The Secret of Chanel No. 5

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  That connection had been confirmed in the minds of millions of Chanel No. 5 enthusiasts in 1952, when rising starlet Marilyn Monroe revealed that when she wanted to feel sexy, she turned to No. 5. Memorably, an impertinent reporter once asked what Monroe wore to bed, and the coy response came: “Nothing but a few drops of Chanel No. 522.” Today, it is still one of her best-remembered quips. Later, Marilyn Monroe said about that interview, “People are funny23. They ask you questions, and when you’re honest they’re shocked.”

  In the spring of 1955, she agreed to pose for a shoot in the Ambassador Hotel in New York City with a bottle of the scent, which she was applying generously to her ample cleavage. It was a sensation. For Marilyn Monroe, keen to give a response that wouldn’t look like a shameless commercial endorsement, Chanel No. 5–already an unassailable classic–was a response no one could criticize. It wasn’t bad press for Chanel No. 5, either. The company had nothing to do with her saying it, however. They didn’t need to. It was a testament to the legendary status this perfume had already achieved that even Marilyn Monroe wanted to wear it.

  As a postwar icon being heavily marketed to consumers in a booming postwar economy, by the end of the 1950s Chanel No. 5 should have been riding high; its fame had never been greater. There was just one problem. For some reason, the fashion for Chanel No. 5 was fading24. Even more important, “In France, in Europe, in the United States, the sales outlets exploded25.” With the expansion, “the price [of a bottle] went lower, lower, lower.”26 In 1960, the company may have accelerated the decline in popularity by launching a new campaign with the tagline “every woman alive wants Chanel No. 5.” That was precisely the dilemma. Every woman wanted it, and it wasn’t hard to come by. It was for sale in discount drugstore chains everywhere. It was becoming inexpensive–and common.

  It was a thin line between a coveted icon and a tired cliché. That had been the danger during the Second World War of selling the perfume through the commissary. At the time, the extraordinary value of the perfume had been more important than the venue in which it was sold. Now, it began to seem that Chanel No. 5 had crossed into the realm of the mass commodity. Marketing didn’t make this perfume famous, but it looked as if brand management–combined with overdistribution–just might be capable of undermining its prestige.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE ART OF BUSINESS

  A product like Chanel No. 5 always had a problem. The balance between being an elite cultural icon and an object of mass-market appeal is a delicate business. Luxury demands exclusivity. For other twentieth-century commercial icons–Coca-Cola or McDonald’s, for example–things were inherently simpler. They made their fame as everyday products in which there could be a communal rite of participation, and more people buying what they were selling didn’t run the risk of contaminating their popularity.

  When Andy Warhol began creating his pop art lithographs in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this was part of the cultural moment to which he was responding. The whole idea behind pop art was to use mass-cultural imagery playfully1 and to reduce objects to the disembodied circulation of images and surfaces. “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art2,” as he once put it, and his work played with those boundaries.

  Prestige, however, is a slippery business. In her book Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster,3 fashion journalist Dana Thomas pins the slow decline of the real luxury product on the idea that everyone should be able to buy it. When Coco Chanel found the idea of selling Chanel No. 5 at the commissary warehouse “monstrous,” she understood something essential about exclusivity. Average people writing onto Chanel No. 5 the story of their own hopes and desires turned the perfume into a cult commodity, but too many average people wearing it could also cut the other way.

  When, in the boom years of the postwar period, people found those desires being satisfied, and when Chanel No. 5 was everywhere, the world’s bestselling perfume ran the risk of seeming ho-hum. By the early 1960s, it was suffering from a potentially disastrous overexposure and was widely available throughout the United States in discount drugstores and at chain outlets like Woolworth’s. It was becoming associated with the kind of scent that was worn by an older generation of women who were out of step with fashion. During the countercultural decade of the 1960s, Chanel No. 5 became essentially unmoored.

  Brand management had created the problem, and the challenges of the 1960s had their roots in the strategies–and in the phenomenal success–of the 1950s. The marketing of the 1960s only exacerbated the trouble. Combining the unfortunate “every woman alive wants Chanel No. 5” campaign with a massive new one in Seventeen magazine, which showed images of love-struck and hopelessly naïve-looking young couples blissfully gazing into each other’s eyes, looks now like an essential miscalculation.

  What made Chanel No. 5 famous wasn’t that it was innocently alluring. If Coco Chanel had wanted that, she would have stuck with the scent of those traditional soliflores in the beginning. People fell in love with the perfume because it was unabashedly and confidently sexy. It wasn’t a perfume for teenage girls; it was a scent for women–and especially women who dared to be a bit dramatic.

  The mid-1960s also held other dangers for the company. Pierre Wertheimer died in 1965, and his son, Jacques, took over management of the partnership. While Jacques was, by all accounts, brilliant at raising racehorses4, there were reports that he had less passionate interests in the daily management of the company. Coco Chanel simply called him “the kid5.” Still designing beautiful collections for her couture line, Chanel was in her eighties, and her final settlement with Pierre Wertheimer had freed her from that lifelong obsession with the fragrance.

  Meanwhile, a new problem was brewing in the south of France. Jasmine production was in decline6. The war had taken a heavy toll on the perfume plantations, and bumper crops in the mid-1950s had driven prices to an unsustainable rock bottom. Just as the market recovered, new and cheaper sources of jasmine from Italy, Spain, and Holland–and a new generation of vastly improved and inexpensive synthetics–began flooding into the market during the 1960s. Soon, the flower plantations of Grasse, where the art of perfume-making had begun in modern Europe, would disappear, foreshadowing bad news for Chanel No. 5, which depended on large doses of that exquisite scent to uphold its expensive reputation.

  Coco Chanel had been railing for years against the erosion of Chanel No. 5 as a supremely luxurious fragrance. She had wanted to create the most expensive perfume in the world, and in the original contract in 1924 that was one thing that she had specified insistently–that she would be the sole arbiter of what it took to preserve the prestige of her name and products. In her long battles with the partners at Les Parfums Chanel, she had used and abused this clause indiscriminately, but her reasons were sometimes good ones. Chanel No. 5 had emerged from the Second World War as one of the world’s most coveted and most recognizable indulgences. Like any product, though, it held only a tenuous grasp on its status as a must-have luxury item. By the 1960s, it seemed to some that the partners had finally overplayed their hand, and Coco Chanel was there to say she had told them so. But it was a hollow victory for her.

  Coco was no longer a young woman dancing to titillating tunes in the dance halls of Moulins sur Allier. She wasn’t even a middleaged woman, procuring one lover after another during les années folles. In 1971, she was eighty-seven. Time was running short for one of the twentieth century’s greatest celebrities, and she had put those battles about her signature scent behind her.

  During the second week of January that year, Coco Chanel complained that she was feeling poorly but went to work in her atelier despite it–as she usually did. She was working to prepare the spring collection, and there was no time to spare. On January 10, the day passed uneventfully. She went for a long Sunday drive and, feeling tired, went to bed early. That evening, in the quiet and simply decorated room at the Ritz Hotel that she had made her home in Paris since before the Second World War, Coco Chanel passed aw
ay quietly.

  The next morning around the world, newspapers carried the headlines: “Chanel, the Couturier, Dead in Paris.” The obituary in the New York Times noted that “Chanel dominated the Paris fashion world7 in the nineteen-twenties and at the height of her career was running four business enterprises–a fashion house, a textile business, perfume laboratories and a workshop for costume jewelry–that altogether employed 3,500 workers.” This wasn’t strictly accurate. During the height of her fame, it was always someone else–the partners–running the perfume business; that was always part of the complexity of Coco Chanel’s relationship to Chanel No. 5. However, the obituary had this detail about the perfume correct: “It was,” the column read,8 “perhaps her perfume more than her fashions that made the name Chanel famous around the world. Called simply ‘Chanel No. 5'–she had been told by a fortune-teller that five was her lucky number–it made Coco a millionaire.”

  Ironically, Coco Chanel’s death came at a precarious moment for her signature scent. For the second time in its long history, Chanel No. 5 was in danger. During the Second World War, the partners had smuggled supplies of jasmine out of France and enchanted a generation of American soldiers. Now, Chanel No. 5's share in the all-important American market had slipped to under 5 percent9. It was a strange and unlucky coincidence. As Alain Wertheimer, Jacques’s son, once said in an interview, by the early 1970s “Chanel was dead. … Nothing was happening10.” It was a statement that was both literal and figurative. The perfume had been launched as an expression of the passionately opposed forces of Coco Chanel’s experience, and–despite the autonomous life of her creation and the conflict that she had felt over that separation–it seemed to be coming to the end of its life cycle with her. Chanel No. 5 would have to rise or fall according to its own destiny, and perhaps it had had its moment.

  Chanel No. 5, however, was not beyond resuscitation; in fact, it was far from it. Despite the dip in market share and a loss of brand-management direction, the perfume was far from any kind of deathbed. It was still a bestselling fragrance, even if its prestige was sliding.

  This time, it really was the magic of marketing and the combined vision of a few key company figures that gave it new life and transformed it, in the words of Chandler Burr’s anonymous industry insider, into the perfume business’s monstre. The genius behind the modern transformation of the Chanel No. 5 advertising–that updating of the story of the fragrance that helped another generation of women to imagine how it was part of their sensuality–was Jacques Helleu, the young artistic director. He was the son of Jean Helleu, the celebrated marketing designer who had worked for Chanel since the 1930s. During the early 1970s, Chanel scaled back its work with outside advertising agencies in marketing the perfume and instead gave control to a man who had more or less grown up in what is still, despite its international prominence, a family company. The marketing of Chanel–the marketing that everyone assumes first made it famous–was his personal vision of the scent and what made its allure timeless. “From the age of eighteen, when he first joined Chanel, [Jacques Helleu] focused his efforts on turning the signature black-and-white packaging"–and especially the trademark bottle–"into a universally recognized brand.”11 Surprisingly, it was, in the history of the company, an essentially new direction.

  Helleu’s early insight, to put it simply, was to return to the glamour of the movies. Marilyn Monroe, as the perfume critic Tania Sanchez puts it, wore Chanel No. 5 because it was sexy12. She was always the kind of woman to whom the scent appealed. It was the same reason Chanel No. 5 was adored by those risqué flappers in the 1920s. To transform the story of Chanel No. 5 again, Helleu hired Catherine Deneuve as fragrance spokes-model. According to the company legend, it was a simple decision. Helleu was in New York City and a devoted cinéphile–a “film buff"–and, there on the cover of Look magazine, he read the caption “Most Beautiful Woman in the World”13 alongside the image of the young French actress. That, so the story goes, was when he made the decision.

  The choice was far savvier than any chance encounter, though. “Chanel,” Laurence Benaïm has perceptively noted, “chooses its models as carefully as any harvest of May roses or jasmine from Grasse14,” and Jacques Helleu was the man behind those decisions. In 1968, the year Catherine Deneuve began representing Chanel No. 5, she was best known for starring in two recent and decidedly racy films, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and especially Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967), the celebrated story of an otherwise respectable young woman who lives out her fantasies through afternoons of illicit sexual adventure. It was a return to what had always been the central narrative that Chanel No. 5 told from the moment Coco Chanel began imagining it. It was once again the story of how a fragrance could reconcile the scent of fresh-scrubbed bodies with the open enjoyment of a liberated sexuality.

  As an advertising campaign, it was fabulously successful during the 1970s, and the glamour of Chanel No. 5 turned Deneuve into one of her generation’s most famous actresses. Deneuve’s beauty and quintessential sexuality also made this iconic perfume more legendary than ever and was the necessary antidote to a decade of advertising that had mistakenly defused the eroticism of Chanel No. 5 during the countercultural years of the 1960s and even the early 1970s, as a scent for sweetly proper co-eds reading Seventeen.

  The advertising for the perfume became even more daring as the 1970s progressed. The focus stayed on renewing the long associations of Chanel No. 5 with movie-star glamour–associations that had begun with Coco Chanel’s trip to Hollywood in the 1930s. In fact, at the end of the Deneuve campaign, Helleu began commissioning not just television commercials for the fragrance but a series of inventive, even surrealistic ad-length films, all with that same Belle de Jour theme of sensual fantasy. Directed during the 1970s and 1980s by Ridley Scott, some including Carole Bouquet, the “face” of Chanel No. 5 during the 1980s, these short promotional films invited viewers into an atmosphere of seductive mystery. Best remembered today are Chanel No. 5 shorts such as La Piscine (1979), L’invitation au rêve (1982), Monument (1986), and La Star (1990).15

  The advertisements of the 1970s in the crucial American market, however, featured simply Deneuve and the Chanel No. 5 bottle in photograph after photograph. It was a simple iconography. Suddenly, Les Parfums Chanel was all about No. 5–and specifically about the bottle. The Ridley Scott films played on the same visual imagery, with the silhouette of the bottle part of the fantasy, and it was these new advertisements, as much as the photographs from the fashion magazines of the late 1950s, that inspired Andy Warhol in the mid-1980s to celebrate the Chanel No. 5 bottle as officially iconic. The title of his silk screens, “Ads: Chanel,” in fact, is suggestively plural, gesturing to both their mass-market reproducibility and the historical evolution of this famous image.

  The combination of these two successful advertising campaigns during the 1970s and into the 1980s counteracted the overdistribution of the 1960s, which had threatened to cheapen the name of the fragrance. At a moment when the perfume and fashion industry as a whole was moving toward the commercialism that Dana Thomas calls “new luxury,” Chanel made a decision to recommit itself to an older–more art deco–philosophy: to the idea that a certain class of consumer goods could be artistry. Only a “handful of major brands–Hermès and Chanel in particular–strive to maintain and seem to achieve true luxury,” Thomas claims. “The quality16 comes through in their products … and in their philosophies.”

  Many credit this revitalization of Chanel during the 1970s to the new, energetic leadership of Pierre’s grandson, Alain Wertheimer17, who stepped in to lead the company in 1974. One of his first actions as head of the company was to reduce dramatically the number of outlets carrying the perfume in the United States and to take it out of the drugstores. Even the act of buying a fine fragrance, after all, is a form of seduction, and Chanel No. 5 was always about there being nothing cheap about being sexy.

  Since the 1970s, the marketing of Chanel No. 5 has
been remarkably consistent, periodically reviving this same theme of fantasy and Hollywood-inflected sensuality that teases consumers with the idea of something implicitly just a little bit naughty. Director Jean-Paul Goude became what the company calls “Chanel’s master storyteller” during the 1980s and early 1990s, and his short film Marilyn (1995) reimagined that early photo shoot at the Ambassador Hotel. The advertisement featured playfully edited footage and computergenerated images of the candidly sexual starlet in her first–and only–"official” Chanel appearance.

  While Catherine Deneuve had evoked fantasies of female desire and Marilyn Monroe was nothing less than cultural shorthand for sexy, by the 1990s, the film advertisements were becoming even more daring. Estella Warren starred in the memorable Little Red Riding Hood shorts and print layouts produced by Luc Besson (1998, 1999). They were an adult retelling of the old fairy tale–and they harkened back to precisely the kind of schoolgirl sexuality that had made Coco Chanel an alluring young mistress during the 1910s and 1920s. The “green girl” wears red was the essential message.

  In fact, in the history of Chanel No. 5 advertising in the last several decades, the women who have represented the perfume have often evoked something of the irrégulière, the courtesan, or the mistress. In the first decade of the new millennium, the face of Chanel No. 5 was movie star Nicole Kidman–spotlighted in a 2004 short film, directed by Baz Lurhmann, that echoed the blockbuster success of her role in his Oscar-winning Moulin Rouge (2001). The film, of course, is the story of a showgirl and grande horizontale and of a dangerously illicit love triangle that pits true romance against the desires of a powerful and rich aristocrat. It is hard not to think of Coco Chanel’s time on the vaudeville stage in Moulins–or that complicated relationship with Boy Capel and Étienne Balsan and the private history that Chanel No. 5 was created to capture.