JOHN GALLIANO, the former head designer of Christian Dior, fell from grace this past February when a video surfaced of him making obscene anti-Semitic remarks in a Paris bar. He was immediately fired, shunned by even the most loyal Dior devotees, and whisked off to rehab. He is now supposedly “cured” of his drug addiction, which he blames for the outburst, and so there he is in the September issue of Vogue, posing at Kate Moss’s wedding. About some things fashion is so forgiving. (This week, a French court found him guilty of making racially abusive statements).

I thought about Galliano while reading Hal Vaughan’s book about Coco Chanel. This biography distinguishes itself from the many other Chanel biographies by tackling the dicey subject of Gabrielle Chanel’s activities during World War II—a topic that has strangely received very little attention in the existing literature. Biographers of Chanel have instead chosen to focus on the more inspiring and glamorous aspects of her life—her incredible intuition for fashion, her transformation from a penniless orphan into one of the richest and most elegant ladies in France, her purported love affairs with illustrious figures such as Stravinsky and Picasso. But there is another side to Chanel’s story that has been left largely untouched. In addition to being the woman who invented the little black dress, Coco Chanel was a fierce anti-Semite (although she had no problem doing business with Jewish families who made her rich), and a smiling collaborator with the Nazis.

According to Vaughan, one reason that Chanel has been able to escape censure is that she flat out lied about the full extent of her activities when she was arrested and questioned in court after the war. Though her lies were hardly airtight, and could easily have been discredited, Chanel’s money and influence (Winston Churchill was an old friend) kept her out of jail and safe from exposure.

The other reason that her activities have not been truthfully discussed, and this is my own assumption, is that the fashion world has always been in love with Coco Chanel, and more than a little reluctant to discredit her. There is no doubt that Chanel had a certain genius for fashion; through her clothes, she helped to create the modern woman, also known as the garçonne, and in doing so she helped to change the way women were perceived, and the roles they were able to perform. A garçonne was a woman who wore her hair and her dresses short; who could have many love affairs and never marry; who was active and tanned; who was not afraid to put on pants and ride a horse or drive a car like a man. Chanel’s clothes were simple yet elegant enough for a garçonne to wear, inspired by the machine-age aesthetic that valued efficiency and practicality. And with her slim figure and beautiful face, Chanel embodied the garçonne, and was her own best model. It is no wonder, really, that none of the dozens of biographies and movies that have been made about Chanel have been interested in the ugliness of her life, because there is so much glamour and beauty to focus on instead.

It thus works to the book’s advantage that Vaughan has little-to-no experience writing about fashion. This is not a book about style or design. It is a frank and unsentimental portrait of a figure that fashion writers are nearly incapable of criticizing. Vaughan has worked as a foreign correspondent and a documentary filmmaker, and has written books on the French Resistance and American spies. While his discussions of Chanel’s contributions to fashion add nothing new to the extensive literature on her, Vaughan more than makes up for it with his impressive research and the never-before-seen information that he has unearthed about her wartime activities.