The year is 1955, and Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel is talking to a handful of reporters. Her couture house has been closed since 1939, when she threw thousands out of work and tucked herself into the Ritz, where she sipped champagne with Nazis and took one for a lover. In 1945, to escape the charge of “horizontal collaboration,” she had fled Paris for Lausanne. Obviously, these subjects are verboten. Chanel’s return to Paris, she announces, is because “Christian Dior ruined French couture, and I’m coming back to save it.”
Across town at the Sorbonne, a packed auditorium of students applauds the man himself, Dior. During a Q&A session, however, one of them asks, “Is it true that, during the German occupation of Paris, Coco Chanel closed her atelier and refused to design dresses for the wives of Nazis while you kept designing and making money?”
