A question: if a lady’s lover reports directly to Goebbels, she holes up with him at a Nazi-controlled hotel during her city’s occupation, and her collaboration earns her a 9-year post-war exile in Switzerland, can you claim that she was not anti-Semitic? If you’re the House of Chanel, and the lady in question is doyenne Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, then the answer is yes, because you have an airtight rebuttal! She couldn’t have been anti-Semitic, because she had Jewish friends.

Such was the peevish response from France’s premier fashion house upon a new book’s allegations that Coco Chanel, in addition to having a taste for fascist boyfriends, was herself a Nazi spy. According to Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War, Chanel spent the duration of the war spying for the Germans under the codename Westminster (named for another lover, the Duke of Westminster, a virulent Anti-Semite with a dog he called “Jew”). Though author Hal Vaughan says he based his book’s claims on “not one, but 20, 30, 40 absolutely solid archival materials on Chanel and her lover, Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, who was a professional Abwehr spy,” what is historical research in the face of the always-solid ‘but some of my best friends are…’ defense?

After all, if Coco Chanel was Anti-Semitic, would she have entered into a Chanel No. 5 partnership with the Jewish businessmen Pierre and Paul Wertheimer? Would she have then, using the Nazi laws seizing all Jewish property, petitioned to lighten her partners’ burden by taking sole ownership of the company, as it was “still the property of Jews?” Luckily (perhaps they knew how much their good friend Coco would worry?), the Wertheimers preempted Chanel’s friendly takeover by transferring ownership to a Christian colleague before the laws came into effect. That’s just what friends do when their friends are Nazis.