50 Fun Facts About Coco Chanel

Coco Chanel was born in 1883 in a charity hospital in which French town?

Her mother was a laundrywoman and her father an itinerant street vendor who peddled work clothes.

How was Chanel's surname entered on her birth certificate?

She never corrected it, since doing so would have revealed she was born in a poorhouse hospice; she went to her grave as Gabrielle Chasnel.

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

She was 11; her father sent her brothers to work as farm labourers. Aubazine later inspired the staircase at her villa La Pausa.

How old was Chanel's mother Jeanne when she died?

Chanel later told glamorous, untrue versions in which her father sailed for America and she was raised by aunts.

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

La Rotonde was frequented by cavalry officers; performers earned only what the passed plate collected.

One account says Chanel's nickname came from a song she sang in cabaret. What was it called?

She liked to claim her father gave her the name; others trace it to 'cocotte', the French for a kept woman.

Failing to find stage work in Vichy in 1906, Chanel took a job doing what?

As a donneuse d'eau at the Grande Grille she served the purportedly curative waters; she then gave up on the stage.

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

She lived three years at his château Royallieu, where she began making hats as a diversion.

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

Their affair lasted nine years; he died in a car crash in December 1919, and she said 'in losing Capel, I lost everything'.

The Chanel No. 5 bottle is thought to be based on which objects belonging to Boy Capel?

She wanted to reproduce the rectangular, bevelled lines in 'exquisite, expensive, delicate glass'.

Chanel became a licensed milliner in 1910 and opened her first boutique at which Paris address?

Chanel Modes sold only hats; the couture house followed at number 31, and by 1927 she owned five buildings on the street.

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

Her sister Antoinette and aunt Adrienne paraded the boardwalks daily as walking advertisements.

Chanel's Biarritz shop, opened in 1915, was so lucrative that within a year she was able to do what?

Biarritz was full of wealthy Spanish clients and wartime exiles; there she met Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich.

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

They had fled Soviet Russia; she had a brief affair with him and secretly guaranteed The Rite of Spring against loss with 300,000 francs.

Under the 1924 Parfums Chanel deal, what share of the profits did the Wertheimer brothers receive?

Théophile Bader got twenty and Chanel ten; she called her partner 'the bandit who screwed me' and fought for control for twenty years.

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

Théophile Bader wanted to sell No. 5 in his department store; the Wertheimers ran the perfume house Bourjois.

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?

She injected herself; her close friend Misia Sert shared the habit.

The writer Colette likened Chanel at work to which animal?

She singled out 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'?

He gave her jewels, art, a Mayfair home and the Riviera land where she built La Pausa.

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

Reputedly an illegitimate daughter of the Marquess of Cambridge, she also introduced Chanel to the Prince of Wales; in Madrid she denounced Chanel to the British as a spy.

Chanel's Riviera villa, built on land the Duke gave her at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, was called what?

'Restful pause'; she sold it in 1953, and five of its rooms have been replicated at the Dallas Museum of Art.

How much did Samuel Goldwyn offer Chanel in 1931 to design costumes in Hollywood twice a year?

She dressed Gloria Swanson in Tonight or Never, then declared Hollywood 'the capital of bad taste'.

How did The New Yorker explain Chanel's failure with the American film studios?

Garbo and Dietrich nonetheless became private clients.

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

She also introduced Renoir to the young Luchino Visconti.

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

Their romance ended in 1926 but the friendship lasted forty years; her letters show none of the polish of the 'Chanelisms'.

How many people did the Chanel couture business employ by 1935?

When she closed the shops in 1939, saying it was not a time for fashion, 4,000 women lost their jobs.

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

Stung, Chanel costumed Cocteau's Oedipe Rex; critics said the actors looked like 'ambulant mummies'.

Where did Chanel live during the German occupation of Paris?

It was the preferred residence of senior German officers; she stayed there more than 30 years in all and died there.

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

An operative since 1920, he eased her arrangements at the Ritz; the Chanel Group later noted he was English on his mother's side.

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

Unknown to her, the Wertheimers had already transferred control to a Christian businessman, Félix Amiot, who handed it back after the war.

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.

What pseudonym appears on the French police file describing Chanel as agent F 7124?

Serge Klarsfeld cautioned that some informers had numbers without knowing it.

For which German intelligence chief did Hal Vaughan say Chanel worked from 1941?

After his release from prison in 1951 she paid his medical bills, supported his family and paid for his funeral.

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

It collapsed in Madrid when her own courier denounced her to the British embassy as a Nazi spy.

At the liberation of Paris in 1944, what did Chanel offer free to all GIs?

She then fled to Switzerland to avoid charges; the purge committee had already released her for lack of evidence.

According to her grand-niece, what did Chanel say on returning from the purge committee?

Some say Churchill feared she would expose pro-Nazi sympathies among British elites; Duff Cooper is said to have been told to protect her.

Who financed the 1954 revival of the House of Chanel?

Her old adversary in the perfume war paid for it; she was over 70 and the house had been shut for 15 years.

How did the French press receive Chanel's 1954 comeback collection?

The American and British press called it a breakthrough; Vogue's Bettina Ballard bought the navy jersey suit herself.

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

She was 87 and had spent the afternoon on a long drive.

Where is Chanel buried?

Her models took the front seats at the Madeleine funeral; Dalí, Dietrich, Balenciaga and Saint Laurent attended.

Which firm manufactured the machine-knit jersey that made Chanel's early reputation?

She bought it at first because it was cheap; designers disliked its knit structure.

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

It dubbed the look the garçonne; male journalists complained of 'no more bosom, no more stomach, no more rump'.

Which flower, first used by Chanel in 1933 on a black suit, became the emblem of the house?

It carried associations with the courtesan of Dumas's La Dame aux Camélias.

Why is Chanel's classic handbag called the 2.55?

The quilting echoed jockeys' jackets and the chain the chatelaines worn by the orphanage caretakers.

Chanel's early costume jewellery line was launched with which duke, whose Maltese-cross cuff she loved?

'I only like fake jewellery... because it's provocative,' she said.

Chanel is the only fashion designer on which list?

Time also chose her as its woman of the year for 1924 in a 2019 retrospective series.

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

André Previn wrote the music and Alan Jay Lerner the book and lyrics; Darrieux took over for the rest of the run.

Chanel is credited with making what fashionable as a mark of privilege and leisure?

Her love of turf and sea also brought sailors' striped shirts, bell-bottoms and espadrilles into fashion.

Who inherited most of Chanel's estate?

Biographer Justine Picardie has suggested Palasse was actually Chanel's own son by Balsan.