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开 本: 16开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 精装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9780307592637
“From this century, in France, three names will remain: de
Gaulle, Picasso, and Chanel.” –André Malraux
Coco Chanel created the look of the modern woman and was the high
priestess of couture.
She believed in simplicity, and elegance, and freed women from
the tyranny of fashion. She inspired women to take off their bone
corsets and cut their hair. She used ordinary jersey as couture
fabric, elevated the waistline, and created bell-bottom trousers,
trench coats, and turtleneck sweaters.
In the 1920s, when Chanel employed more than two thousand people
in her workrooms, she had amassed a personal fortune of $15 million
and went on to create an empire.
Jean Cocteau once said of Chanel that she had the head of “a
little black swan.” And, added Colette, “the heart of a little
black bull.”
At the start of World War II, Chanel closed down her couture
house and went across the street to live at the H?tel Ritz.
Picasso, her friend, called her “one of the most sensible women in
Europe.” She remained at the Ritz for the duration of the war, and
after, went on to Switzerland.
For more than half a century, Chanel’s life from 1941 to 1954 has
been shrouded in vagueness and rumor, mystery and myth. Neither
Chanel nor her many biographers have ever told the full story of
these years.
Now Hal Vaughan, in this explosive narrative—part suspense
thriller, part wartime portrait—fully pieces together the hidden
years of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s life, from the Nazi occupation
of Paris to the aftermath of World War II.
Vaughan reveals the truth of Chanel’s long-whispered
collaboration with Hitler’s high-ranking officials in occupied
Paris from 1940 to 1944. He writes in detail of her decades-long
affair with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, “Spatz” (“sparrow” in
English), described in most Chanel biographies as being an
innocuous, English-speaking tennis player, playboy, and harmless
dupe—a loyal German soldier and diplomat serving his mother country
and not a member of the Nazi party.
In Vaughan’s absorbing, meticulously researched book, Dincklage
is revealed to have been a Nazi master spy and German military
intelligence agent who ran a spy ring in the Mediterranean and in
Paris and reported directly to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph
Goebbels, right hand to Hitler.
The book pieces together how Coco Chanel became a German
intelligence operative; how and why she was enlisted in a number of
spy missions; how she escaped arrest in France after the war,
despite her activities being known to the Gaullist intelligence
network; how she fled to Switzerland for a nine-year exile with her
lover Dincklage. And how, despite the French court’s opening a case
concerning Chanel’s espionage activities during the war, she was
able to return to Paris at age seventy and triumphantly resurrect
and reinvent herself—and rebuild what has become the iconic House
of Chanel.
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