WTF? Coco Chanel Was a Nazi Spy, Journalist Says

According to the new book Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War, fashion designer Coco Chanel was purportedly a Nazi intelligence operative. Biographer Hal Vaughan claims Chanel was recruited by then-boyfriend Hans Günther von Dincklage, who himself was a master spy.

From Vaughan’s website:

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.

The story sounds harebrained—and hopefully it is—but, horrifyingly, Vaughan’s proposed timeline matches Coco Chanel’s Wikipedia page exactly. In fact, the one kernel of “news” here is that Chanel was a spy, as opposed to a mere sympathizer.

I swear to God, if someone manages to connect Fendi and Mussolini, I am finished with purses forever.