After spending six years in the orphanage, where she learned how to sew, Chanel found work as a seamstress and had a side job performing in a cabaret frequented by cavalry officers. It was here that she acquired the nickname Coco. During her time working at the cabaret, she met Étienne Balsan, heir to a textile fortune, and became his mistress. While living a life of decadence at Balsan’s chateau near Compiègne, Chanel also began a nine-year affair with one of Balsan’s friends, an English polo player named Arthur Edward Capel.

It was Capel who installed Chanel in an apartment in Paris and financed her earliest boutiques. The arrangement was far from merely one of convenience for Chanel, however. By all accounts, she actually wanted to settle down with Capel. When he died in a car accident in 1919, she “lost everything,” as she told a friend a quarter of a century later. “What followed was not a life of happiness, I have to say.”

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But it was, by most measures, a life of success. Before Capel's death, Chanel was able to reimburse him for the original investment he made in her business. By 1927, she owned five buildings along the fashionable rue Cambon in Paris, where she had opened an early fashion boutique, selling everything from hats and clothes to jewelry and perfumes. Her early liaisons among the wealthy had taught her how to mingle with the aristocracy, a skill she would employ for the rest of her life.

Chanel hosted the family of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky and helped to financially back the 1920 production of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. By 1923, when she was 40 years old, she had begun a decade-long affair with the Duke of Westminster, an avowed homophobe and anti-Semite (more on that soon), and there are rumors that she also had a fling with the Prince of Wales around the same time. Her connections with the highest ranks of British society also meant that she counted among her friends and acquaintances one Winston Churchill.

Coco Chanel’s Legacy, From Iconic Fashion Designer to Nazi Collaborator

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