GRAZIA HEALTH+BEAUTY
More than 100 years since its creation, Annie Vischer discovers why the world still can’t get enough of Chanel No5
Fragrance lore states that in 1921 Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel – Coco to her friends – selected the fifth scent sample offered to her by Ernest Beaux, perfumer to the tsars and the French fashion designer’s ‘nose’. The sample would become Chanel No5: the fashion house’s very first perfume and, arguably, the world’s most iconic scent.
By 1921 Chanel was already a phenomenon in French fashion circles with designs that defied convention. She styled women in trousers and glamorised simplicity and comfort at a time when frilly dresses and restrictive corsets were the norm. It made sense, then, that Chanel’s first perfume should turn feminine ideals on their head too. The brief was simple: make a fragrance that smells like a woman. Which, in 1921, was a radical idea.
Before Chanel No5, the perfume world revolved around flowers in a very literal way – you could smell like lilies, roses, violets, take your pick… But smell like a woman? C’est pas possible. ‘No5 is a perfume with an abstract aesthetic,’ says Olivier Polge, Chanel’s in-house perfumer since 2015, ‘meaning it doesn’t seek to mimic the scents of nature.’ This was modern perfumery in the making. Leave it to Coco.
Beaux delivered and in the century since its creation, artists, celebrities and even the late Queen Elizabeth have all fallen under the Chanel scent spell.
‘As usual you have discovered just the very thing I particularly wanted,’ a letter from Queen Elizabeth to Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, treasurer to the Duke of Edinburgh, revealed at the V&A’s sell-out exhibition, Gabrielle Chanel Fashion Manifesto. ‘I want to thank you very much indeed for the birthday present of the Chanel scent. I am already using it and, I hope, smelling all the better for it!’
A scent good enough for (actual) royalty, it’s no surprise Chanel No5 has become a staple for Hollywood royalty too. Marilyn Monroe famously caused a flurry of pearlclutching when she claimed that she wore ‘a few drops of Chanel No5’ to bed and nothing else. Mon dieu! And rumour has it that the floral fragrance is the scent of choice for Eva Mendes, Celine Dion, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and even Brad Pitt.
Chanel No5 was an instant hit. Word of the heady scent soon spread across the pond and, at the liberation of Paris, American soldiers lined up in front of the Chanel boutique on rue Cambon to bring back a bottle for their sweethearts. If you can’t give a girl diamonds, give her Chanel, right ? Its popularity almost caused its demise. In the 1970s, No5 was so popular that Chanel executives feared the perfume was on the verge of losing its prized air of exclusivity. Cue a sneaky marketing tactic that involved pulling stock from 6,000
