Coco Chanel: the Swiss years

French fashion designer, perfumer and Nazi agent Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, who died exactly 50 years ago, is buried in Lausanne. After the war she moved to Switzerland to escape criminal charges of collaboration, spending around ten years by Lake Geneva.

Once settled in Lausanne, she stayed and socialised at the top hotels – a world away from the poorhouse hospice where she was born in 1883 and the orphanage where she grew up and learnt to sew.

She died on January 10, 1971, at the Ritz Paris, where she had lived for several decades, but she demanded to be buried in Lausanne. Her grave, which she designed herself, is in the Bois-de-Vaux Cemetery.