Part One: Coco Chanel: The Nazi Who Invented Fashion

Robert is joined by Courtney Kocak to discuss fashion designer, Coco Chanel.

(2 Part Series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Um, what's uh, Coco my Chanel. That's not a very
good introduction. What's What's what's Coco Cosack? What's Coco? My
Courtney co Sack our guest for today on Behind the Bastards,
a podcast about the worst people in all of history
that this week is talking about Coco Chanelle Courtney. Welcome

(00:24):
to the program. Thank you. I am honored by this alliteration.
This is great. Yeah, we worked really hard on it.
First off, it's been a bit since you've been on.
Congratulations on the engagement. Thank you. Yeah, that is getting
married is widely considered to be the second most significant

(00:45):
bond two people can engage in the most significant, of course,
being podcast partners. And this is Sophie and I's fifth
anniversary of doing the show. I just upstaged your engage
anniversary to you, guys. No, this is why US is
like six months old. Um yeah, congratulations, coordinate. What do

(01:10):
you know about the fashion industry, the world of high fashion?
You're always so well dressed, as Sophie said, that's why, Uh,
that's why I was shocked that someone thinks I'm well dressed.
You always look amazing. Thank you. It is very a
low maintenance effort, and I know nothing about fashion honestly.

(01:31):
That is that is appropriate because that is the kind
of fashion that was pioneered by the guests or the
subject of this week's episode, Coco Chanel. Um. The other
thing she pioneered was being a Nazi collaborator. So mixed bag, Courtney,
do you know much about Is she someone you know

(01:52):
much about or is it just sort of like a
name on a brand, which I think is the case
for most people. I think it's Yeah, it's the brand.
It's like the vibe, it's the Chanel number five, you know. Yeah,
that's so fascinating because having gone through this, we're about
to start. But like the act the fact that she Now,
like when you say Chanelle, you think rich people spending

(02:14):
way too much money on clothing and perfume, right, you
think like walking into a really high end mall, you
think like a six thousand dollars pants suit, like that
sort of shit. I get Like the second you say
the word Chanelle, a smell that's what happens for Yeah, yeah,
I mean that is, to be honest, like, yeah, that's
a testament to her success. She has about the saddest,

(02:39):
bleakest early life story we have ever covered on this podcast.
You you cannot start lower than Coco Chanel starts life.
Um yeah, I mean again, this is Behind the Bastards.
It doesn't end in a good person, but we're all
going to be kind of rooting for her at the
start of this here Coco, Baby, Coco, Baby, Coco. So

(03:04):
my considered opinion, Courtney, after I don't know five years
of Behind the Bastards, is that we can kind of
broadly file away nearly all of our subjects into two categories.
Category one is people who suck complete ass, and category
two is people who still suck complete ass but are
also impressive in some way. Right. So, for example, Choochescu,

(03:28):
the dictator of Romania, just sucked complete ass, right, l
Ron Hubbard sucked ass, but he was also incredible, right,
he just had some amazing talents. Yeah, just wonderful author.
I like the way personally he summoned the Antichrist in
the desert by masturbating with the guy who invented rocketry.
But well, there's a lot of oh yeah, quite, We've

(03:49):
got some episodes on it this week. Our bastard is
from the sucked complete ass but was also objectively impressive category.
That is Coco Chanel in a nutshell, She's an incredibly
impressive person. Um, terrible, but very impressive. So what's your
quick question on that scale of after five years of bastards? Yeah?

(04:11):
How many have this tragic early life? Like? Is this
really a case for more social programs? A decent number
of them? You know, we talked aout like Saddam's early
life was so bleak that he had to like hold
his teacher at gunpoint to learn how to read. Oh god, Yeah,
Hitler's early life was a nightmare. You know. Hitler's a

(04:32):
really really tough childhood. Um, I would you know, I'm
never going to be I don't know, Like there's this
there's this thing going on. A colleague of mine, Will Summer,
who has covered a lot of you know, the same
kind of dysinfobeats and stuff for putting on qan On
just wrote a book about it. Um. Gave an interview
to I think Jacobin recently where he was like, well,
a lot of the problems we have with qan On

(04:54):
wouldn't be happening if there was like socialized medicine in
this country and people could rely on good mental healthcare,
and I feel I'm mixed about that. I don't want
to like put everything on because I think that all
that can kind of put the onus on, like, oh,
it's mental illness that causes these problems, And I actually
don't think the nut of these, like our most bastardry

(05:15):
is mental illness. For one thing, if I get a
sense that, like we're writing about someone who is just
mentally ill, even if they did shitty things, I'm not
gonna like focus on them. Like I don't think Hitler
was mentally ill. I don't think Saddam was, I don't
think l Ron Hubbard was. Like they're just shitty people,
you know. Yeah, but like Kanye, you're not like reporting
on another yeah, exactly, Like Kanye is a bad person,

(05:36):
but also a lot of his badness is due to
the fact that he is a deeply sick, unmedicated person.
And like, I don't want to yeah, I feel like
ways about that. This is all very complicated and beyond
the competence of a guy who professionally makes dick jokes
on the internet. So I'm not gonna but I will
say I do think there is a significant case for

(05:59):
d Like I think there is a case for you
have fewer people like Coco is somebody who because of
how rough or upbringing is, she grows up hard as
fuck um and kind of and and I think a
lot of people would have been less hardened and less
cruel and maybe less motivated in ways that led them
to bastardry if they had been able to rely on

(06:20):
like sufficient food and stable housing and that sort of
stuff when they were little kids. I don't think that's
a non But also, I will say most of our bastards,
it's far more common for us to have a bastard
who like grows up rich than it is to have
a bastard who grows up poor and desperate. So I
don't know. I don't know where to take this. I

(06:40):
have no like solid stance on this shit. But yeah,
I don't know. Sometimes people just suck. Sometimes people suck
and they make great fashion, you know, they make a
great fashion. Yeah, So I have to before we start,
I want to make a note about the providance of
most of the information that we're going to be talking
about today. Because Coco Chanelle was born into gut riching

(07:02):
poverty and a time and place in which record keeping
was a lot less robust than it is today. So
we're heavily reliant on her own memories for information about
her early life before she became famous, and most of
this is info that she gave to biographers in fashion
industry journalists decade decades after it happened when she was famous.
She is a veteran liar. She was an incredible liar,

(07:25):
and she would often lie about the same thing several
times within an interview. For every significant development in her childhood,
there are two or three contradictory stories, all of which
you're based on things that she said. So the two
books that are going to be the bulk of my
sources for these episodes are Coco Chanelle, The Life and
Legend by Justine Picardy, which covers pretty exhaustively all of

(07:48):
the contradictory claims about her past. It provides really good context,
but it's also really frustrating because she'll tell you one
story and then another, and it's like, well, I have
no way to know which of these is true, Like,
you know, what the fuck? My other source is Sleeping
with the Enemy by how Vaughan, which suggests Vaughan is
the guy who reported on her Nazi ties, and he
basically just kind of like picks what is probably the

(08:11):
likeliest version of her story and goes with that, but
he doesn't really give you context on the other things.
He claimed. I'm going to be kind of mixing both
of these narratives up in order to try and give
you the best context I can. So the official record
states that Coco was born Gabrielle Chasnell on August nineteenth,
eighteen eighty three, and most what is most commonly referred

(08:34):
to as a poorhouse in the town of Saumer her mother,
and this is in France, by the way. Obviously, her mother, Eugenie,
is about twenty years old when she has Gabrielle, and
her father is a guy named are Albert, and he
was twenty eight years old. And as you might have
guessed from the fact that she was born in a poorhouse,

(08:55):
they did not come from money. Gabrielle was delivered into
this world members of the Sisters of Providence, which were
an order of nuns who ran a series of these
poorhouses across France. Basically all social welfare programs are run
by the Catholic Church in France. In the eighteen hundred
likely right like there's not You're not going to like
a government poorhouse. Generally, you're something that the church is running.

(09:19):
As an adult, Cocoa didn't like to talk about her
birth and her early life, but Justine Piccardi notes one
story that she told often enough that we can probably
glean something from it. Quote. She did occasionally mention a
train journey that her mother had undertaken just beforehand before
her birth, in search of her elusive father. What with
the clothes of that time, she remarked to her interviewer,

(09:41):
with her customary circuitous vagueness, I suppose no one could
see that she was about to have a baby. Some
people helped her. They were very kind. They took her
into their home and sent for a doctor. My mother
didn't want to stay there. You can get another train tomorrow,
the people said, to soothe her, you'll find your husband tomorrow.
But the doctor realized that my mother wasn't ill at all.
She's about to have a bab he said. At that point,

(10:01):
the people who had been so nice to her were furious.
They wanted to throw her out. The doctor insisted that
they take care of her. They took her to a
hospital where I was born. Oh so you get a
lot about the culture. Right, this is a sick woman.
Let's say, oh she's pre Fuck this bitch, she's pregnant malone.
Yeah that's my nightmare. Yeah, it's pretty rough. Like I said,

(10:26):
it doesn't start much harder than Coco's early life. So,
depending on who you ask, the name Chassnell, because again
her original name is not well, the name on her
birth certificate isn't Channell. Depending on who you ask, this
is either because Chassnell is just a misspelling or it's
an earlier medieval version of Chanel. We don't really know.

(10:47):
Either is pretty reliable or pretty possible. Interestingly enough, Gabrielle's father,
the son of a peddler, had been born himself into
a poorhouse in eighteen fifty eight and also had his
name misspelled on his certificate, but in a different way.
It was listed as Charney. So it's likely that, just
like nuns aren't great at reading in the eighteen eighty,

(11:09):
it's just been involving this whole time. Yeah they're not. Yeah,
it's just like a bunch of fucking half illiterate nuns
handling healthcare because no one else is going to do it.
So Coco's father, gab Gabrielle. At this point, her father, Albert,
made his living such as it was, by selling junk

(11:30):
on street corners. He's literally like a trash dealer, right,
Like he's kind of like finding whatever he can and
selling it for what he can. He's got a little
horse drawn cart and he's like taking goods from town
to town. Gabrielle's parents were eventually wed about fifteen months
after her birth, but there this was not a stable life,
so she's not She is born out of wedlock. Right.

(11:50):
They're not married when she gives birth, but they do
get married soon after. But her dad is not in
the picture often he either just doesn't care about having
a kid or is just so married to this traveling
salesman life that he's gone basically all the time. The
junk is just so important. The junk's calling me, honey,

(12:11):
you can't you can't lock me down. I got it
so trashed on the street. The junk is his art. Yeah,
it's very funny. I mean it's not. It's tragic, but
it is kind of funny. Um. So, her father's gone
all the time, and in order to like survive, Coco
and her mom have to live with relatives. Um, and
these this is not you don't get the feeling. This

(12:33):
is a super close family. Like a lot of times
when they're living with an aunt or an uncle, it's like, well,
what else are we gonna do? You know, we can't
we can't kick her out in the street, but we
don't really want her here. Everything everybody's poor as shit.
She had numerous brothers and sisters. Her youngest brother, Augustine,
died as an infant in eighteen ninety one. All the
evidence suggests that Coco's father was basically absent most of

(12:56):
the time, but she had a habit later on of
claiming that she was his favorite and that he had
given her her nickname Coco because he disliked the name Gabrielle.
This is not true. We'll talk about where the name
comes from a little bit later. She just lied about
her dad loving her for reasons that I shouldn't have
to like talk about, right, Like, that's that's bleak. It's

(13:20):
important to note, but like, like, yeah, you can't throw
shade on somewhat for that. It's understandable. Um, it may
be true that after one trip away from home for work,
her father gave her a present she talked about. There's
present that he gave her a lot um. It also
tells you a lot about the time because the present
was a human knucklebone that had been turned into a pinholder.

(13:44):
There's just bones all over there. This is like you
can still hang out in Paris if you wind up
in some markets and find human bones on sale. I
have been there. I didn't buy any bones. I don't
engage in the human bone trade. But it's not. If
you're going to buy human bones and you have cash
to spare, you can find like some monks, skulls and
shit in markets in Paris. It's doable. Don't do this,

(14:06):
but you can, That's all I'm saying. Um. So this
knucklebone that she gets from her dad has like the
Eiffel Tower printed on one side and Notre Dame on
the other, which is so it's like some weird turist
shotsky made out of human remains. Says again, so much
about the late eighteen hundreds. Also just Paris, right, yeah,
and Paris and stuff they love easy to get bones, right,

(14:28):
there's bones all over the fucking place. Um. Now, Coco
is a weird fucking kid. Um. She is kind of
goth as fuck, and so when she gets this knuckle bone,
she buries it in a cemetery as an offering to
the dead. Um, which is fucking rad. Look, it's hard
not to love little kid Coco, and by age six,

(14:52):
she would later claim she spent all of her free
time in a graveyard like that is her playground as
a kid graveyard. Yes, she's very Wednesday Adams. Yes, she
told one biographer. Every child has a special place where
he or she likes to hide, play and dream. Mine
was an Auvergine cemetery. I knew no one there, not

(15:13):
even the dead, And yet the dead seem to come
alive for her there, although they remained as silent as
the graves. I was the queen of this secret garden.
I loved its subterranean dwellers. The dead are not dead
as long as we think of them. I would tell myself,
Oh my god, I kind of love that. She's kind
of a dope kid. Yeah, she is basically a Pixar

(15:34):
protagonist at this point in her life. Let's get the
early Coco Chanelle movie, The Gabrielle. Yeah, you'll have to
leave out the Nazi stuff. Yeah, but her early life.
It is hard not to be on this kid's side
right now. She is particularly drawn in her fucking cemetary

(15:55):
wanderings to two one labeled tombstones, which she would adorn
with flowers in the springtime. She had several ragdalls she
made for herself, and she would bring them with her
to the graves. She later said, I wanted to be
sure that I was loved, but I lived with people
who showed no pity. I like talking to myself and
I don't listen to what I'm told. This is probably
due to the fact that the first people to whom

(16:15):
I opened my heart were the dead. A creepy yeah again,
goth is hell. It's hard to like see her transition
from like being this epic Goth Wednesday Adam's figure child

(16:36):
to the clutching your pearls fabric lady who Nazi. We'll
get to this. The sad truth is, like so many people,
she falls in with a bad crowd, and that bad
crowd is the British royal family. But I'm getting ahead
of myself, so it's impossible to say which of these

(17:02):
stories she tells about her childhood are in fact true,
but it is worth noting that death would have been
one of the first reality she had to confront. Not
only did her little brother die when she was like
eight or nine, her mother is sickly for her entire
early childhood. Some of her Coco's earliest memories are watching
her mom cough blood onto handkerchiefs. Probably some sort of tuberculosis.

(17:23):
We don't really know obviously, Like you're not going to
get a great, you know, diagnosis back then. Not good
labs back then. Yeah, they just said she's got the consumption.
She coughs a lot, like it could have been a
thousand different things. Tuberculosis is not unlikely. As a result
of kind of this, The color red features particularly in
her early recollection. She would always be fascinated by red.

(17:46):
Coco often recalled this story to interviewers from when she
was five and her mom had to move her and
her siblings into the house of an uncle. We were
shut away in a room covered in red wall paper.
To begin with, we were very well behaved. Then we
noticed that the red wallpaper was very damp and could
be peeled off from the walls. So, being kids, the
girls start to pull strips of wallpaper off and they

(18:07):
leave the room eventually like completely stripped bare. The pleasure
was sublime, but eventually their mother found them, and mom
doesn't like say anything, but she realizes, like they've destroyed
this room basically that belongs to a relative. So her
earliest memory is like gleefully ripping all of this wallpaper off,
and then her mom sees it and just starts sobbing
on the bed because they're yeah, it's fucked up, Like

(18:32):
this is such a sad childhood. She's like a roll
doll character, Like it's just like endless sadness. Channel's mother
dies of tuberculosis or something similar in eighteen ninety five,
when Coco is twelve. Her mom is thirty three years old.

(18:53):
She dies in so all of the kids are like
with her in this freezing bedroom in the City of Breathe,
and her mom just like dies trying to get warm,
and Coco and her siblings find her, but there's no
other adults in the house, and we don't actually know
how long they're alone with their mom's freezing corpse before
other adults find them and take them away. She would

(19:15):
never talk about this, Oh, but God, hard to imagine
a greater trauma. Oh that is terrible. It's fucked up. Yeah,
like I saw my grandma die, but it was the
opposite a very beautiful experience. This sounds horrible, and you're like,

(19:35):
one way to survive just dies in front of this
fucking nightmare. So Dad again is like out and about.
He comes back every now and then, but as soon
as mom dies, Dad is like, this is my opportunity
to abandon my family because once and for all again,
just as sort of like being a single mother, you
would get fucking spit on by people. It's also assumed

(19:57):
that like, well, if you shouldn't be a single father
raising kids, if like your wife dies, you hand your
kids over to somebody else like that. That's not how
everyone did it, but that was not an uncommon way
to handle the problem at the time, right um and
and al Albert showed no real inclination to raise his family.
So he he's like the junk, you guys, I'm sorry, kids,

(20:21):
it's the junk. He has two sons and like three
daughters at this point, and he he sells his sons. Basically,
he basically finds he finds a farm that will like
take them, and I think he probably gets like it's
on the verge of human trafficking. It's one of these like,
if you teach my kids how to do farm work,

(20:44):
they'll work for you if you let them live here.
But like it's sketchy, um. But since you know, girls
are not useful um in this period in time, by
the by the standards of a guy named are Albert Um.
And so he sends Coco and her sisters off to
a fucking nunn. Ray. He's like, go to this or
phage orphanage run by nuns. Like I have no ability
to profit off of you. So the extant evidence that

(21:07):
in prostituting them out, I would say, yes, he definitely
didn't pick the absolute worst option. So he basically takes
whatever money he has left and then fucks off to
the United States to find his fortune, and Coco never
sees him again. This is the end of her dad
being a factor in her life. She was never able

(21:28):
to really admit this, certainly not to biographers and maybe
not to herself. She would make up stories as an
adult about all these times her dad had come to
visit her while she was being raised by the nuns.
She would also lie regularly and say that he had
left her with her aunts who had raised her. She
was not raised by her aunt. She's raised by nuns.
There's documentation of this, but you can kind of get

(21:51):
again in the story she tells that are not true
about her childhood. You can't get pieces of the truth. So,
for example, even though she would claim it was her
aunts who had raised her, she would talk about the
way they raised her and how stern they were, And
you can assume she's talking about the nuns, right, She's
just kind of pretending they were a family. So she
would say stuff like, my aunts were good people, but
absolutely without tenderness. I was not loved in their house.

(22:15):
I got no affection. Children suffer from such things, and
I don't have truth. Yeah, I don't need to fact
check that last part. I trust that she was suffering.
Coco had a lot of family in the area. She
did have aunts, and she's not so this and again,
this kind of tells you something about the way in

(22:37):
which life was back then. When you are a kid
whose parents die or leave you and you're in like
one of these orphanages run by nuns, you still have
family in town. She still has connections with her family,
so she's not isolated entirely. But it's also like nobody
can really handle the burden of taking care of her,
so the nuns are going to do it. Yeah. Other

(23:00):
statements she made later in life hint at her real
feelings towards how this childhood went. Quote from my earliest childhood,
I've been certain that they have taken everything away from me.
That I'm dead. I knew that when I was twelve.
You can die more than once in your life. Oh god, yeah,
it's fucked up. I'm really curious if these people are

(23:25):
going to show up again, you know, in twenty years
or whatever, when she's famous, and they're gonna be like, oh, member,
when we took care of you. I'm gonna be honest. Yeah,
I mean, she she definitely has like some family who
get money from her. Her dad never shows back up.
I kind of think he just like fucked off and
died in the US trying to strike it rich or something.
You know, people people died for no reason back then.

(23:47):
We'll probably never know. He does seem like the kind
of guy who would come back for money. Yeah, I mean,
I'm sure he would have if he could have. But
you know what, never dies, Courtney. The need for capitalism
and ads. That's right, capitalism so far cannot be killed.
You know, stay tuned, pay attention to this spot in
case that changes. But no one's did it yet. Ah,

(24:16):
those ads were great, a real tribute to the immortality
of the market economy. So it is worth digging into
more what kind of place this orphanage was and what
sort of things Coco and her siblings learned there. Later
in life, she would tell a story of sitting with
other children in a wooden pew in the church. Anne

(24:36):
would poke her with a stick whenever she's saying the
ave Maria too loudly. She recalled that a hunchback man
was sitting nearby and told a biographer, I'd have liked
to sit down beside him and touch his hump and
tell him that it didn't matter, he could still be loved.
Oh yeah, that's sweet. That is sweet. Yeah. So again

(24:57):
you get this feeling that not only is she didn't tenderness,
but she wants to show it and just is raised
in an environment where, like they believe, kids are fundamentally
evil would have to be treated strictly in order to
bring them up properly. She just has no outlet to
express or receive affection as a little kid, which is

(25:18):
not good for kids. Spoiler for those of you who
have kids, don't raise them this way. It doesn't go well.
When it comes to what kind of thing she learned
from the nuns, well, we know that she got what
was for the time a pretty decent education. In the basics.

(25:38):
She learned how to read. She learned not a ton
of arithmetic because she was a girl, but she learned
enough that she was able to get by. As an adult.
She runs a large business, So the basics of her
education are about as good as you could hope for
at the time given her socioeconomic level. Outside of that,
the curriculum was rather less wholesome. I'm going to quote

(26:00):
now from how Vaughan's book. At the turn of the
twentieth century, Catholic institutions such as Aubasine indoctrinated Catholic youth
to loathe Jews. Chanelle was no exception. She was often
given to anti Semitic outbursts. Well known French author and
editor in chief of the French fashion magazine Marie Claire
Marcel Heydrick tells of a conversation he had with Chanelle

(26:21):
over his book and Moses created God. Chanelle asked Hedrick,
why Moses, you can't believe that ancient stories are still
of interest, or you hope Jews will like your story,
they won't buy your book. When the conversation turned to
how new fashion boutiques were springing up like mushrooms in Paris,
Chanelle declared, I only fear Jews and Chinese, and the
Jews more than the Chinese. Hadrick observed, Chanelle's anti Semitism

(26:43):
was not only verbal, but passionate, demoted, and often embarrassing.
Like all the children of her age, she had studied
the Catechism, Hadn't the Jews crucified Jesus? The most Christian
thing I could do is hate another clogi. Yeah, this
is she is up until. I mean, it's probably worth

(27:06):
noting that, like her early life, this is not unusual
anti semitism, right, this is a pretty normal amount of
anti Semitism to grow at the time. French society for
the time not excusing it. I'm just saying like her
education is not an abnormal one. A lot of French
kids in the same period are taught the same things
she does, grow up to be an abnormally anti Semitic

(27:27):
person for French society at the time, she is more
racist than the background level of her society. Eventually, at
this point, she's just a little kid. So it is
worth noting that while Coco deeply imbibed the Church's teachings
on Jewish people, she was less convinced about the existence
of God. She kind of probably never was really a believer.

(27:47):
This is probably not surprising given the fact that her
childhood might be considered to disprove the existence of a
loving God. But also just like the I very much
identify with that. When they told me about religion, I
was like, I don't know. So in age eighteen, Coco

(28:08):
moves from the orphanage to a Catholic school for girls,
and the big news story at the time would have
been the Dreyfus affair, which was focused around the eighteen
ninety four arrest of a Jewish French artillery officer under
false claims that he'd been a spy. We have talked
about the Dryfus affair on several occasions. It is a
watershed moment in the history of European anti Semitism. The

(28:30):
gist of it is that there was a massive court
case one of the first big media circuses around a
trial in Western history. It ignited an entirely new right
wing media industry in France, which largely formed around spreading
anti Semitic propaganda. Hal Vaughan writes, during Chanelle's teens at
the convent and later in the Catholic community at Mulline,
anti Semitism was in full froth. The widely read Catholic

(28:53):
Assumptionist daily Lacroix raged against the Jews. A typical spokesman
for the church's position was the Jesuit priest Father Dulac,
the spiritual guide to the anti Semitic publicist Edward Drumont,
author of Jewish France. Drummont coined the slogan France for
the French. So not much has changed about right wing politics.
I was gonna say, this sounds very familiar France. There's

(29:16):
a lot of similarities in France. Now about this shit again,
nothing nothing changes spoiler alert because people are incapable of
learning lessons, which is good. It's good that we can't
learn lessons, but we do get better at building bombs.
I like that. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, it's good stuff.
I was actually reading this is completely off topic. A

(29:37):
very cool story about this This Italian physicist who worked
with Enrico Fermi, brilliant physicist, considered by like Fermi to
be like a Galileo level genius. He was probably the
first guy to really figure out like neutrons and neutrinos
and like have a real complicated understanding of the kind
of physics that go into the making of a nuclear bomb.

(29:59):
And he dis appeared off the face of the Earth
in nineteen twenty eight, and one of the most likely
explanations is that, being as smart as he was, he
realized that nukes were the end result of his research
and went off to a convent or to end his way.
Let just to be like, I can't like, I fuck off,
I'm not doing science anymore. It's a fun story anyway,

(30:21):
not related to Coco Chanelle. A little related to Coco Chanelle.
So Chanelle somewhat thoughtlessly adopted the right wing attitude in
her society towards Jewish people and to what was best
for French society in general. She's always very conservative. Some
of this has to do with the company that she
keeps as a young adult, who are mostly cavalry officers
and this is don't hang out with cavalry officers. First off.

(30:43):
At twenty, she gets a job working as a seamstress.
And so basically the place that she's the school that
she's going to, is geared towards preparing poor children to
be productive members of the economy. So the nuns each
cocoa had a sow so that she can make money.
And it's kind of worth spending some time on what

(31:06):
that instruction entailed. So I'm gonna quote from Justine Piccardi again.
She spoke of being taught to sew by the aunts,
himming and sing and seeming her trousseau, and of how
she wore a white shift in which to bathe herself
because it was a sin to look at one's body.
She said that she sewed cross stitches on her nightgowns
to make them look Russian. Sometimes she used to rub
her nose to make it bleed at night. The blood

(31:28):
dripped on her white night dress, and when she cried
out for someone to come to her bedside, Anne would emerge.
Slashes of red appeared elsewhere in her narratives. Two cherries
that she stole to eat before her first communion, before
she panicked and sought absolution from the priest for her wickedness,
the blood stains on her night dress when she reached puberty,
not understanding what had happened to her, but believing she
had hurt herself and her reddened skin when the aunts

(31:49):
beat her, I remember that they used to take my
knickers down to spank me. First there was the humiliation.
Then it was very unpleasant. Your bottom was as red
as blood. So that's how she learns how to sew again.
Kind of a nightmare in this period. You know, debatably

(32:09):
better now. So that's a pretty rough life experience. It
is worth noting that her time in the convent provides
Cocoa with enough of a basis in reading. They do,
I think, a particularly good job of teaching her to read,
because she is a lifelong reader. She loves fiction. She
is a huge fan of Like one of her biographers, Justine,
will note that, like, do you know that short story

(32:29):
the Yellow Wallpaper? Oh yeah, it's a it's a very
famous like short story that she kind of transposes into
some stories about her life. She loves like all of
these different kind of like romance novels and stuff that
are popular at the time, she's particularly in love with
like these, these kind of melodramatic like what you call

(32:54):
like kind of what you'd find into like an airport
romance novel today, right, Like that's the kind of literature
that she really enjoys, and she likes it because she
she wants to escape for really obvious reasons, like it's
this u She later tells a biographer quote, I thought
that it was all awful because in my novels there
was nothing but silk pillows and white lacquered furniture. I'd
have liked to do everything in white lacquer. Sleeping in

(33:16):
an alcove made me miserable. It humiliated me. I broke
off bits of wood whenever I could, thinking what old
trash this is. I did it out of sheer wickedness
for the sake of destruction. When one considers all the
things that go on in a child's head. I wanted
to kill myself. Oh so she's like, you know, an
intelligent kid. She finds fiction, she develops this love of reading.

(33:41):
She's obsessed with these lights. She's horny, for sure. She's
obsessed with like these Charles Charlotte Perk Perkins Gilman stories
about like sickness and kind of the oppression of women,
and also these stories of like swashbuckling romantic adventure, but
they just kind of make her angrier and angrier. So
as soon as she came and she gets this job
as a seamstress, but she wants more independent, so she

(34:04):
gets a second job singing at a cafe. This is
where she meets all those cavalry guys because this is
like kind of a bar. She's like nineteen twenty at
this time, so she gets this side job singing at
this cafe where cavalrymen are known to go drink and
let off steam. So yeah, this is kind of like

(34:25):
in cafes in this time, like groups singing sessions kind
of the early versions of karaoke is a common form
of recreation. And this is where she picks up the
nickname Coco. And there's two versions of the story of how.
One of them is that it's a nickname these soldiers
give her because Coco is a French name for kept
women coquette. So basically one is that when she is

(34:45):
a teenager ish, these adult soldiers are like bitch, looks
like a like a you know, a kept on and
she was like, thank you, that is a compliment. This
is the nicest thing anyw want to said to me.
And yeah, the other is that Coco the singer only
new two songs. One is Coco Rico, which is a

(35:08):
song about a rooster because Coco Rico is the French
version of cockadoodle doo. And the other song is quiqua
vu Coco, which is a song about a girl who
lost her dog. Now, the audience here are all drunk,
horny soldiers who are more interested in her appearance than
her voice. So when she would come on stage, they
tended to greet her with a mix of barnyard noises

(35:28):
and chance of Coco, which is the name of the
dog from the song. So probably through some mix of
all of this is how she accrues her nickname Coco.
But she's kind of proud of it, Like you know,
they barked it at me. It was so romantic you
would not believe. Look, I mean there's problematic aspects to this,
but her time singing in the bar is the first

(35:50):
period of her life that kind of sounds like it
might have been fun. I say that is this like
how she works her way into the eventual spy stuff
these No, no, no, much much too early. Yeah. Again,
this is like barely the nineteen hundreds, right, So she's
just a little kid at this point. Um, I mean
she's a young woman, but like, you know, she's little

(36:12):
world kids. Yeah. So, at age twenty three, after she
spent a couple of years as a seamstress and singing,
she runs into a wealthy for former French cavalry officer
named at the end Balsan. Now she she claims they
meet when she's on vacation to the city of Vish.
That might be true, she might have just met him
at the cafe. Either way, Balsan asks her out to

(36:35):
a date the next day, and he like kind of
falls for her, so he takes her to his compound
because he's a very wealthy man from a very wealthy family. Um,
and she basically as soon as she's like, oh, this
rich guy is kind of offering to let me live
on his rich guy compound as his mistress. Yeah done, absolutely,
I'm on board totally. Yeah, like, of course, why wouldn't

(36:59):
you do this. I'm really hate her later, Yeah, it's
it's a it's a bummer that this ends with Nazi
because so far, this is an incredible like fucking you
could get twenty episodes of a Netflix series out of
this that would have like a third of the country
on that the edge of their seats. Oh that's a
great idea, Robert Ide Yeah, yeah, yeah, take it. Take it.

(37:21):
So Coco is very lowborn and very poor, so she
can't marry Balson, right because he's a French noble kind
of would be embarrassing for him. Yeah yeah, and it's
but but also Balsan very much loves her right like
he is. And that is the thing, Like none of
these all she's going to be kind of a kept
woman for a bunch of men. They are all absolutely

(37:42):
mate like maniac for her. Um, she is very very
good at I mean, she's an endearing person right like
she they This is not just like a oh, they're
like lecherous old men who want her around because she's cute,
Like they fall for her. People will make like these
very intense sacrifices for her. She has these very intense

(38:05):
romantic relationships with these men. And this is not abnormal
in Frenchhise society. Kind of the norm for French aristocrats
in this period is like you marry some high born
lady who is fancy enough that like, your family's happy,
and then you never see each other, and you have
a bunch of mistresses and chateaus around the riviera and
other nice places who are like the actual people you

(38:28):
spend your time with, and everyone is aware of this,
and that's a pretty normal aspect of life in this
strata of society. Coco transitions very easily to this life,
and she likes she really She meets a couple of
other Cortisons who are like also mistresses of rich guys,
and she finds them very admirable. She learns a lot

(38:48):
from them. They're kind of like her mentors. She also
meets a bunch of French noblewomen who she hates. She
doesn't like the way they dress, she thinks their makeup
is shitty, she thinks they smell bad. She likes hates
these fucking rich lad She's like, fuck, these rich ladies,
like the Cortisons, are the ones who I want to
be like, right, Like, obviously that's why the men want

(39:08):
to spend time with them, for sure. No, some of
those mistresses are like super impressive to read about. Yeah yeah,
oh yeah, yeah, these are this is I mean, more
a broader and more fascinating history than just cocoa. So
for a few years she enjoys the high life with Balsan,
becoming acquainted to high society. She rides horses a bunch,
she flirts incessantly with Balsan's friends. He cheats on her

(39:30):
regularly too, but you know, that's their French. But of course,
eventually the realities of their divergent social situations and Balsan's
love life outside of her cause issues and they break up.
They don't wind up being like hating it, like they
remain friendly. This is kind of another pattern. She tends

(39:51):
to like stay pretty close with her exes, which is
interesting to me. Yeah, and anyway, in nineteen o eight,
at age twenty five, she falls madly in love with
another aristocrat. And this guy is British and his name
is Arthur Cappell, but everyone calls him boy Capell, which
we don't call people boy anymore. It's like a name condescending.

(40:15):
I don't know. I think it's like he's got like
a boyish face, like he's yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't
think it's like condescending. He doesn't seem to hate it
or anything. Boy is a very wealthy British aristocrat. He
falls head over heels for cocoa like everyone else does,
and he puts her up in a fancy Paris apartment
so she gets her own place now that he pays for.

(40:36):
That's very nice. The two are very much in love
for a time. But as an English aristocrat, he also
cannot marry a poor frenchwoman, but he pays. He cares
about her, and he cares about her enough that like,
not only does he put her up in an apartment,
but he gives her a chunk of money to invest
in starting a business so that she can become financially independent,
which is a sign of actual care as opposed to

(40:58):
just like you know he doesn't he has. He does
not seem to want to keep her dependent on him, right,
which I also find interesting. Is she sewing this whole time?
Or was that if she sucks ass at sewing she
always highs she learns how to do it, but she
she usually hires other people to do that. She's not
she's never going to be a very good I bring
that up, but like she's not very good at it.

(41:19):
That seems to be the consensus. So By this point,
Coco has come to the conclusion for herself that if
she wants to exist in the rarefied air of Menli,
Balsan and Capelle, one option is to just be a
kept woman. But that only lasts so long, and if
she wants to really succeed in high society, she's going
to need to make a fortune of her own. And

(41:40):
it's interesting. One of the things I find fascinating about
her is she certainly has the potential, given her beauty,
given her obvious intelligence, given her social skills, to acquire
a fortune by like making some old rich guy fall
in love with her and taking his money right like
that is an option for a Coco. She could have
handled that if she wanted. She does not seem to
be interested in that. Um she could have probably convinced

(42:03):
a lover to set her up for life, but she
doesn't seem interested in that either. She wants to make
a fortune for herself, and so she starts a business
business that's going to make her name known to people
and allow her to feel potent standing next to these
rich people that she's going to spend her life around. Robert,
I'm so mad at this edge. I had to be

(42:23):
on her side. She's pretty red at this stage, except
for the rampant anti semitys. Oh yeah, yeah, that is
not But you know what isn't rampantly anti Semitic ads.

(42:44):
That's right, these great sponsors not one of them. Ah,
we're back, so worry about Hey, hey, Sophie, you know
the Hugo boss. You know the Hugo boss motto. It's

(43:07):
been a long time since the Holocaust. Sorry, boss, you
don't have to say you're sorry to the people who
made uniforms for the SSSA. You're not sorry. It's okay.
Look if you are. It's the same thing with like
fucking IBM, providing like the technology that the Germans used

(43:32):
to do a lot of the like keep track of
a lot of the people that they put in the camps,
Like if you worked with the Yeah, oh yeah, that
was a big early ib IBM played a crucial role
in the Holocaust. And you can keep giving companies shit
for that. It doesn't matter that nobody there today did that.
You can keep giving them shit. It's fine. Um, Look,
they rolled over that money. That money is a part

(43:54):
of their present success. You can continue to give them
shit for working with the Nazis is my opinion. So anyway, way,
Hugo boss, if you want to sponsor the show, I
will delete all of this. I have no principles. So
during her time in the upper crust, Coco developed both
a distaste for the Garnet's war developed a distaste for

(44:14):
the garments worn by rich society women. Right. She thinks
they're ugly, They're very complicated. You've seen movies and TV
shows set in this period. You've seen paintings like these
massive dresses with like the whalebone course, it's in these
these huge, wide like like they're there. They require like
a lot of the bigger dresses and shit require multiple

(44:35):
people to help you put them on. Right, It's like
a suit of night's armorum. Coco does not like these big,
complicated all these layers, all of this. She likes bathrobes,
She likes wearing men's clothing, large shapeless shirts. She also
likes suits, and she thinks it's frustrating that women don't
get to wear stuff like that because that kind of
clothing is liberating and you can move in it, and

(44:55):
you can be active in a participant in the world
in it, and you can take care of dressing and
stuff on your own, right, you don't need a team
of people. And so Cappel, like Chanelle, convinces Cappel to
invest in her business. And the first thing she's going
to make is just a line of hats, right, I guess,
because that's the easy thing to make. But the hats
do reasonably well. And around the time she's starting her

(45:15):
clothing business, Coco's life gets struck by another tragedy. Her
sister Julia, had gotten pregnant and had a child when
Coco was around twenty and when Coco's around twenty seven,
Julia catches her husband cheating on her and commits suicide,
and so Coco is forced to take responsibility for her
nephew Andre. That's one version of the story. Coco's sister

(45:37):
definitely dies. Some people will say Andre was probably Coco's son,
and she just would never admit it. We really have
no idea. She calls him her nephew, so I'm just
going to call him her nephew for the rest of
the story, because you know whatever. But she raises this
kid kinda so she does. I will say this, she
does a much better job of raising Andre than her father.
Test of raising her. Yeah, that's so interesting. Yeah, it is.

(46:02):
It is interesting, and she gets Boycappell against kind of
the evidence that he really does love her. He arranges
for her nephew to go to a really really expensive
English boarding school, like one that was going to kind
of like cement him as a member of English high society.
It's going to teach maybe his son. It's not impossible.

(46:22):
I don't think it is. It's not impossible because they know.
I don't think it could. It could be because the
timing doesn't work out because again, by the time they meet,
the kids a couple of years old. Okay, So I
think it is a situation of like Coco's trying to
figure out how to take care of this kid. Maybe
there's a little bit of I don't want a little
kid running around and stuff, But in any case, he
spends a significant amount of money to give this kid

(46:43):
a good chance at life, and the fact that the
kid is at a boarding school leaves Coco free to
focus her efforts on her new business. When the Great
War hits in nineteen fourteen, Boycappell joins the army and
serves while Coco jaunts between her Paris factory, the riviera
and the hosts, and she is kind of following French
elite society leaves Paris during the war for the most

(47:05):
part because Paris is getting shelled a lot of the time.
So they're like, well, let's go party, Like we're not
gonna fight in this war, you know, let's go. I mean,
some of them do, but most of them. Most of
them go party, especially the ladies, so they're kind of
hanging out, chilling and stuff. And while all of the people,
these people are dying on the Western Front, Coco's business

(47:27):
blows the fuck up. It blows up like one hundred
and fifty five millimeter howitzer shell in a trench full
of French eighteen year olds. Not even the disruption of
the war can hinder her success. In short order, she
has more than a hundred employees, and in order to
deal with the shortages of wartime, she starts using her
own fabric. Blends. Jersey is a fabric, you know, like

(47:49):
jersey fabric. She starts to use. It had never been
a part of high fashion, but it's one of those
things that has no real military use. It's not used
in uniforms. So she's able to get a supply it
and she kind of makes it high fashion, and this
kind of informs the kind of clothing that she makes
in this period, which is loose, baggy and androgynous, right, Like,

(48:10):
that's a big part of the stuff she's making. A
lot of the feel of her early clothing is like
I'm wearing my boyfriend's shirt, you know, yeah, very consciously
like what she's doing. So that's the stuff that gets
her rich, not these hats that she was making before. No,
the hats are kind of like a test run. It's
this kind of addrogynous, baggy, but comfortable and stuff that

(48:33):
you can move in and be active in. Now, the
most iconic design of her early career is her creation
of what she calls and she's the first person to
say this, the little black dress that is a that
is the coco Chanelle original. Now, obviously today that concept
is bigger than any fashion brand. God knows how many
kinds of little black dresses, but Coco Chanelle is the

(48:55):
one who decides. And a fashion world that is dominated
by eighteen hundreds fashion that like, fuck all these big
fucking dresses with these huge hoop skirts and shit, I
am going like women want to wear a slinky, lightweight
black dress. And there's a couple of different stories as
to how this look comes about, but I'm choosing to
quote this version of events from Justine Piccardi's book. She

(49:18):
was dressing for the evening at the apartment in the
Avenue Gabrielle. No mention of boy Capelle, who was often
away not only in the arms of other women, but
also as an army officer, undertaking clandestine missions for his
friends at government. I'd never been to the opera before.
I had a white dress made by my own modistes.
My hair, which came down below my waist, was done
up around my head in three braids. All that mass

(49:39):
set straight upon that thin body. She had so much hair,
she said that it was crushing me to death. But
fate intervened and gave her freedom. There was a gas
burner in the bathroom. I turned on the hot tap
to wash my hands. Again, the water wasn't hot, so
I fiddled with the pilot light and the whole thing exploded.
My white dress was covered in soot my hair. The
less said, the better. I only had to wash my

(49:59):
face again. I didn't use makeup in those days. Only
the coquettes used makeup and were elegant. The women of
the bourgeoisie weren't groomed, and they wore hats that flopped
all over the place with bird's nests and butterflies. But
nothing was going to stop her from going out that night,
not even her burnt hair. I took a pair of
scissors and cut one braid off. The hair sprang out
all at once around my face. In those days, I

(50:20):
had hair like sable. Undaunted, she cut off the second
braid and then told her maid to cut off the third.
The girl began to cry, but Channelle didn't care, or
at least she didn't care about the loss of her
hair or of the suit stained white dress. I slipped
on a black dress I had crossed over in the front.
What a marvelous thing, youth and caught in the waist,
with a sort of minaret on top. With bobbed hair
and a little black dress. Channelle was neither slave nor girl,

(50:42):
but something of her own making. Everyone at the opera
was looking at her, she later told an interviewer. They
were also impressed that the darling of the English became
the beauty of Paris. Afterwards, however, yeah, so that's the story. Right,
She's going out this night, this burner explodes and she
winds up like throwing together this outfit that's something. She's got,
short hair, she's got the slinky black dress. People don't

(51:03):
dress this way, right, and it takes the fuck off.
People cannot stop talking about how good Koko she looks
in this dress. I love it, and I also think, yeah,
she's essentially a sex worker, and like they have been
so influential on this kind of you know, it makes sense, Yes,

(51:24):
it totally tracks and it people like one of Coco's
nicknames is the woman who killed nineteenth century fashion, Like
if you watch those like Gone with the Wind dash it,
she kills that, and she kills it on that night
with that little black dress. Right. It makes such a
fucking impact on French fashion that like it, it's like
a bomb goes off in the fashion industry now. Coco

(51:48):
is also an activist for women's liberation, and a lot
of her obsession with loose and comfortable women's fashion is
married to her commitment to liberation. One CNN fashion article
I found noted she wanted women to move in, breathe
in her clothes just like men did in theirs. Her
work was in many ways a form of female emancipation. Queen. Yeah,

(52:11):
it sucks where it's building. This is pretty cool. So
while Coco's career reaches its heights during World War One
and immediately afterwards she's just doing amazing, her love life
is a little less successful because her lover boy Capell,
dies horribly in an automotive crash right after the war ends.

(52:33):
That's a bummer, Yeah, makes her very sad. Obviously. One
of the things that makes her sadder is that Keppell's
most of his possessions. He's got some wife back in England, right,
She gets a lot of stuff, but he leaves a
lot of money to Coco. He also leaves a lot
of money to an Italian woman that Coco does not know,
making it clear that like, oh so he's he's you know,

(52:53):
he was playing the field more than she was aware of.
I would have loved to see that will reading share
that was fun, she would later tell a biographer. His
death was a terrible blow to me, and losing Capelle,
I lost everything. What followed was not a life of happiness.
I have to say this seems to most buy there's

(53:16):
she will have fall in love with other men. Most
people who know of her life will tend to say, like,
this was the love of her life, right, this was
the guy that she she cared about the most. That said,
while she never recovers, maybe emotionally from this, financially she
just does better and better and better. The war years
give away to the Roaring twenties, and that's this is

(53:38):
when Chanel reinvents herself as Coco. Pivoting off of her
little black dress, she launches a line of loose fitting
jersey outfits made to emulate, in her words, the poor look.
So the look of like poor girls, right, but in
expensive high fashion. So she's taking you know, she grows
up dirt poor, she's taking like, well, these women who
have to work for a living, this is how they dress,

(53:58):
and she's making fancy, riche versions of it, right, Like
That's that's a big part of the early success of Chanelle.
Andrew vibes flapper vibes very perfectly. We are building to
the Flappers because that is partly a creation of Coco.
Chanelle um so androgeny is central to her work. She
is very much into the idea of women wearing clothing

(54:22):
that covers up their hips, that covers their breasts. Um.
She's also very much open to Like one of her
most famous Chanelle models will pose in Chanelle clothing dressed
as a man in wearing mustaches. Um, this is part
part of why they're doing this is that like Coco,
for whatever reason, is like really into this kind of
androgynous style. And part of it is that it gets

(54:43):
people talking, right like these ads. This is like this
is you know, risque, This is kind of all the
edge of acceptability. Um. And this kind of risque tinge
mixed with flawless fashion pedigree helps Coco influence an entire
movement in women's clothing. Quote in this is from that
CNN article. Her designer clothes inspired flappers to wear shorts,

(55:06):
sheer short sleeved and sometimes sleeveless dresses, and roll down
their stockings to just blow their knees. French and American
fashion magazines such as Mademoiselle, Femina, and Minerva celebrated her creations.
Chanelle launches the ravishing dark green sports suit, Lady Fellow's
sports a Chanelle raw silk dress at the Ritz. Chanelle
launches the black tulet dress. Chanelle's creation for evening, a

(55:27):
white satin sheath covered over with an embroidered and beaded cloak. Still,
critics could be ferocious women were no longer to exist.
All that's left or the boys created by Chanelle. So
she gets kind of balled out by guys for being like,
you're making like women don't look like women anymore because
they're they're they're dressing, you know, in this new fashion

(55:47):
style you've brought on. So by the twenties, Coco Chanelle
is richer than God. She is as rich as all
of the most of these guys she's hanging around right,
richer than a lot of them. And yeah, through sheer
force of will and talent, she has made a place
for herself in the highest halls of power and European pride,

(56:08):
she later told an interviewer, an orphan denied a home
without love, without either father or mother, my solitude gave
me a superiority complex. The meanness of life gave me strength, pride,
the drive to win, and a passion to greatness. And
whenever life brought me lavish elegance in the friendship of
a Stravinsky or a Picasso, I never felt stupid or inferior.
Why because I knew it was with such people that

(56:30):
one succeeds good climber. That's our right, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
and she is. She liked she hangs out with Picasso,
she hangs out with Stravensky, She's like close with all
of these people. That's like the social set that she
moves in. And yeah, Coco blends in effortlessly with these luminaries,
not just because she's successful and rich, but because she's witty.

(56:53):
She becomes very well known for her quotes as well
as her clothes lines like a woman who doesn't wear
perfume has no fee future. And if you're sad, add more.
I like this one. If you're sad, add more lipstick
and attack. Okay, so not so feminist, Yeah, I mean
this is this is the twenties, Like what do you

(57:14):
want right about perfume has no future. She also made
some statements that are still baffling, like if blonde wear
blue perfume, No one seems to know what that means.
Sometimes she just said things because they sounded good. She
was an innovator in the speed with which she released

(57:35):
radically different lines of clothing. Coco worked at such a
dizzying pace that her competitors could not keep up. Never
before had fashioned moved so quickly or changed so often,
and Coco saw this as the key to the success
of her empire. Quote address is neither a tragedy nor
a painting. It is a charming and ephemeral creation, not
an everlasting work of art. Fashion should die and die

(57:57):
quickly in order that commerce may survive. The more transient
Fashioned is, the more perfect it is. You can't protect
what is already dead. And this is where I don't
know if you can lay this morally on her, but
this is where we can lay it. Like the biggest
negative impact of Coco's life, which is that she kind
of helps lay the foundations for fast fashion, not just

(58:18):
the industry, where like every season there's a new outfit
which had not been a thing before in the same way,
but like this idea that fashion should be discardable, that
you should be moving through outfits, that you should be
getting outfits right now. Chanel, she is not making fast
fashion right. Chanelle is a luxury brand. It's a luxury
brand in her day, but the idea that clothing should
be a femural Coco is the one who pushes that

(58:41):
and most successfully does so, and the human costs of
the fashion industry today due to this are enormous. We
can't entirely because she's not making these choices. She's not
having her ship made in Bangladesh right where these factories
burned down and killed two thousand people. But that is
a result of her choices, even if it's one that
maybe she wouldn't have foreseen, although knowing Coco, I don't
know she would have been against it. So it odds

(59:05):
with her Like timeless style, it is it is, but
it's she did not see her style as timeless. We
see it as timeless because of how iconic it became.
She was always iterating, always moving, always changing Coco's clothing. Obviously,
we've talked about how liberatory it was to women in
the West, but the industry she innovated now bases its

(59:27):
profits on the continued suffering of thousands of women, primarily
in Southeast Asia. Some eighty percent of the garment workforce
is industry workforce is female. Most of it resides in
countries like Bangladesh with very few worker protections. In an
interview with Deutsche well industry expert Josella Burkhardt notes the
industry wants us to hire women because they are seen

(59:48):
as docile and they might not organize very easily when
they come home. For example, they might not be able
to go to trade union meetings because they have so
much to do. It's a very patriarchal society in India
and Bangladesh, so women are not used to be treated
as they should be as human beings. This also makes
it easier in the factory boss's shout at them and
treat them differently than men, just keep getting them pregnant

(01:00:10):
and make them desperate. It's and again this is this
is not morally if you're talking about what is she
morally responsible for, It's much more the anti semitism than
like modern fast fashion. But it is worth noting that
modern the modern fashion industry, as horrific as a lot
of it is, does is direct. She is probably the
number the single most influential designer certainly and why fashion

(01:00:33):
works the way that it does today, at least up
there right, Like it's hard to beat Coco fucking Chanel
for that. An amazing legacy we're working on here, quite
a legacy coordinate that's gonna be all for part one
of our emotionally confusing series on Coco Chanelle. This is

(01:00:55):
the good part, I'm assuming. Yeah, it is gonna get
rapidly more anti Semitic m so and a lot more
Nazis because the twenties are happening, but also the British
Royal family, although those guys are Nazis too. So Courtney,
you got anything tood plug? Oh my god, you guys. Yes,
I am addicted to making podcasts. I have three. If

(01:01:18):
you are a podcaster, check out podcast Bestie. If you
are a writer, check out The Bleeders. And if you're
horny and like to fuck, check out Private Parts Unknown.
And yeah, yeah, that's what I'm up to, all right?
And where should should vollow you? On Twitter and Instagram?
Court Oh yeah, I am on the social media's at
Courtney kosak koc a k oh and you can find

(01:01:43):
this is a hot tip. This is not really on
the internet. Oh wow, I'm about to end. I'm thinking
of retiring from only fans, you guys, so this is
your last chance. If you want to check out Coco
peep show, check out Coco peep Show, and when that ends,
you can find my only fans. Yeah, finally gonna leave this, uh,

(01:02:07):
this grueling life of podcasting behind. You were just celebrating
our five year. Now you're abandoning me. M m. That's right,
that's right, getting the killing on only fans, as long
as I get ten percent. Good times, good times, everybody,
all right. Part two's coming up. You know later this week.

(01:02:30):
You know how it works. You watch this show, it'll
be back. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool
Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our
website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on
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