The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (14 page)

Chanel No. 5, created at the height of Coco Chanel's first celebrity, was poised for great things, and this was clear almost from the first moment. For the first four years of its existence, the scent had been available only to clientele in her fashion boutiques, and it had been wildly successful even then. Soon there would be international distribution. All that was left was to make customers aware of the perfume and to generate desire in them. The job fell not to Coco Chanel but to the partners at Les Parfums Chanel, who had–Coco put it best–made the perfume
their
business now.

W
ith the creation of Les Parfums Chanel in 1924, the Wertheimer brothers, with Théophile Bader and Coco Chanel as minority partners, set out to make Chanel No. 5 a perfume with a global distribution and, by doing so, to gain worldwide fame for the product. These efforts were the first serious attempts to market the fragrance traditionally–a fragrance that had become a favorite among the fashionable women who shopped in Paris, despite Coco Chanel's strategic refusal to pay for any advertising. Indeed, it had become a sensation among these social elite–women who could afford to have their clothing made for them by the famous Coco Chanel–based on word of mouth alone. Those who bought their clothing off the rack at the world's great department stores couldn't yet pick up a bottle of Chanel No. 5 at the beauty counter, unless they happened to be shopping at the Galeries Lafayette after 1923.

This would all quickly change. The transformation of Chanel No. 5 into the world's most famous perfume would happen with the opening of the vast American market. By the 1920s, American women had, in the words of one historian, “the greatest value of surplus [money] ever given to women to spend in all of history.”
¹
The postwar years saw the rise of a new kind of luxury market that included the middle-class consumer. The goal at Les Parfums Chanel, where Ernest Beaux had now been hired as the head of fragrance, was to bring Chanel No. 5 to the cultural mainstream, where it could reach the women who read fashion magazines like
Vogue
and patterned their hemlines after news from Paris.

Ironically, Coco Chanel imagined her minimalist perfume in opposition to the world of salesmanship, and, even after the partners at Les Parfums Chanel took over the marketing and distribution of Chanel No. 5, the advertising was determinedly understated–not just for the first few years but for most of the next two decades. The persistent idea, then, that Chanel No. 5's original success was the result of heavy advertising and cunning marketing campaigns could not be further from the truth. In fact, the real surprise is that the early marketing didn't manage to undermine it completely. Those first advertisements are baffling.

The partners at Les Parfums Chanel outlined their strategy succinctly in the first sales catalog, sent to retailers in France immediately after the creation of the partnership in 1924. It was a remarkably simple affair in black and white, with a plain brown paper cover, black edging, and a white ribbon: the signature Chanel colors. It tells us everything we need to know about how Coco Chanel imagined her signature scent–or how the partners at Les Parfums Chanel, more precisely, imagined it for her–and it cuts to the heart of why there was, in the beginning, so little marketing. “Luxury perfume,” the brochure reads,
²

In rejecting the idea of fussy advertising, it was the quality of her fragrance that they wanted to showcase, and the clear message to the consumer was that, in the world of luxury, flashy marketing was part of the problem. Unlike the ornate and florid perfume bottles being famously created by the luxury glass firm of Cristal Baccarat in the 1920s, Les Parfums Chanel would make a simple, pharmaceutical bottle its signature.

I
mmediately after that meeting with Ernest Beaux in 1920, in which she selected his famous fifth sample, Coco Chanel had started planning for the Paris launch of her new fragrance. She had picked out the bottle, however, much earlier. The decision about the bottle had been a long and fascinating one. “Elegance,” she once said, “is refusal,” and the bottle for Chanel No. 5 was an act of both memory and defiance.

What the bottle would
not
look like was one important consideration. Most perfume bottles before Coco Chanel were as ornate and as flowery as the fragrances within them, decorated with swirling, gaudy flourishes of color and design. She wanted something with cleaner lines, something that would be distinct and simple. It would have lines as clean as those notes of the aldehydes in the fragrance.

Like the perfume, it would also have to be sensual. Selecting her signature perfume had always been wrapped up intimately with Boy Capel, and the bottle–this simple glass shape–was nothing if not an intimate memory. The story usually told about her inspiration, however, isn't accurate. Boy had carried with him in his traveling case a set of matching toiletry bottles, and leather cases with flacons and brushes were common. Boy's set came, some say, from the shop of his shirtmaker, Sulka; others say it came from the tailors at Charvet, already in the 1920s the most exclusive couture house for men's fashion, where nearly all the men of Coco Chanel's acquaintance bought their shirts hand-tailored. Coco Chanel shopped there herself on occasion
³
: the company also produced the gorgeously patterned silks that even she couldn't find anywhere else.

Both toiletry bottles shared the same economy of lines that she admired in the Romanesque architecture of Aubazine and in the fall of a dress, and, when asked years later where the design had come from, Chanel's artistic director, the late Jacques Helleu, remembered hearing from his father, Jean, that the Charvet bottle was behind it. But that wasn't where Coco found her inspiration at all. Her real model was one of Boy Capel's whisky decanters
⁴
.

Her friend Misia Sert described the original design for the Eau Chanel bottle–as she insisted on calling Chanel No. 5–as “solemn, ultra-simple, quasi-pharmaceutical,”
⁵
and Coco ordered copies of just such a bottle–adapted in “the Chanel taste"–made in delicate and expensive glass and sometimes, for special clients, in crystal from the elite manufacturers at the firm of Brosse. Everything about it was pure transparency. What Coco Chanel wanted was an invisible bottle–an invisible bottle that, ironically, would one day become one of the world's most recognizable icons.

Ernest Beaux had created an abstract floral perfume in the scent of Chanel No. 5, a fragrance that Coco Chanel would celebrate as a composition not unlike a dress. The bottle would be its complement: the abstraction of a bottle, from which everything was erased except the essentials of line.

It was a surprising decision, maybe even a daring one. In some ways, though, the bottle wasn't nearly as radical as it appears. The history of early twentieth-century perfume bottles reveals something entirely unexpected: this style of bottle was already being used in the fragrance industry. The mainstream might have preferred those overwrought crystal creations, but by the early 1920s there was a fledgling movement in design toward a new kind of artistry in perfume bottles. It's the elaborate designs of René Lalique that everyone remembers–and collects today–of course. Already “the art of the bottle tend[ing] … to simplicity of line and decoration”
⁶
was gaining momentum, however. Even Lalique was producing elegant, streamlined modernist flacons.

Some of them strongly resemble that first Chanel No. 5 design. The 1907 Lalique bottle for François Coty's La Rose Jacqueminot (1903)–
⁷
a perfume that was a huge commercial success–is strikingly similar. It's the same delicate pharmaceutical style, with a discreet label and a square stopper. The only notable differences are some extraneous art nouveau flourishes. Coty himself had been introduced to the world of perfume-making in a friend's pharmacy, where he had seen dozens of understated, elegant glass bottles–bottles, it's worth noting, not entirely unlike the one Coco Chanel designed for her signature scent.

Throughout most of the first part of the century, Coty was the world's largest fragrance house, but one of the other international powerhouses was Bourjois, the parent perfume company that had first made the Wertheimer brothers' fortunes. At least as early as 1920, Bourjois's bottle for its Ashes of Roses (1909)
⁸
also used a flask whose lines are a close echo of the Chanel No. 5 bottle: simple, clear, square, with just a small maroon paper label.

Coco was a careful businesswoman, and she made her name by paying attention to details. When she began her study of fragrance in 1919, she assessed her would-be competitors, and, with her gift for timing, she selected a bottle that reflected a new, chic direction in the industry. From the marketing perspective, the achievement of Chanel No. 5 has not been that its packaging has been entirely revolutionary but that it has always pushed what some have called the soft edge of the avant garde. This is precisely the case with the famous bottle.

Or, rather, with the bottle that would
become
famous as it evolved over the years. Because the first bottle used for Chanel No. 5 isn't quite the same as the one that today is among the world of luxury's most recognized icons. In the beginning, the flask wasn't sold in the now-ubiquitous square-cut bottle, with its sharp and beveled shoulders. The original bottle–the one shown in that 1921 tribute to Chanel No. 5 by Sem–was gently curved at the edges. Its shape was sleek, the tiniest bit masculine, and spectacularly understated.

The innovations that directly led to the bottle we know today happened in 1924
⁹
, when the original rounded and ethereally thin glassware was proving too delicate for distribution and the partners at Les Parfums Chanel ordered a new design, produced at the celebrated Cristalleries de Saint Louis, in glass and only rarely in crystal. Later, in the course of nearly a century now, there has been only one substantial modification to the shape of the bottle. In 1924, the corners of the bottle were first faceted and squared.

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 stopper
¹⁰
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. 1
¹¹
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.