The Secret of Chanel No. 5

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Over the years, the stopper, however, has changed more dramatically. In fact, it’s the variations in the stoppers that experts use to date bottles of vintage Chanel No. 5 perfume. In 1921, when Coco Chanel first launched Chanel No. 5 from her boutiques to her admiring clients, the top was nothing more than a small, utilitarian square glass plug. Although the Charvet boutique was just a stone’s throw from Paris’s ritzy Place Vendôme, the original flask didn’t yet have that familiar faceted large stopper10 that some people insist was inspired by the monument in the center of that famously chic square. The signature octagonal stopper was also added in 1924, when Les Parfums Chanel redesigned the bottle. Since then, there have been only three other alterations. In the 1950s, the bevel-cut stopper was made thicker and larger. In the 1970s, it was made even bigger. The last change was in 1986, when the size of the stopper was scaled back to balance the proportions.

  There is another small controversy about the origins of the famous Chanel No. 5 bottle, however, and it’s a story that suggests that the updated flacon in 1924 might have come with some hard feelings. The original flask for Chanel No. 5 hadn’t ever been entirely original. But some fragrance historians suspect that the changes to the bottle in 1924 also had their inspiration in the bottle for another perfume–a perfume that was already intimately entangled with the story of Chanel No. 5.

  At Chiris, Ernest Beaux had a former colleague by the name of Jean Helleu. Helleu was an accomplished painter who, because of his keen sense of aesthetics, was highly sought after as a designer of fragrance packaging. Some of his earliest designs were for Coty. But he had also worked for Chiris designing bottles in 1923, when–after the success of Chanel No. 5 and Ernest Beaux’s departure–Rallet No. 1 was being relaunched in the French market. This is where the controversy comes in: experts have uncovered at least one rare example of Rallet No. 111 packaged in a bottle that is immediately recognizable. In fact, it is iconic. It is the same bottle as the 1924 Chanel No. 5 flacon. Precisely.

  Who designed that Rallet No. 1 bottle? And what was the direction of the influence? It’s all a mystery of chronology. Jean Helleu–and his son Jacques after him–went on to spend distinguished careers working for Chanel, but according to the company archives there is no evidence of Jean Helleu having worked for the house before 1930. Meanwhile, the surviving Rallet No. 1 bottle, produced for export to the American market, is impossible to date precisely. Either way, though, the undercurrent was electric. If the 1924 updates to the Chanel No. 5 bottle were borrowed from the design for the 1923 Rallet No. 1 relaunch, then it’s difficult to imagine that the businessmen at Chiris–François Coty already among them–were anything but furious. Using a formula developed at Rallet was one thing. Packaging the new perfume in the same bottle as the predecessor must have seemed outrageous.

  More likely, it happened the other way and Rallet No. 1 was packaged in the “Chanel No. 5” bottle after 1924 in order to capitalize on its obvious success. But designing the Rallet No. 1 packaging to imitate deliberately the Chanel No. 5 bottle was still a pointed kind of irony. Only a small group of people knew or suspected the connections between those two scents until the 1990s, and, if that’s the case, then someone had a sharp sense of humor–someone who also knew the entangled history of those two fragrances and didn’t mind advertising it.

  Either way, the 1924 Chanel No. 5 bottle, of course, went on to become iconic. So did the distinctive small, white label that the company still uses, with its famous typeface. For the relaunch of the Chanel No. 5 flacon, the tag read simply “N°5–Chanel–Paris,” and, when not in the standard parfum concentration, it included the strength in eau de toilette or eau de cologne–two other early12 versions of the fragrance. The sans-serif font was drawn from contemporary13 avant-garde design. From the very beginning, however, even as early as 1921, on the top of each stopper Coco Chanel placed her symbol, also formally trademarked in 1924: those instantly recognizable double Cs. That has been there always, and it was Coco Chanel’s original contribution.

  There are conflicting tales about where those double Cs came from, too. One is a romantic story about the glittering world of the Roaring Twenties along the Riviera. In the south of France, Coco Chanel’s friends were wealthy socialites and some of the twentieth century’s great artists, including Igor Stravinsky, who was famously besotted with her. Since she only met Stravinsky for the first time in the summer of 1921, any notion that he directly inspired the scent of Chanel No. 5 is mere romantic fantasy. One of her other friends, however, was the American heiress Irène Bretz14–known during the 1920s as simply la belle Irène–who owned a soaring, white-stuccoed wedding-cake villa in the hills above Nice called Château Crémat. According to the legend, one summer night Coco Chanel looked up at a vaulted arch at one of Irène’s famous parties and found her inspiration in a Renaissance medallion: two interlocking letter Cs. Those double Cs became from that moment her signature.

  There are, however, other stories of where the symbol came from, and according to the officials at Chanel this tale about the medallion at Château Crémat is also nothing more than a persistently fanciful legend. After all, Coco Chanel also knew well the Château Chaumont, where one could find the very same motif, a famous symbol that dated back to the sixteenth century and the days of the Medici queens. At the royal château in Blois, the symbol was carved in white in the private apartments15 of France’s Queen Claude, who found in the initial “C” an inspiring personal motto: candidior candidis–the fairest of the fair. Everywhere at the royal court and on the jousting fields, Cs blazoned forth, in homage to her. A generation later, Catherine de Medici became the next queen to live in those chambers, and she sensibly–and more famously–adopted the symbol and the motto as her signature as well.

  For Coco Chanel, nothing could have been more fitting. An ancient Renaissance perfume recipe used by the scent-obsessed Medici queens set her on the path that led to Chanel No. 5. The coincidence seemed almost destined. Because the initials for “Coco Chanel” weren’t the only inspiration she found in the iconography of two Cs, eternally embracing. It was also the symbol of those two last names that were never united: Chanel and Capel.

  When we think of Chanel No. 5 today, what comes to mind above all is the bottle. It’s the part of the product for most of us that is immediately iconic. In fact, it’s one of the curiosities of its history that far fewer people are able to identify the perfume by its scent alone–a strange state of things for a legendary fragrance. Our familiarity with the bottle of Chanel No. 5 certainly can’t hurt those staggering sales figures, but it was never the reason this perfume became world famous. If we are looking for the answer to Chanel No. 5's mythical success in marketing, we will have to look deeper.

  What is boggling, considering the marketing of the perfume in the 1920s and the selection of its original bottle, is that Chanel No. 5 ever became iconic at all. That first sales catalog in 1924 laid out the marketing strategy at Les Parfums Chanel precisely, and, while the simplicity of the bottle was always part of the conception, the focus was on the luxurious singularity of the perfumes.

  Perfumes plural.

  Because there is one bewildering thing about the first sales catalog: nowhere does it single out Chanel No. 5 for any particular attention. In fact, the scent that Coco Chanel had turned into a boutique bestseller was jumbled together with a whole new line of Chanel-labeled perfumes, all sold in precisely the same bottle–and nearly all of them had numbers.

  In 1924, with the creation of Les Parfums Chanel, Chanel No. 5 went from being the Chanel perfume to one among many. In the first sales catalog, there were almost a dozen perfumes for sale. Some of those new fragrances, oddly, were very traditional, old-fashioned scents like Rose. They were precisely the kind of girlish soliflores that Coco Chanel had been renouncing. This mixture of old and new wasn’t the most surprising thing, though. It was that suddenly Chanel No. 5 had plenty of competition–and it was of the partners’ own making.

  If
Les Parfums Chanel were looking to create an international brand identity for Chanel No. 5, it is difficult to imagine a more curious marketing strategy. They advertised for sale that year a host of fragrances, including extracts Chanel No. 1, Chanel No. 2, Chanel No. 5, Chanel No. 7, Chanel No. 11, Chanel No. 14, Chanel No. 20, Chanel No. 21, Chanel No. 22, and Chanel No. 27, along with Rose, Chypre, and Ambre. All were packaged in identical fashion. In decades to come, they would add to the litany of perfumes Chanel No. 9, Chanel No. 18, Chanel No. 19, Chanel No. 46, and Chanel No. 55.

  There were so many numbered Chanel perfumes that, by the 1930s, the American chronicler of the Jazz Age, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, could write of the character of Nicole, in his masterpiece Tender Is the Night (1934)16, that

  She bathed and anointed herself and covered her body with a layer of powder, while her toes crunched another pile on a bath towel. She looked microscopically at the lines of her flanks, wondering how soon the fine, slim edifice would begin to sink squat and earthward. … She put on the first ankle-length day dress that she had owned for many years, and crossed herself reverently with Chanel Sixteen.

  He could rely on his readers to get the joke. Chanel No. 16 was almost the only one that never really existed.

  Part of the great puzzle of Chanel No. 5 is why, among all these numbers, it became the only perfume we all remember. Some of those early numbered perfumes were lovely fragrances in their own right–one or two even rivaled for a short time the success of Coco Chanel’s original. Yet most of the early ones have since disappeared completely, and no one even knows any longer what some of the first scents–especially the mysterious and very popular Chanel No. 55–might have smelled like. Yet, even in the 1920s, it already seemed that Chanel No. 5 was marked for some special sort of future. Consumers were poised to make Chanel No. 5 the world’s most famous perfume. It happened despite a decade of what should have been a modern marketing disaster.

  TEN

  CHANEL NO. 5 AND THE STYLE MODERNE

  When Coco Chanel licensed her signature perfume in 1924, Chanel No. 5 was already a coveted luxury object. In the fashionable circles of Paris, it was the scent everyone wanted–and only the lucky few could manage to get it. That had been the whole point of the partnership at Les Parfums Chanel: to bring Chanel No. 5 out of the boutique and to introduce it to larger markets on both sides of the Atlantic.

  For the partners at Les Parfums Chanel, the United States was always a target market, and New York City–already with nearly six million inhabitants–was the commercial and cultural epicenter of that market in this famously fast-paced decade. Luxury ocean liners carried thousands of wealthy tourists each week between New York and the French port of Le Havre, and perfume was still the ultimate souvenir of Paris. In the grand department stores of Manhattan, sales of luxury goods were skyrocketing in the booming postwar era, because the economy of the United States was growing at a stupendous rate, while much of Europe, on the other hand, languished in a recession. Sales of French perfumes in America increased more than 700 percent1 in the decade from 1919 to 1929, and by the early 1920s nearly all the major fragrance houses–Bourjois a leader among them–were opening or expanding offices in New York to capitalize on the growing sales. The extent to which the American market and American cultural contexts created the legend of Chanel No. 5 is also part of this perfume’s untold story. In fact, the history of Chanel No. 5's success cannot be disentangled from the scope of the American century–or the consumers who helped to create it.

  The advertising for the Chanel fragrances, however, was remarkably modest, and it was confined exclusively to the American market. The first known advertisement for Les Parfums Chanel ran in the New York Times on December 16, 1924. It was a small corner advertisement on page five, taken out by the high-end department store Bonwit Teller, which was located on Fifth Avenue at 38th Street back in the Roaring Twenties.

  Bonwit Teller specialized in bringing to the women of New York City the latest Parisian fashions, and the advertisement alerted readers to “Chanel’s New Perfumes,” encouraging city gentlemen to “choose one of these exquisite fragrances that will be a subtle compliment to her taste.” Again, the emphasis was on many perfumes, and among them was Chanel No. 5. But it was only one among several. Also offered for sale were the perfumes Chanel No. 7, Chanel No. 9, Chanel No. 11, and Chanel No. 22. The prices ranged by size from a modestly expensive $4.50 to an astonishing $175 for an impressively large bottle, the modern-day equivalent of from fifty dollars to nearly two thousand. All that the reader saw in the advertisement was a row of bottles. In it, every single bottle was precisely the same.

  There was simply nothing singular about its presentation. The surprise wasn’t so much the uniformity of the bottle alone–other perfume companies sometimes used standard flacons. But the identical bottles, combined with the proliferation of numbered perfumes, were an odd way to capitalize on the growing international fame of Coco Chanel’s signature scent2.

  New advertisements appeared only sporadically for a decade.

  If Les Parfums Chanel intended to launch Chanel No. 5 in the American market, they chose a strange way to do it. Their strategy in Europe, when viewed in hindsight, would be no less perplexing.

  Back in Paris, the partners at Les Parfums Chanel missed a spectacular marketing opportunity just a few months later. In fact, they arguably missed one of the greatest advertising spectacles of the century. It wasn’t because the partners didn’t know about it, either.

  In 1925, Paris hosted an international commercial exhibition dedicated to showcasing the world’s great luxury products–and French luxury products in particular. First planned for 1915 but postponed due to the First World War, it was a massive effort to stimulate the flagging French economy and to remind the world that Paris was the world’s fashion capital. The event spread out across the city and drew sixteen million visitors that year, and it changed the history of art and design. Officially titled L’Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes–the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts–this show of the “Arts Décoratifs” launched the celebrated movement today known as “art deco.”

  Then, it was simply called the “Style Moderne,” and the exhibition was dedicated to the world’s most beautiful and innovative objects, an “exquisite presentation of a few choice luxury commodities”3 by the world’s most famous firms, in an opulent theatrical setting. To celebrate daring new architecture, entire buildings were erected for the exhibition, and showcase gardens were planted in parks along the river Seine. There were pavilions dedicated to the display of handcrafted textiles, the book arts, jewelry, and, of course, the entire world of Parisian high fashion. It was the first world exposition to include film, and “the promotion of cinema was a means of vaunting the modernity of French industrial and cultural production4,” because film was, after all, originally a French invention. Fashion designers and interior decorators were already working to produce costumes and sets.

  One of the most celebrated spectacles of the 1925 Paris exhibition was a lighted glass fountain, a staple of the postcards sent around the world to offer friends and family back home a glimpse of these modern marvels. It echoed the shape of the Eiffel Tower–itself the achievement of an earlier great exposition–but instead of lacy steelwork, it featured a column of brilliant arching crystal and streaming water. The fountain’s designer was René Lalique, the man who had made a name designing fragrance bottles, and just beyond it stood a temple of the senses, the great perfume pavilion.

  Inside the perfume pavilion were all the most famous names of the French fragrance industry, and the names that would soon become famous. Perfume, after all, was one of France’s signature luxury products. There were fanciful stalls hosted by firms like Houbigant, Parfums de Rosine, Lenthéric, D’Orsay, Roger et Gallet, Molyneux, and Coty5. Parfum Delettrez trumpeted its new fragrance, a numbered perfume named simply XXIII (1923). Jacques Guerlain also under
stood the significance of the event and knew it was the perfect venue to launch his masterpiece Shalimar, still one of the world’s great fragrances. Of course, there was also a beautiful display put on by Bourjois, the people who now produced and distributed Les Parfums Chanel.

  The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes–known at the time simply as the “expo"–was a cultural landmark that shaped the direction of style for another two decades, and it would have been the perfect opportunity to launch a scent as quintessentially modern as Chanel No. 5.

  Indeed, the catalog for the exposition describes eloquently the coming of a new era of modernist fragrances that might have captured the spirit of Chanel No. 5 precisely. “Perfumery,” those sixteen million visitors read,

  is an essentially modern art.6 … [and] the principle of perfume, like that of fashion, is always to make something new. It is the condition of its existence. … the discoveries of chemists … have opened unknown horizons, the synthetic perfumes with aldehydes, ionones, vanillin, coumarin, hydroxycitronnel-lol, and of course the living flower … [are] the synthesis of natural essences and these aromatic scents. … the mysterious harmony of ingredients … a seductive composition.

  No fragrance aficionado in 1925 could read this description and not think of Chanel No. 5, a product that should have been singled out as one of modernity’s great design achievements. While Chanel No. 5 wasn’t the first perfume to use aldehydes and while it might not have been an entirely new invention, these materials were still rare in the fragrance industry until the late 1920s. The explosion of their popularity afterward owed a great deal to the astonishing commercial success of Ernest Beaux’s creation and to the mad rush to create imitations. Just as Guerlain’s Shalimar defined that year what it meant to use vanillin and coumarin in a fragrance and epitomized the modern oriental perfume, Chanel No. 5, already a cult favorite with an enviable sales record, was the first perfume to make aldehydes famous.