{"id":96968,"date":"2020-10-24T22:43:12","date_gmt":"2020-10-24T19:43:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/vogue-cover-girl-and-wwii-spy\/"},"modified":"2020-10-24T22:43:12","modified_gmt":"2020-10-24T19:43:12","slug":"vogue-cover-girl-and-wwii-spy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/vogue-cover-girl-and-wwii-spy\/","title":{"rendered":"#Vogue cover girl and WWII spy"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Vogue cover girl and WWII spy<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Toto Koopman: beautiful, bisexual, mixed-race cover girl. Coco Chanel: brilliant, bisexual, business-savvy fashion designer. The two women attended the same glittering parties, shared friends and lovers, and even worked together, with the \u201cexotic,\u201d long-limbed, green-eyed Koopman modeling for the famed couturier in the late 1920s.<\/p>\n

Then came World War II.<\/p>\n

A new book, \u201cToto & Coco\u201d<\/a> (Kelvin House), tells the parallel wartime stories of these two fashion plates and the wildly divergent paths they would take \u2014 one cozying up with the Nazis; the other risking her life to fight fascism.<\/p>\n

\"Toto
Toto Koopman on Vogue, September 1933.<\/span>Vogue<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThey went totally different ways,\u201d author Alan Frame told The Post.
Indeed. Chanel spent the war holed up in the Ritz with her Gestapo lover, Baron G\u00fcnther von Dincklage. Koopman, meanwhile, spied for the British, joined the Italian Resistance and endured horrors in Ravensbr\u00fcck, Hitler\u2019s concentration camp for women.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe contrast between Chanel living throughout the war in the Ritz, and Toto living in caves, in jail in \u00adItaly and then in Ravensbr\u00fcck \u2014 it was so dramatic,\u201d said Frame.<\/p>\n

Koopman was born in 1908 to a Dutch cavalry officer and his half-Javanese wife in Indonesia. Her real name was Catharina, but her family called her \u201cToto,\u201d after her father\u2019s favorite horse, from infancy. She had a glitzy childhood: pet kangaroos and elephants, servants and nannies, boarding school in Holland and finishing school in London. By the time a 19-year-old Toto ran off to Paris, in 1928, she spoke Dutch, French, \u00adEnglish, German and Italian.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that she could speak five languages fluently certainly helped in her becoming a spy,\u201d said Frame.<\/p>\n