Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Coco Chanel trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Coco Chanel trivia quiz follows Gabrielle Chasnel, as her birth certificate misspelled her, from a charity hospital in Saumur and the orphanage at Aubazine where she learned to sew, through the cabaret in Moulins where she may have picked up 'Coco', the water-dispensing job at Vichy, and the two men, Étienne Balsan and Boy Capel, who bankrolled the hats, the Deauville shop and the jersey suits. The second half covers No. 5 and the 1924 deal she spent twenty years trying to undo, Stravinsky in her spare house, the Duke of Westminster and the line about there being only one Chanel, La Pausa, the Hollywood million, the little black dress Vogue compared to a Ford, the 2.55 bag, the camellia, the Ritz during the occupation, Baron von Dincklage, Agent F 7124 and Operation Modellhut, the Churchill question, Switzerland, the 1954 comeback financed by her old enemy, and the last words she said to her maid. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Try our Fashion and Salvador Dalí quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Coco Chanel was born in 1883 in a charity hospital in which French town?
Saumur
Her mother was a laundrywoman and her father an itinerant street vendor who peddled work clothes.
Q 02How was Chanel's surname entered on her birth certificate?
Chasnel
She never corrected it, since doing so would have revealed she was born in a poorhouse hospice; she went to her grave as Gabrielle Chasnel.
Q 03After her mother died, Chanel was sent to the orphanage at which convent, where she learned to sew?
Aubazine
She was 11; her father sent her brothers to work as farm labourers. Aubazine later inspired the staircase at her villa La Pausa.
Q 04How old was Chanel's mother Jeanne when she died?
32
Chanel later told glamorous, untrue versions in which her father sailed for America and she was raised by aunts.
Q 05Where did Chanel make her stage debut as a poseuse, an entertainer between the star turns?
A cafe-concert in Moulins
La Rotonde was frequented by cavalry officers; performers earned only what the passed plate collected.
Q 06One account says Chanel's nickname came from a song she sang in cabaret. What was it called?
Who Has Seen Coco?
She liked to claim her father gave her the name; others trace it to 'cocotte', the French for a kept woman.
Q 07Failing to find stage work in Vichy in 1906, Chanel took a job doing what?
Dispensing glasses of mineral water
As a donneuse d'eau at the Grande Grille she served the purportedly curative waters; she then gave up on the stage.
Q 08Étienne Balsan, Chanel's first wealthy lover, was an ex-cavalry officer and heir to what?
A textile fortune
She lived three years at his château Royallieu, where she began making hats as a diversion.
Q 09Which lover installed Chanel in a Paris apartment and financed her first shops?
Arthur 'Boy' Capel
Their affair lasted nine years; he died in a car crash in December 1919, and she said 'in losing Capel, I lost everything'.
Q 10The Chanel No. 5 bottle is thought to be based on which objects belonging to Boy Capel?
His toiletry bottles or whisky decanter
She wanted to reproduce the rectangular, bevelled lines in 'exquisite, expensive, delicate glass'.
Q 11Chanel became a licensed milliner in 1910 and opened her first boutique at which Paris address?
21 rue Cambon
Chanel Modes sold only hats; the couture house followed at number 31, and by 1927 she owned five buildings on the street.
Q 12Chanel's 1913 Deauville boutique used jersey and tricot, fabrics then mainly used for what?
Men's underwear
Her sister Antoinette and aunt Adrienne paraded the boardwalks daily as walking advertisements.
Q 13Chanel's Biarritz shop, opened in 1915, was so lucrative that within a year she was able to do what?
Repay Capel's original investment
Q 21Who opened British high society to Chanel in 1923 and later acted as courier in Operation Modellhut?
Vera Bate Lombardi
Reputedly an illegitimate daughter of the Marquess of Cambridge, she also introduced Chanel to the Prince of Wales; in Madrid she denounced Chanel to the British as a spy.
Q 22Chanel's Riviera villa, built on land the Duke gave her at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, was called what?
La Pausa
'Restful pause'; she sold it in 1953, and five of its rooms have been replicated at the Dallas Museum of Art.
Q 23How much did Samuel Goldwyn offer Chanel in 1931 to design costumes in Hollywood twice a year?
A million dollars
Biarritz was full of wealthy Spanish clients and wartime exiles; there she met Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich.
Q 14Which composer's family did Chanel house at her villa Bel Respiro in 1920-21?
Igor Stravinsky's
They had fled Soviet Russia; she had a brief affair with him and secretly guaranteed The Rite of Spring against loss with 300,000 francs.
Q 15Under the 1924 Parfums Chanel deal, what share of the profits did the Wertheimer brothers receive?
Seventy per cent
Théophile Bader got twenty and Chanel ten; she called her partner 'the bandit who screwed me' and fought for control for twenty years.
Q 16Which store's founder introduced Chanel to her future perfume partners at the Longchamps races in 1922?
Galeries Lafayette
Théophile Bader wanted to sell No. 5 in his department store; the Wertheimers ran the perfume house Bourjois.
Q 17Which star gave No. 5 pop-culture notoriety by saying she wore nothing else to bed?
Marilyn Monroe
The 1921 launch was one of the first times a designer had extended a brand beyond clothing.
Q 18By 1935 Chanel was a daily user of which drug, a habit she kept to the end of her life?
Morphine
She injected herself; her close friend Misia Sert shared the habit.
Q 19The writer Colette likened Chanel at work to which animal?
A small black bull
She singled out the tuft of curly black hair falling over Chanel's brow.
Q 20Chanel's ten-year affair from 1923 was with which British aristocrat, known to intimates as 'Bendor'?
The Duke of Westminster
He gave her jewels, art, a Mayfair home and the Riviera land where she built La Pausa.
She dressed Gloria Swanson in Tonight or Never, then declared Hollywood 'the capital of bad taste'.
Q 24How did The New Yorker explain Chanel's failure with the American film studios?
'She made a lady look like a lady. Hollywood wants a lady to look like two ladies.'
Garbo and Dietrich nonetheless became private clients.
Q 25Chanel was credited as La Maison Chanel on the costumes of which 1939 Jean Renoir film?
La Règle du jeu
She also introduced Renoir to the young Luchino Visconti.
Q 26Which poet is thought to have helped craft the famous maxims attributed to Chanel?
Pierre Reverdy
Their romance ended in 1926 but the friendship lasted forty years; her letters show none of the polish of the 'Chanelisms'.
Q 27How many people did the Chanel couture business employ by 1935?
4,000
When she closed the shops in 1939, saying it was not a time for fashion, 4,000 women lost their jobs.
Q 28Which designer eclipsed Chanel in the 1930s with playful, surrealist-tinged fashions?
Elsa Schiaparelli
Stung, Chanel costumed Cocteau's Oedipe Rex; critics said the actors looked like 'ambulant mummies'.
Q 29Where did Chanel live during the German occupation of Paris?
The Hotel Ritz
It was the preferred residence of senior German officers; she stayed there more than 30 years in all and died there.
Q 30Chanel's wartime lover Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage worked for what?
German military intelligence
An operative since 1920, he eased her arrangements at the Ritz; the Chanel Group later noted he was English on his mother's side.