The not so innocent history of fashion

It did not all start with Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue from 1988-2025, who was famously portrayed in The Devil Wears Prada films.

But the amorality of fashion has reached its height in the Met meltdown around John Galliano’s antisemitic antics and his cancelled show. In desperation, Wintour, who was involved in curating and championing the show, showered Galliano with a major accolade in her attempt to elevate his status and make him unassailable in the art world, despite his many antisemitic remarks about Jews, whose gassing in the Holocaust he was all too happy to celebrate in a pub.

Galliano’s venality became what can only be described as Wintour’s vulgar cover-up. But cover-ups are part of the stock in trade of the fashion industry and no one was more determined to hide her impoverished beginnings than Coco Chanel. Her rise from street urchin to trendsetter fashion designer in the 1920s took a turn during the Vichy Regime, when she closed her operations and developed a close relationship to the Nazis, living in the Ritz Hotel with a German intelligence officer throughout the war. Her love affair involvement in Nazi spy operations took her, at one point, to Madrid to negotiate an end to the war on behalf of Hitler.

Chanel was also actively anti-Jewish, and shamelessly tried to use Aryan laws to prevent Jews, some of whom were her business partners, from control of her perfume company. In the 1950s, when Chanel returned to the fashion circuit, she was entirely without remorse about her Nazi connections and beliefs, and never apologised for her behaviour. Her biographers suggest that she was ruled by opportunism and a love of power more than any sense of patriotism.

In contrast, Christian Dior, who was a fiercely patriotic Frenchman, continued to work for the Nazis in order to survive, but he used his money to support the French Resistance, in which his younger sister, Catherine, was deeply involved.