Coco Chanel: enduring style, fairytale story - just don't mention the Nazi lover

• Biopic of 'Mademoiselle' omits her darker period
• First of two films to trigger Chanel mania in France
Coco Avant Chanel
Alessandro Nivola as Arthur Capel and Audrey Tautou as Coco Chanel in Coco Avant Chanel Photograph: Chantal Thomine-Desmazures/Sony

It was the ultimate French fairy tale. An illegitimate chid abandoned in a rural orphanage and taught needlework by nuns rose to become the star of Paris fashion - a bolshy, androgynous trendsetter who freed women from corsets, invented the little black dress, round-neck jackets and quilted handbags which inspired a century of rip-offs.

France is braced for months of Chanel mania as the first of two feature films about the fashion house founder, Coco Chanel, opens today. With French luxury brands desperate to show they can buck the financial crisis, the biopic of "Mademoiselle" has been accompanied by endorsements of Chanel style from silk pyjamas to women's suits. Next month, the label's best-selling perfume Chanel No 5 unveils a new advertising campaign starring Audrey Tatou, best known for her role in the film Amelie, who plays Mademoiselle Chanel in the first film, Coco Avant Chanel. A second, rival film about Chanel's love affair with the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky will be released later this year as France embraces a newly discovered film genre: biopics of troubled females such as the singer Edith Piaf and novelist Françoise Sagan.

'One of the most intriguing figures in French fashion' Link to this audio

The film Coco Avant Chanel focuses on what its director calls the miserable, "pure Balzac" early years of Gabrielle Chanel, nicknamed "Coco" during her failed attempt to launch a singing career. The film sees her move from poverty to high society, from young hat-maker to her first catwalk show. But it stops short of a darker period in her life - her affair with the Nazi officer, Hans Gunther von Dincklage, at Paris's Ritz hotel during the Occupation.

The film's release coincides with publication of the latest instalment in historian Patrick Buisson's much-praised study of sex lives during the Nazi occupation of France: 1940-1945 Années érotiques. Buisson details not just the French prostitutes who served Nazi officers, or the young women who fell in love with soldiers, but Paris's famous cultural and artistic elite who engaged in "horizontal collaboration" with Nazi officers, including Coco Chanel and the actress "Arletty", star of Les Enfants du Paradis.

Buisson told the Guardian that despite the success of his book, French women's wartime relationships with Germans were still taboo in France, where there had been an organised "collective amnesia". He felt a feature film exploring those relationships would be impossible for at least a decade.

"Coco Chanel or the actress Arletty were the incarnation of the values of France: insolence, freedom and in Chanel's case elegance," he said. "In their own way, each was an icon. The fact that they could fall for the occupier was not just a transgression, it was damaging for the national conscience. These women were part of the French national heritage - in terms of Chanel, haute couture and fashion were even more important in that era than they are today."

Chanel tried, but failed, to use the law banning Jews from owning businesses to wrest control of her perfume manufacturing from the Wertheimer family who ran it at that time. She preferred to conduct her relationship with the Nazi baron indoors, rather than at Nazi soirees. Briefly moving to Switzerland, she escaped punishment at the Liberation and would later stage a fashion comeback in Paris.

French commentators have not protested that the new films stops before the Nazi links of a designer described as "indomitably antisemitic" in Carmen Calill's recent study on French collaboration. Instead, extensive press coverage has revelled in nostalgia for Chanel's style.

Alicia Drake, the Paris-based fashion author, explained: "As a woman, she was the ultimate Française: a survivor, a working woman, she had multiple love interests, she was disciplined, thin, brilliant and chic. Her work spanned 60 years from her hatmaking in 1910 to her death in 1971, during which time she invented the first working woman's wardrobe. She set very strict, lasting rules for French women's dressing. It's impossible to overestimate her relevance to high fashion today."

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