Coco Chanel's collaborationist activities were known at least since 1942 when she was put on a black list by the resistance fighters of the FFI (Forces françaises de l'intérieur), probably for her discreet but no so discreet love affair with German intelligence officer Hans von Dincklage. On the first week of September 1944, young FFIs took her for questioning to the office of the épuration committee, but those men had no precise record of her actions, and she was let go after a few hours, allegedly on Churchill's instructions (there has been a lot of speculation about this). Chanel nevertheless preferred to flee to Switzerland, where she would spend the next decade.

In May 1946, a French judge opened a case against her, this time for her connexion with the Abwehr, the German intelligence service. In 1949, she was questioned in court about her friend the Baron Louis de Vaufreland, a collaborationist. The judge knew very little, and she denied everything. While her denials were found deceptive, she was not incriminated. The trial of Vaufreland was not mentioned in the press, and neither was Chanel's appearance in it. After the war, she bought the silence of those who could talk about her Nazi-friendly activities, such as Walter Schellenberg, Himmler's chief of SS intelligence. It also worked in the other direction. During the war she had tried to "aryanize" the business of Jewish associates, the Wertheimers. Had Pierre Wertheimer sued Chanel after the war, everything would have been exposed, but he wanted to protect the Chanel brand and chose to make a deal with her instead.

Coco Chanel's collaborationist activities were known by a few people, but, as the most incriminating ones were secret, the little that was rumoured was not judged so serious. Many of the French celebrities who had worked with the Germans during the war, such as her friends Jean Cocteau and Serge Lifar, did not suffer too much, or not at all, from the épuration, unless they had been extremely vocal about supporting the Nazis. Chanel basically hid away in Switzerland, waiting for the storm to pass, and it did. Chanel was by now a French legend, and biographers tended to downplay the rumours, even after Chanel's death in 1971. Edmonde Charles-Roux, for instance, wrote about Chanel's love affair with Dincklage in her biography L'Irrégulière ou mon itinéraire Chanel (1974) but she later claimed to have been manipulated by Chanel’s lawyer into believing that Dincklage was just a playboy. In addition, Chanel had well-placed friends, such as the Academician Michel Déon, who helped her built her post-war reputation. The extent of Chanel's collaboration with the Nazis was not known until the 2000s, notably through the book of journalist Hal Vaughan Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War (2011) (which is the main source for this text), who pieced together the whole story from a large corpus of French, British, German, Italian, and American archives.

So: an average French person would have had no idea about Chanel's full role as a collaborationist before the 2000s. At the time of her comeback, in the mid-1950s, she had managed to suppress the worst of it (her work with the German intelligence services, the aryanisation of Wertheimer business). There may have been some vague rumours about her wartime affair with Dincklage, but her friends had no difficulty keeping her legend pristine, and in the mid-1950s the French preferred to look the other way anyway as the time of épuration had passed.