has. He does
Speaker 1: not seem to want to keep her dependent on him, right,
Speaker 1: which I also find interesting. Is she sewing this whole time?
Speaker 1: Or was that if she sucks ass at sewing she
Speaker 1: always highs she learns how to do it, but she
Speaker 1: she usually hires other people to do that. She's not
Speaker 1: she's never going to be a very good I bring
Speaker 1: that up, but like she's not very good at it.
Speaker 1: That seems to be the consensus. So By this point,
Speaker 1: Coco has come to the conclusion for herself that if
Speaker 1: she wants to exist in the rarefied air of Menli,
Speaker 1: Balsan and Capelle, one option is to just be a
Speaker 1: kept woman. But that only lasts so long, and if
Speaker 1: she wants to really succeed in high society, she's going
Speaker 1: to need to make a fortune of her own. And
Speaker 1: it's interesting. One of the things I find fascinating about
Speaker 1: her is she certainly has the potential, given her beauty,
Speaker 1: given her obvious intelligence, given her social skills, to acquire
Speaker 1: a fortune by like making some old rich guy fall
Speaker 1: in love with her and taking his money right like
Speaker 1: that is an option for a Coco. She could have
Speaker 1: handled that if she wanted. She does not seem to
Speaker 1: be interested in that. Um she could have probably convinced
Speaker 1: a lover to set her up for life, but she
Speaker 1: doesn't seem interested in that either. She wants to make
Speaker 1: a fortune for herself, and so she starts a business
Speaker 1: business that's going to make her name known to people
Speaker 1: and allow her to feel potent standing next to these
Speaker 1: rich people that she's going to spend her life around. Robert,
Speaker 1: I'm so mad at this edge. I had to be
Speaker 1: on her side. She's pretty red at this stage, except
Speaker 1: for the rampant anti semitys. Oh yeah, yeah, that is
Speaker 1: not But you know what isn't rampantly anti Semitic ads.
Speaker 1: That's right, these great sponsors not one of them. Ah,
Speaker 1: we're back, so worry about Hey, hey, Sophie, you know
Speaker 1: the Hugo boss. You know the Hugo boss motto. It's
Speaker 1: been a long time since the Holocaust. Sorry, boss, you
Speaker 1: don't have to say you're sorry to the people who
Speaker 1: made uniforms for the SSSA. You're not sorry. It's okay.
Speaker 1: Look if you are. It's the same thing with like
Speaker 1: fucking IBM, providing like the technology that the Germans used
Speaker 1: to do a lot of the like keep track of
Speaker 1: a lot of the people that they put in the camps,
Speaker 1: Like if you worked with the Yeah, oh yeah, that
Speaker 1: was a big early ib IBM played a crucial role
Speaker 1: in the Holocaust. And you can keep giving companies shit
Speaker 1: for that. It doesn't matter that nobody there today did that.
Speaker 1: You can keep giving them shit. It's fine. Um, Look,
Speaker 1: they rolled over that money. That money is a part
Speaker 1: of their present success. You can continue to give them
Speaker 1: shit for working with the Nazis is my opinion. So anyway, way,
Speaker 1: Hugo boss, if you want to sponsor the show, I
Speaker 1: will delete all of this. I have no principles. So
Speaker 1: during her time in the upper crust, Coco developed both
Speaker 1: a distaste for the Garnet's war developed a distaste for
Speaker 1: the garments worn by rich society women. Right. She thinks
Speaker 1: they're ugly, They're very complicated. You've seen movies and TV
Speaker 1: shows set in this period. You've seen paintings like these
Speaker 1: massive dresses with like the whalebone course, it's in these
Speaker 1: these huge, wide like like they're there. They require like
Speaker 1: a lot of the bigger dresses and shit require multiple
Speaker 1: people to help you put them on. Right, It's like
Speaker 1: a suit of night's armorum. Coco does not like these big,
Speaker 1: complicated all these layers, all of this. She likes bathrobes,
Speaker 1: She likes wearing men's clothing, large shapeless shirts. She also
Speaker 1: likes suits, and she thinks it's frustrating that women don't
Speaker 1: get to wear stuff like that because that kind of
Speaker 1: clothing is liberating and you can move in it, and
Speaker 1: you can be active in a participant in the world
Speaker 1: in it, and you can take care of dressing and
Speaker 1: stuff on your own, right, you don't need a team
Speaker 1: of people. And so Cappel, like Chanelle, convinces Cappel to
Speaker 1: invest in her business. And the first thing she's going
Speaker 1: to make is just a line of hats, right, I guess,
Speaker 1: because that's the easy thing to make. But the hats
Speaker 1: do reasonably well. And around the time she's starting her
Speaker 1: clothing business, Coco's life gets struck by another tragedy. Her
Speaker 1: sister Julia, had gotten pregnant and had a child when
Speaker 1: Coco was around twenty and when Coco's around twenty seven,
Speaker 1: Julia catches her husband cheating on her and commits suicide,
Speaker 1: and so Coco is forced to take responsibility for her
Speaker 1: nephew Andre. That's one version of the story. Coco's sister
Speaker 1: definitely dies. Some people will say Andre was probably Coco's son,
Speaker 1: and she just would never admit it. We really have
Speaker 1: no idea. She calls him her nephew, so I'm just
Speaker 1: going to call him her nephew for the rest of
Speaker 1: the story, because you know whatever. But she raises this
Speaker 1: kid kinda so she does. I will say this, she
Speaker 1: does a much better job of raising Andre than her father.
Speaker 1: Test of raising her. Yeah, that's so interesting. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: It is interesting, and she gets Boycappell against kind of
Speaker 1: the evidence that he really does love her. He arranges
Speaker 1: for her nephew to go to a really really expensive
Speaker 1: English boarding school, like one that was going to kind
Speaker 1: of like cement him as a member of English high society.
Speaker 1: It's going to teach maybe his son. It's not impossible.
Speaker 1: I don't think it is. It's not impossible because they know.
Speaker 1: I don't think it could. It could be because the
Speaker 1: timing doesn't work out because again, by the time they meet,
Speaker 1: the kids a couple of years old. Okay, So I
Speaker 1: think it is a situation of like Coco's trying to
Speaker 1: figure out how to take care of this kid. Maybe
Speaker 1: there's a little bit of I don't want a little
Speaker 1: kid running around and stuff, But in any case, he
Speaker 1: spends a significant amount of money to give this kid
Speaker 1: a good chance at life, and the fact that the
Speaker 1: kid is at a boarding school leaves Coco free to
Speaker 1: focus her efforts on her new business. When the Great
Speaker 1: War hits in nineteen fourteen, Boycappell joins the army and
Speaker 1: serves while Coco jaunts between her Paris factory, the riviera
Speaker 1: and the hosts, and she is kind of following French
Speaker 1: elite society leaves Paris during the war for the most
Speaker 1: part because Paris is getting shelled a lot of the time.
Speaker 1: So they're like, well, let's go party, Like we're not
Speaker 1: gonna fight in this war, you know, let's go. I mean,
Speaker 1: some of them do, but most of them. Most of
Speaker 1: them go party, especially the ladies, so they're kind of
Speaker 1: hanging out, chilling and stuff. And while all of the people,
Speaker 1: these people are dying on the Western Front, Coco's business
Speaker 1: blows the fuck up. It blows up like one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty five millimeter howitzer shell in a trench full
Speaker 1: of French eighteen year olds. Not even the disruption of
Speaker 1: the war can hinder her success. In short order, she
Speaker 1: has more than a hundred employees, and in order to
Speaker 1: deal with the shortages of wartime, she starts using her
Speaker 1: own fabric. Blends. Jersey is a fabric, you know, like
Speaker 1: jersey fabric. She starts to use. It had never been
Speaker 1: a part of high fashion, but it's one of those
Speaker 1: things that has no real military use. It's not used
Speaker 1: in uniforms. So she's able to get a supply it
Speaker 1: and she kind of makes it high fashion, and this
Speaker 1: kind of informs the kind of clothing that she makes
Speaker 1: in this period, which is loose, baggy and androgynous, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's a big part of the stuff she's making. A
Speaker 1: lot of the feel of her early clothing is like
Speaker 1: I'm wearing my boyfriend's shirt, you know, yeah, very consciously
Speaker 1: like what she's doing. So that's the stuff that gets
Speaker 1: her rich, not these hats that she was making before. No,
Speaker 1: the hats are kind of like a test run. It's
Speaker 1: this kind of addrogynous, baggy, but comfortable and stuff that
Speaker 1: you can move in and be active in. Now, the
Speaker 1: most iconic design of her early career is her creation
Speaker 1: of what she calls and she's the first person to
Speaker 1: say this, the little black dress that is a that
Speaker 1: is the coco Chanelle original. Now, obviously today that concept
Speaker 1: is bigger than any fashion brand. God knows how many
Speaker 1: kinds of little black dresses, but Coco Chanelle is the
Speaker 1: one who decides. And a fashion world that is dominated
Speaker 1: by eighteen hundreds fashion that like, fuck all these big
Speaker 1: fucking dresses with these huge hoop skirts and shit, I
Speaker 1: am going like women want to wear a slinky, lightweight
Speaker 1: black dress. And there's a couple of different stories as
Speaker 1: to how this look comes about, but I'm choosing to
Speaker 1: quote this version of events from Justine Piccardi's book. She
Speaker 1: was dressing for the evening at the apartment in the
Speaker 1: Avenue Gabrielle. No mention of boy Capelle, who was often
Speaker 1: away not only in the arms of other women, but
Speaker 1: also as an army officer, undertaking clandestine missions for his
Speaker 1: friends at government. I'd never been to the opera before.
Speaker 1: I had a white dress made by my own modistes.
Speaker 1: My hair, which came down below my waist, was done
Speaker 1: up around my head in three braids. All that mass
Speaker 1: set straight upon that thin body. She had so much hair,
Speaker 1: she said that it was crushing me to death. But
Speaker 1: fate intervened and gave her freedom. There was a gas
Speaker 1: burner in the bathroom. I turned on the hot tap
Speaker 1: to wash my hands. Again, the water wasn't hot, so
Speaker 1: I fiddled with the pilot light and the whole thing exploded.
Speaker 1: My white dress was covered in soot my hair. The
Speaker 1: less said, the better. I only had to wash my
Speaker 1: face again. I didn't use makeup in those days. Only
Speaker 1: the coquettes used makeup and were elegant. The women of
Speaker 1: the bourgeoisie weren't groomed, and they wore hats that flopped
Speaker 1: all over the place with bird's nests and butterflies. But
Speaker 1: nothing was going to stop her from going out that night,
Speaker 1: not even her burnt hair. I took a pair of
Speaker 1: scissors and cut one braid off. The hair sprang out
Speaker 1: all at once around my face. In those days, I
Speaker 1: had hair like sable. Undaunted, she cut off the second
Speaker 1: braid and then told her maid to cut off the third.
Speaker 1: The girl began to cry, but Channelle didn't care, or
Speaker 1: at least she didn't care about the loss of her
Speaker 1: hair or of the suit stained white dress. I slipped
Speaker 1: on a black dress I had crossed over in the front.
Speaker 1: What a marvelous thing, youth and caught in the waist,
Speaker 1: with a sort of minaret on top. With bobbed hair
Speaker 1: and a little black dress. Channelle was neither slave nor girl,
Speaker 1: but something of her own making. Everyone at the opera
Speaker 1: was looking at her, she later told an interviewer. They
Speaker 1: were also impressed that the darling of the English became
Speaker 1: the beauty of Paris. Afterwards, however, yeah, so that's the story. Right,
Speaker 1: She's going out this night, this burner explodes and she
Speaker 1: winds up like throwing together this outfit that's something. She's got,
Speaker 1: short hair, she's got the slinky black dress. People don't
Speaker 1: dress this way, right, and it takes the fuck off.
Speaker 1: People cannot stop talking about how good Koko she looks
Speaker 1: in this dress. I love it, and I also think, yeah,
Speaker 1: she's essentially a sex worker, and like they have been
Speaker 1: so influential on this kind of you know, it makes sense, Yes,
Speaker 1: it totally tracks and it people like one of Coco's
Speaker 1: nicknames is the woman who killed nineteenth century fashion, Like
Speaker 1: if you watch those like Gone with the Wind dash it,
Speaker 1: she kills that, and she kills it on that night
Speaker 1: with that little black dress. Right. It makes such a
Speaker 1: fucking impact on French fashion that like it, it's like
Speaker 1: a bomb goes off in the fashion industry now. Coco
Speaker 1: is also an activist for women's liberation, and a lot
Speaker 1: of her obsession with loose and comfortable women's fashion is
Speaker 1: married to her commitment to liberation. One CNN fashion article
Speaker 1: I found noted she wanted women to move in, breathe
Speaker 1: in her clothes just like men did in theirs. Her
Speaker 1: work was in many ways a form of female emancipation. Queen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sucks where it's building. This is pretty cool. So
Speaker 1: while Coco's career reaches its heights during World War One
Speaker 1: and immediately afterwards she's just doing amazing, her love life
Speaker 1: is a little less successful because her lover boy Capell,
Speaker 1: dies horribly in an automotive crash right after the war ends.
Speaker 1: That's a bummer, Yeah, makes her very sad. Obviously. One
Speaker 1: of the things that makes her sadder is that Keppell's
Speaker 1: most of his possessions. He's got some wife back in England, right,
Speaker 1: She gets a lot of stuff, but he leaves a
Speaker 1: lot of money to Coco. He also leaves a lot
Speaker 1: of money to an Italian woman that Coco does not know,
Speaker 1: making it clear that like, oh so he's he's you know,
Speaker 1: he was playing the field more than she was aware of.
Speaker 1: I would have loved to see that will reading share
Speaker 1: that was fun, she would later tell a biographer. His
Speaker 1: death was a terrible blow to me, and losing Capelle,
Speaker 1: I lost everything. What followed was not a life of happiness.
Speaker 1: I have to say this seems to most buy there's
Speaker 1: she will have fall in love with other men. Most
Speaker 1: people who know of her life will tend to say, like,
Speaker 1: this was the love of her life, right, this was
Speaker 1: the guy that she she cared about the most. That said,
Speaker 1: while she never recovers, maybe emotionally from this, financially she
Speaker 1: just does better and better and better. The war years
Speaker 1: give away to the Roaring twenties, and that's this is
Speaker 1: when Chanel reinvents herself as Coco. Pivoting off of her
Speaker 1: little black dress, she launches a line of loose fitting
Speaker 1: jersey outfits made to emulate, in her words, the poor look.
Speaker 1: So the look of like poor girls, right, but in
Speaker 1: expensive high fashion. So she's taking you know, she grows
Speaker 1: up dirt poor, she's taking like, well, these women who
Speaker 1: have to work for a living, this is how they dress,
Speaker 1: and she's making fancy, riche versions of it, right, Like
Speaker 1: That's that's a big part of the early success of Chanelle.
Speaker 1: Andrew vibes flapper vibes very perfectly. We are building to
Speaker 1: the Flappers because that is partly a creation of Coco.
Speaker 1: Chanelle um so androgeny is central to her work. She
Speaker 1: is very much into the idea of women wearing clothing
Speaker 1: that covers up their hips, that covers their breasts. Um.
Speaker 1: She's also very much open to Like one of her
Speaker 1: most famous Chanelle models will pose in Chanelle clothing dressed
Speaker 1: as a man in wearing mustaches. Um, this is part
Speaker 1: part of why they're doing this is that like Coco,
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, is like really into this kind of
Speaker 1: androgynous style. And part of it is that it gets
Speaker 1: people talking, right like these ads. This is like this
Speaker 1: is you know, risque, This is kind of all the
Speaker 1: edge of acceptability. Um. And this kind of risque tinge
Speaker 1: mixed with flawless fashion pedigree helps Coco influence an entire
Speaker 1: movement in women's clothing. Quote in this is from that
Speaker 1: CNN article. Her designer clothes inspired flappers to wear shorts,
Speaker 1: sheer short sleeved and sometimes sleeveless dresses, and roll down
Speaker 1: their stockings to just blow their knees. French and American
Speaker 1: fashion magazines such as Mademoiselle, Femina, and Minerva celebrated her creations.
Speaker 1: Chanelle launches the ravishing dark green sports suit, Lady Fellow's
Speaker 1: sports a Chanelle raw silk dress at the Ritz. Chanelle
Speaker 1: launches the black tulet dress. Chanelle's creation for evening, a
Speaker 1: white satin sheath covered over with an embroidered and beaded cloak. Still,
Speaker 1: critics could be ferocious women were no longer to exist.
Speaker 1: All that's left or the boys created by Chanelle. So
Speaker 1: she gets kind of balled out by guys for being like,
Speaker 1: you're making like women don't look like women anymore because
Speaker 1: they're they're they're dressing, you know, in this new fashion
Speaker 1: style you've brought on. So by the twenties, Coco Chanelle
Speaker 1: is richer than God. She is as rich as all
Speaker 1: of the most of these guys she's hanging around right,
Speaker 1: richer than a lot of them. And yeah, through sheer
Speaker 1: force of will and talent, she has made a place
Speaker 1: for herself in the highest halls of power and European pride,
Speaker 1: she later told an interviewer, an orphan denied a home
Speaker 1: without love, without either father or mother, my solitude gave
Speaker 1: me a superiority complex. The meanness of life gave me strength, pride,
Speaker 1: the drive to win, and a passion to greatness. And
Speaker 1: whenever life brought me lavish elegance in the friendship of
Speaker 1: a Stravinsky or a Picasso, I never felt stupid or inferior.
Speaker 1: Why because I knew it was with such people that
Speaker 1: one succeeds good climber. That's our right, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and she is. She liked she hangs out with Picasso,
Speaker 1: she hangs out with Stravensky, She's like close with all
Speaker 1: of these people. That's like the social set that she
Speaker 1: moves in. And yeah, Coco blends in effortlessly with these luminaries,
Speaker 1: not just because she's successful and rich, but because she's witty.
Speaker 1: She becomes very well known for her quotes as well
Speaker 1: as her clothes lines like a woman who doesn't wear
Speaker 1: perfume has no fee future. And if you're sad, add more.
Speaker 1: I like this one. If you're sad, add more lipstick
Speaker 1: and attack. Okay, so not so feminist, Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: this is this is the twenties, Like what do you
Speaker 1: want right about perfume has no future. She also made
Speaker 1: some statements that are still baffling, like if blonde wear
Speaker 1: blue perfume, No one seems to know what that means.
Speaker 1: Sometimes she just said things because they sounded good. She
Speaker 1: was an innovator in the speed with which she released
Speaker 1: radically different lines of clothing. Coco worked at such a
Speaker 1: dizzying pace that her competitors could not keep up. Never
Speaker 1: before had fashioned moved so quickly or changed so often,
Speaker 1: and Coco saw this as the key to the success
Speaker 1: of her empire. Quote address is neither a tragedy nor
Speaker 1: a painting. It is a charming and ephemeral creation, not
Speaker 1: an everlasting work of art. Fashion should die and die
Speaker 1: quickly in order that commerce may survive. The more transient
Speaker 1: Fashioned is, the more perfect it is. You can't protect
Speaker 1: what is already dead. And this is where I don't
Speaker 1: know if you can lay this morally on her, but
Speaker 1: this is where we can lay it. Like the biggest
Speaker 1: negative impact of Coco's life, which is that she kind
Speaker 1: of helps lay the foundations for fast fashion, not just
Speaker 1: the industry, where like every season there's a new outfit
Speaker 1: which had not been a thing before in the same way,
Speaker 1: but like this idea that fashion should be discardable, that
Speaker 1: you should be moving through outfits, that you should be
Speaker 1: getting outfits right now. Chanel, she is not making fast
Speaker 1: fashion right. Chanelle is a luxury brand. It's a luxury
Speaker 1: brand in her day, but the idea that clothing should
Speaker 1: be a femural Coco is the one who pushes that
Speaker 1: and most successfully does so, and the human costs of
Speaker 1: the fashion industry today due to this are enormous. We
Speaker 1: can't entirely because she's not making these choices. She's not
Speaker 1: having her ship made in Bangladesh right where these factories
Speaker 1: burned down and killed two thousand people. But that is
Speaker 1: a result of her choices, even if it's one that
Speaker 1: maybe she wouldn't have foreseen, although knowing Coco, I don't
Speaker 1: know she would have been against it. So it odds
Speaker 1: with her Like timeless style, it is it is, but
Speaker 1: it's she did not see her style as timeless. We
Speaker 1: see it as timeless because of how iconic it became.
Speaker 1: She was always iterating, always moving, always changing Coco's clothing. Obviously,
Speaker 1: we've talked about how liberatory it was to women in
Speaker 1: the West, but the industry she innovated now bases its
Speaker 1: profits on the continued suffering of thousands of women, primarily
Speaker 1: in Southeast Asia. Some eighty percent of the garment workforce
Speaker 1: is industry workforce is female. Most of it resides in
Speaker 1: countries like Bangladesh with very few worker protections. In an
Speaker 1: interview with Deutsche well industry expert Josella Burkhardt notes the
Speaker 1: industry wants us to hire women because they are seen
Speaker 1: as docile and they might not organize very easily when
Speaker 1: they come home. For example, they might not be able
Speaker 1: to go to trade union meetings because they have so
Speaker 1: much to do. It's a very patriarchal society in India
Speaker 1: and Bangladesh, so women are not used to be treated
Speaker 1: as they should be as human beings. This also makes
Speaker 1: it easier in the factory boss's shout at them and
Speaker 1: treat them differently than men, just keep getting them pregnant
Speaker 1: and make them desperate. It's and again this is this
Speaker 1: is not morally if you're talking about what is she
Speaker 1: morally responsible for, It's much more the anti semitism than
Speaker 1: like modern fast fashion. But it is worth noting that
Speaker 1: modern the modern fashion industry, as horrific as a lot
Speaker 1: of it is, does is direct. She is probably the
Speaker 1: number the single most influential designer certainly and why fashion
Speaker 1: works the way that it does today, at least up
Speaker 1: there right, Like it's hard to beat Coco fucking Chanel
Speaker 1: for that. An amazing legacy we're working on here, quite
Speaker 1: a legacy coordinate that's gonna be all for part one
Speaker 1: of our emotionally confusing series on Coco Chanelle. This is
Speaker 1: the good part, I'm assuming. Yeah, it is gonna get
Speaker 1: rapidly more anti Semitic m so and a lot more
Speaker 1: Nazis because the twenties are happening, but also the British
Speaker 1: Royal family, although those guys are Nazis too. So Courtney,
Speaker 1: you got anything tood plug? Oh my god, you guys. Yes,
Speaker 1: I am addicted to making podcasts. I have three. If
Speaker 1: you are a podcaster, check out podcast Bestie. If you
Speaker 1: are a writer, check out The Bleeders. And if you're
Speaker 1: horny and like to fuck, check out Private Parts Unknown.
Speaker 1: And yeah, yeah, that's what I'm up to, all right?
Speaker 1: And where should should vollow you? On Twitter and Instagram?
Speaker 1: Court Oh yeah, I am on the social media's at
Speaker 1: Courtney kosak koc a k oh and you can find
Speaker 1: this is a hot tip. This is not really on
Speaker 1: the internet. Oh wow, I'm about to end. I'm thinking
Speaker 1: of retiring from only fans, you guys, so this is
Speaker 1: your last chance. If you want to check out Coco
Speaker 1: peep show, check out Coco peep Show, and when that ends,
Speaker 1: you can find my only fans. Yeah, finally gonna leave this, uh,
Speaker 1: this grueling life of podcasting behind. You were just celebrating
Speaker 1: our five year. Now you're abandoning me. M m. That's right,
Speaker 1: that's right, getting the killing on only fans, as long
Speaker 1: as I get ten percent. Good times, good times, everybody,
Speaker 1: all right. Part two's coming up. You know later this week.
Speaker 1: You know how it works. You watch this show, it'll
Speaker 1: be back. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our
Speaker 1: website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.