HOW FASHION ICON AND TRAITOR ESCAPED VENGEANCE

THE world knows her for the little black dress, the pearls, the tweed suit and Chanel No. 5the perfume Marilyn Monroe wore in bed with nothing else.

- BY MATT ROPER

But Coco Chanel's legacy hides a far darker past.

For decades stories have abounded about the French fashion queen's collaboration with the Nazis, her affair with a Gestapo officer and the possibility she was a German spy.

Now a new book, using recently declassified French Resistance papers and previously overlooked sources, has revealed the truth about what the designer did during the war.

And it details for the first time how, reviled as a traitor, she managed to escape from France to Switzerland through a devastated country with Resistance fighters on the lookout for collaborators to lynch.

Author Richard Wallace believes she could only have made the 340-mile journey with the help of organised crime gangs.

Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel is remembered as the queen of chic, the orphan who rose from nothing to liberate women from corsets with her boyish tailoring, pearls and tweed suits.

But, as described by Wallace in his book Chanel's War, the reality was far from elegant.

When the Germans marched into Paris in June 1940 Chanel was already a global fashion icon employing more than 4000 people.

She hobnobbed with Europe's rich and powerful, counting Pablo Picasso and Winston Churchill among her friends.

Never married, she had been a mistress to some of the most influential men of the age, including the composer Igor Stravinsky and the vastly wealthy Duke of Westminster.

While other elites fled Paris ahead of the Nazis, she stayed, checking into the Ritz, soon to become Luftwaffe HQ.

Although Chanel did close her studio on the Rue Cambon once the capital was occupied, her boutique stayed open so soldiers could buy Chanel No. 5 for sweethearts back in Germany.

Soon the designer - 57 but as glamorous as ever - was on the arm of an attache at the German embassy, Baron Hans Guenther von Dincklage, 33 years her junior.