48 Fun Facts About Coco Chanel

Coco Chanel was born in 1883 in a poorhouse hospital in which Loire Valley town?

Saumur was a start she hid for life: Chanel claimed she had been raised by aunts and never admitted the poorhouse.

What was Coco Chanel's real first name?

Gabrielle was her given name, and the birth register spelt her surname Chasnel, a spelling she never had changed.

After her mother died, Chanel was sent to the orphanage at which convent, where she learned to sew?

Aubazine stayed with her: decades later she had the abbey's stone staircase echoed in her own Riviera villa.

Which designer took over the House of Chanel in 1983 and led it until his death in 2019?

Karl Lagerfeld arrived twelve years after her death and spent 36 years reworking her suits, pearls and interlocking Cs.

Where did Chanel make her stage debut as a poseuse, an entertainer between the star turns?

A cafe-concert in Moulins drew the town's cavalry officers, and she sang there at night after days spent sewing.

In one account, Chanel's nickname came from which song she sang in cabaret?

Who Has Seen Coco? was in her cabaret repertoire, though others trace the name to 'cocotte', a kept woman.

Finding no stage work in Vichy in 1906, Chanel is said to have taken what job?

Dispensing glasses of mineral water at a spa spring was her fallback, by one biographer's account, before she gave up on a stage career.

Étienne Balsan, Chanel's first wealthy lover, was an ex-cavalry officer and heir to what?

A textile fortune let Balsan quit the army to breed racehorses, and Chanel moved into his château.

Which polo player installed Chanel in a Paris apartment and financed her first shops?

Arthur 'Boy' Capel stayed her lover until he died in a car crash in December 1919, the year after marrying an English aristocrat.

The Chanel No. 5 flacon is widely thought to echo which of her lover's possessions?

His toiletry bottles, from the shirtmaker Charvet, are the usual answer, though a rival story credits his whisky decanter.

Chanel's first Paris boutique, opened on rue Cambon in 1910, sold only what?

Hats were all her lease allowed: a dressmaker already worked in the building, so the terms barred her from making dresses.

Chanel's 1913 Deauville boutique used jersey and tricot, fabrics then mainly used for what?

Men's underwear was jersey's usual fate; short of money, she chose the cloth because it was cheap, then made its ease the point.

Chanel's Biarritz shop, opened in 1915, was so lucrative that it let her do what?

Repay her backer in full: the resort sat beside neutral Spain, and wealthy clients from across the border kept buying through the war.

Which composer's family did Chanel house at her villa Bel Respiro in 1920-21?

Igor Stravinsky's family, cut off from Russia by the revolution, stayed from September 1920 to May 1921, and she later claimed a brief affair with the composer.

By the usual account, why is Chanel No. 5 called No. 5?

She picked the fifth sample offered from perfumer Ernest Beaux's numbered vials, and five was already her lucky number.

Which store's founder introduced Chanel to her future perfume partners at the Longchamps races in 1922?

Galeries Lafayette founder Théophile Bader wanted No. 5 on his counters, and took 20 per cent of the new perfume company for the introduction.

Which star gave No. 5 pop-culture notoriety by saying she wore nothing else to bed?

The 1921 launch was one of the first times a designer had extended a brand beyond clothing.

By 1935 Chanel was a daily user of which drug, a habit she kept to the end of her life?

Morphine, injected daily, is the habit her biographer Hal Vaughan describes, and her close friend Misia Sert shared it.

The writer Colette likened Chanel at work to which animal?

A small black bull was Colette's image in a 1932 sketch, prompted by the tuft of curly black hair falling over Chanel's brow.

Chanel's ten-year affair from 1923 was with which British aristocrat, known to intimates as 'Bendor'?

The Duke of Westminster showered her with jewels; years later her wartime code name as an agent was 'Westminster'.

Who opened British high society to Chanel in 1923 and later acted as courier in Operation Modellhut?

Vera Bate Lombardi, a well-connected English socialite, was freed from an Italian prison for the trip, then denounced Chanel in Madrid as a German spy.

What was the name of the Riviera villa Chanel built at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin?

La Pausa hosted Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dalí, and its principal rooms were later recreated inside the Dallas Museum of Art.

Which Hollywood producer brought Chanel to California in 1931 to dress his studio's stars?

Samuel Goldwyn wanted Paris chic for United Artists, but she costumed only a few films, Tonight or Never among them, before going home.

Which French actress played the young designer in the film Coco Before Chanel?

Audrey Tautou became the face of No. 5 that same year; the film follows Chanel from the orphanage to her first success as a designer.

Chanel was credited as La Maison Chanel on the costumes of which 1939 Jean Renoir film?

La Règle du jeu flopped on release in July 1939, and that October the French government banned it as demoralizing.

Which poet is thought to have helped craft the famous maxims attributed to Chanel?

Pierre Reverdy burned many of his manuscripts in 1926 and withdrew to live beside a Benedictine abbey, yet stayed her close friend until his death in 1960.

Which event led Chanel to close her couture house for 15 years?

The outbreak of World War II led her to dismiss her workers and shut the couture house, which stayed closed until her comeback in 1954.

Which rival designer challenged Chanel in the 1930s with playful, surrealist-tinged fashions?

Elsa Schiaparelli worked with Salvador Dalí himself, turning out a lobster-print evening dress and a hat shaped like a shoe.

Where did Chanel live during the German occupation of Paris?

The Hotel Ritz doubled as a German headquarters during the occupation, and she died there in 1971.

Chanel's wartime lover Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage worked for what?

German military intelligence, the Abwehr, employed the baron, and the liaison let her live in comfort and company through the occupation.

On what grounds did Chanel petition German officials in 1941 for sole ownership of Parfums Chanel?

Her partners were Jewish, so she invoked the Aryanisation laws, only to learn they had already signed control to a non-Jewish businessman, Félix Amiot.

Under the 1947 renegotiation, what did the Wertheimers agree to pay for the rest of Chanel's life?

She also got two per cent of all No. 5 sales worldwide, making her one of the richest women in the world.

Chanel's lover Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich was notorious for his part in whose 1916 murder?

Rasputin's killers included the Grand Duke, a cousin of the last tsar, and in exile he introduced Chanel to the perfumer behind No. 5.

Which SS general sent Chanel on a secret mission to Madrid late in the war?

Walter Schellenberg, the head of SS foreign intelligence, was released from prison gravely ill, and she paid his medical bills and supported his family.

Operation Modellhut, 'Model Hat', was a 1943-44 scheme for the designer to carry a peace feeler to whom?

Winston Churchill had been her friend for years, which is why SS officers hoped she could carry him their offer of a separate peace.

Which couturier's cinched waists and full skirts so irked Chanel that they helped spur her 1954 comeback?

Christian Dior's New Look struck her as neither modern nor suitable for active women, and she mocked him as a man who doesn't know women.

Who financed the 1954 revival of the House of Chanel?

Pierre Wertheimer, her old adversary in the perfume war, paid for it all and got the rights to her name in return; his family still owns the house.

How did critics first receive Chanel's 1954 comeback collection?

They gave it poor reviews, but the American press welcomed the same show, and shoppers soon took to her relaxed, comfortable clothes.

What were Chanel's reported last words, spoken to her maid in January 1971?

'You see, this is how you die.' was the line reported from her deathbed; at 87 she was still at work on a spring collection.

Where is Chanel, who died in Paris in 1971, buried?

Lausanne, Switzerland, was her home for almost ten years after the war, and her gravestone there carries five lions, for her star sign and her lucky number.

Which woollen fabric became the signature of the Chanel suit?

Tweed gave her comeback its uniform: the collarless, braid-trimmed suit became a status symbol for a new generation.

American Vogue in 1926 compared the little black dress to what mass-market product?

The Ford automobile stood for something simple and within everyone's reach, and Vogue predicted the dress would become a uniform for women of taste.

Which white flower became the emblem of the House of Chanel?

The camellia had a literary pull: in her youth she was obsessed with Dumas's The Lady of the Camellias, whose courtesan heroine wears the flower.

Why is Chanel's classic handbag called the 2.55?

It was created in February 1955 as an update of her 1929 shoulder bag, whose strap, borrowed from soldiers' kit, left a woman's hands free.

Which duke designed jewellery for Chanel, including her favourite Maltese-cross cuffs?

The Duke of Verdura, a Sicilian named Fulco, reworked jewels given to her by aristocratic admirers, then opened his own jewellery house in 1939.

Who played Chanel for the first eight months of the 1969 Broadway musical Coco?

Katharine Hepburn had never done a stage musical and never did another; after Danielle Darrieux took over, the show closed two months later.

Chanel is credited with making what fashionable in the 1920s as a mark of privilege and leisure?

Suntans had marked out outdoor labourers until she came home bronzed from the Riviera and her admirers copied the look.

For which ballet company did Chanel costume the 1924 beach comedy Le Train bleu?

The Ballets Russes danced it in her own sportswear designs, to a scenario by Jean Cocteau and before a curtain painted after Picasso.