Chanel Nº5

SCENTENNIAL

Chanel N°5 liberated women from Victorian olfactory values

OF AN ICON

French cartoonist Sem’s 1921 take on the New Woman

Reigning muse Marion Cotillard

Chanel posed for the first advertising campaign, 1937

Andy Warhol immortalised it in pop art; Marilyn Monroe wore nothing else in bed; and one classy glass bottle flies off a shelf somewhere in the world every 30 seconds. As Chanel N°5 gets gift-wrapped for its 100th Christmas, finds out why a fragrance your great grandmother wore remains the classic gift we keep on giving.

SCENT OF A MODERN WOMAN

It’s 100 years since Coco Chanel tweaked polite society’s nose with a perfume that allowed a woman to ‘smell like a woman, not like a flower’.

In an age when single-note florals, dabbed discreetly behind the earlobe, were the essence of feminine purity and only brazen trollops wore musk, Mademoiselle Chanel hurled convention in the face of the male-dominated fragrance industry with her heady 80-ingredient medley, to be worn “wherever one would like to be kissed.”

Fresh but seductive in an oh-so-French way, Chanel N°5 liberated scent from Victorian olfactory values and proved that women could be simultaneously virtuous and sexy.

A fragrance for the flapper age, the first by a female fashion designer, it was a distillation of Coco’s own free spirit. Already a phenomenon in French fashion circles with boutiques in Paris, Deauville and Biarritz, she drove a blue Rolls Royce, held wild parties at her villa on the French Riviera and had a healthy disregard for social etiquette. It’s no secret that Picasso, Stravinsky and Edward Vll were three of her many lovers, or that she used their money to help fund her business ventures. Now she sought a perfume to match the multi-layered complexity of the modern woman wearing her clothes.

THE FIRST ABSTRACT PERFUME

Chanel found her alchemist in Ernest Beaux, perfumer to the Imperial Court of Russia, who was experimenting with synthetic scent enhancers called aldehydes. These potent potions boosted the olfactory ‘whoosh’ of a fragrance but were so powerful, few perfume houses dared use them. Chanel had no such qualms: “I don’t want rose or lily of the valley, I am a seamstress,” she told her chemist. “I want an artificial fragrance, something crafted, like a dress.”

Like a Jackson Pollock of the perfume world, Beaux threw everything into the mix – musk and civet, vanilla and patchouli, vetiver and sandalwood (previously only used in men’s colognes) and a forest of plant, bark and flower extracts – to produce a perfume that smelled incredibly ‘abstract’ with no single dominant note.

He also OD’d on aldehydes which he called ‘the salt and pepper’ in his recipes although this perfume chef didn’t smell any of his ingredients. He jotted down formulae. ‘It is like writing music,” he said. “Each component has a definite tonal value so I can compose a waltz or a funeral march. The future of perfumery is in the hands of chemists.”

He was right. Today perfumes are made no other way. Chanel N°5 was a game changer that made single flower fragrances old hat. Yet after all these years, the original parfum remains Chanel’s best-selling scent. ›

Andy Warhol’s pop art tribute

The 5 versions of Chanel N°5

ICON IN A BOTTLE

The fragrance is the star but the chunky masculine flask in its plain white and black box became the icon. Photographed by Helmut Newton, filmed by Ridley Scott and exhibited at the New York MoMA, Warhol immortalised it in his 1985 silk screen series, Ads, alongside James Dean, Donald Duck and Volkswagon. Bucking the trend for fancy fragrance bottles by Lalique and Baccarat, its clinical simplicity was a reflection of Mademoiselle’s no-frills convent upbringing as well as an insight into her rebel soul. “I want pure transparency, an invisible bottle, unashamedly machinemade and mass-produced,” said the woman who invented the elegant understatement. The stopper, cut like a diamond, was inspired by the geometry of Paris’s Place Vendôme, Chanel’s home when she lived at the Ritz. The flask, modelled on the Charvet toiletry bottles used by her lover Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel – or, some say, his whiskey decanter – has barely changed.

LUCKY N°5

You can’t take the Convent out of the girl… Born a Leo, the fifth sign in the Zodiac, orphaned in childhood and raised by nuns, Chanel discovered that the paths she trod daily to the convent chapel for prayers were laid out in a figure of five pattern. The number became her talisman.

She religiously launched her collections on the fifth of the month and when she was handed a list of formulas for her first perfume she picked out number five. She kept the name, loving that it sounded like a laboratory sample when perfumes were meant to have exotic names like rival Guerlain’s Shalimar.

Chanel’s lucky number still informs policy today. There are only five interpretations of the original formula produced under the Chanel N°5 label. And this centenary year is particularly auspicious, say Chanel’s marketing spin doctors, ‘because 2+0+2+1 equals 5’.

Noughties muse Nicole Kidman

Marilyn reveals her naked truth

Brad Pitt’s face didn’t quite fit

FACES OF N°5

The world’s most iconic perfume requires the world’s most iconic muse. That was Love Story star Ali MacGraw and model Jean Shrimpton in the Sixties, Belle de Jour beauty Catherine Deneuve in the Seventies and elegant Aussie Nicole Kidman in the Noughties. French actress Marion Cotillard is the current muse.

Fittingly, Coco herself was the first face of Chanel N°5 in 1937, when she was photographed leaning languidly against her mantelpiece at home for the fragrance’s first advertisement in Harper’s Bazaar. Before that, Coco would invite women ‘tastemakers’ to smart soirees and spritz them with her perfume and next day all their friends wanted some.

One famous face that didn’t quite fit in 2012 was Brad Pitt, in a gendertwisting campaign that might even have shocked Coco. Gazing wistfully out from the moody blackand-white promo video, Pitt utters the immortal lines: “Wherever I go, there you are, my luck, my fate, my fortune. Chanel N°5, inevitable.” Chanel defended its choice: ‘N°5 is the most iconic fragrance of our time, Brad Pitt is the most iconic

Seventies muse Catherine Deneuve actor’. Time magazine called it ‘nonsensical’.

Marilyn Monroe is eternally associated with Chanel N°5 although she was never an official muse in her lifetime. It was all down to that famous 1952 interview for Life magazine when she was asked what she wore in bed; and she answered, “Why, Chanel N°5 of course.” In 2013 she became the perfume’s posthumous poster girl in a campaign featuring archive footage and a recording of a later interview when she explained, “I said Chanel N°5 because I didn’t want to say nude but it’s the truth!” ›

ASK FOR THE MOON

You may have to this Christmas if you want to get your hands on the first Chanel N°5 advent calendar, a limited centenary edition retailing at an eye-watering €700. Shaped like an enormous bottle of N°5, inside there are 27 boxes to pull open, numbered five to 31 (the address of Chanel’s Paris apartment), containing beauty products from the N°5 Collection, including the scent.

Ask for the Moon and you might get this advent calendar

Another 100th Christmas special you could splurge on is a monumental 2021-millilitre Baccarat crystal flask of N°5 Parfum Grand Extrait. That’s more than double the size of the fair-sized bottle French actress Marion Cotillard is schmoozing in the publicity shots. There are only 55 in the world and although price details are equally rare, a standard 225ml bottle retails at circa €2.000, so do the math, then add some.

Ask for the Moon is the theme title of the 100th Chanel N°5 Christmas collection and, for once, it’s no elegant understatement! e

Chanel hopes we’ll Ask for the Moon this Christmas

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