The founder and namesake of the Chanel brand, she was credited in the post-World War I era with popularising a sporty, casual chic as the feminine standard of style.

Its religious order, the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary, was "founded to care for the poor and rejected, including running homes for abandoned and orphaned girls".

[11]: 49  Obliged to find employment, she took work at the Grande Grille, where as a donneuse d'eau she was one whose job was to dispense glasses of the purportedly curative mineral water for which Vichy was renowned.

[33][34] Chanel also guaranteed the new (1920) Ballets Russes production of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps ('The Rite of Spring') against financial loss with an anonymous gift to Diaghilev, said to be 300,000 francs.

In the years 1923–1937, she collaborated on productions choreographed by Diaghilev and dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, notably Le Train bleu, a dance-opera; Orphée and Oedipe Roi.

It is said that theirs was an immediate bond of kindred souls, and Misia was attracted to Chanel by "her genius, lethal wit, sarcasm and maniacal destructiveness, which intrigued and appalled everyone".

[5]: 80–81  According to Chandler Burr's The Emperor of Scent, Luca Turin related an apocryphal story in circulation that Chanel was "called Coco because she threw the most fabulous cocaine parties in Paris".

[11]: 248 In 1923, Vera Bate Lombardi, (born Sarah Gertrude Arkwright), reputedly the illegitimate daughter of the Marquess of Cambridge, offered Chanel entry into the highest levels of British upper classes.

It was an elite group of associations revolving around such figures as aristocratic politician Winston Churchill, peers such as the Duke of Westminster and royals such as Edward, Prince of Wales.

In Monte Carlo in 1923, at age forty, Chanel was introduced by Lombardi to the vastly wealthy Duke of Westminster, Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, known to his intimates as "Bendor".

Years later, Diana Vreeland, editor of Vogue, would insist that "the passionate, focused and fiercely-independent Chanel, a virtual tour de force", and the Prince "had a great romantic moment together".

[5]: 78–79 [9]: 300  In 1936, one year after Le Témoin ceased publication, Chanel veered to the opposite end of the ideological continuum by financing Pierre Lestringuez's radical left-wing magazine Futur.

[24]: 150 [35] She wrote: I have an indisputable right of priority ... the profits that I have received from my creations since the foundation of this business ... are disproportionate ... [and] you can help to repair in part the prejudices I have suffered in the course of these seventeen years.

Chanel visited Madrid in 1943 to convince the British ambassador to Spain, Sir Samuel Hoare, a friend of Winston Churchill, about a possible German surrender once the war was leaning towards an Allied victory.

Count Joseph von Ledebur-Wicheln, a Nazi agent who defected to the British Secret Service in 1944, recalled a meeting he had with Dincklage in early 1943, in which the baron had suggested including Lombardi as a courier.

[5]: 169–71  Schellenberg's SS liaison officer, Captain Walter Kutschmann, acted as bagman, "told to deliver a large sum of money to Chanel in Madrid".

[5]: 187 Requested to appear in Paris before investigators in 1949, Chanel left her retreat in Switzerland to confront testimony given against her at the war crime trial of Baron Louis de Vaufreland, a French traitor and highly placed German intelligence agent.

[53] When Vaughan's book was published in August 2011, his disclosure of the contents of recently declassified military intelligence documents generated considerable controversy about Chanel's activities.

[54]Vaughan also addressed the discomfort many felt with the revelations provided in his book: A lot of people in this world don't want the iconic figure of Gabrielle Coco Chanel, one of France's great cultural idols, destroyed.

Chanel was convinced that women would ultimately rebel against the aesthetic favoured by the male couturiers, what she called "illogical" design: the "waist cinchers, padded bras, heavy skirts, and stiffened jackets".

[60] Her funeral was held at the Église de la Madeleine; her fashion models occupied the first seats during the ceremony and her coffin was covered with white flowers—camellias, gardenias, orchids, azaleas and a few red roses.

Salvador Dalí, Serge Lifar, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Jacques Chazot, Yves Saint Laurent and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild attended her funeral in the Church of the Madeleine.

From her excursions on water with the yachting world, she appropriated the clothing associated with nautical pursuits: the horizontal striped shirt, bell-bottom pants, crewneck sweaters, and espadrille shoes—all traditionally worn by sailors and fishermen.

[11]: 128, 133  Traditionally relegated to the manufacture of undergarments and sportswear (tennis, golf, and beach attire), jersey was considered too "ordinary" to be used in couture, and was disliked by designers because the knit structure made it difficult to handle compared to woven fabrics.

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "With her financial situation precarious in the early years of her design career, Chanel purchased jersey primarily for its low cost.

[5]: 13, 47 Chanel's introduction of jersey to high-fashion worked well for two reasons: First, the war had caused a shortage of more traditional couture materials, and second, women began desiring simpler and more practical clothes.

[67] In addition to the headscarf, Chanel clothing from this period featured square-neck, long belted blouses alluding to Russian muzhiks (peasant) attire known as the roubachka.

[41] Vogue predicted that such a simple yet chic design would become a virtual uniform for women of taste, famously comparing its basic lines to the ubiquitous and no less widely accessible Ford automobile.

[72][73] The spare look generated widespread criticism from male journalists, who complained: "no more bosom, no more stomach, no more rump ... Feminine fashion of this moment in the 20th century will be baptized lop off everything.

[41] As an antidote for vrais bijoux en toc, the obsession with costly, fine jewels,[41] Chanel turned costume jewellery into a coveted accessory—especially when worn in grand displays, as she did.