The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (25 page)

D
uring those grim years of the Second World War, Chanel No. 5 had become embedded in the cultural imagination. It had become as much about the idea of mystery and feminine sexuality as about the scent contained in the bottle. Like only a handful of other brand names in history, Chanel No. 5 represented more than just a famous product. In many respects, the 1950s–its first decade as an icon–was the first moment of its true glory.

What was iconic about Chanel No. 5 in the 1950s still wasn't the bottle, though, and that's a claim that would seem to fly in the face of reason. After all, it's widely known that pop art guru Andy Warhol used the Chanel No. 5 bottle as the basis of a series of silk screens, placing it in the company of mass-culture icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Mao Tse-Tung, and Campbell's Soup cans.

It's all part of the familiar Chanel No. 5 story, and, like so much of the legend, it's fantasy mixed with fact. True, Andy Warhol did use the image of the famous square-cut bottle as one of his commercial icons, and he based his art on a series of advertisements that appeared briefly, from 1954 to 1956, in fashion magazines. The reality, however, is that Warhol didn't create the Chanel No. 5 silk screens until the mid-1980s
¹¹
. What happened is perfectly simple. In the early 1960s, Warhol had placed an outdated women's magazine containing one of those mid-1950s advertisements into a time capsule and then went on busily creating his pop art renditions of the era's great icons. The bottle for Chanel No. 5 was not yet among them.

It is also a generally accepted part of the legend that in 1959 Chanel No. 5's bottle was famously featured in a special exhibit on “The Package” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York–one that would feature items “removed from their conventional context of advertising and sales” and selected “for excellence
¹²
of structure and shape, color, texture, proportion, and the suitability of these qualities to functional performance"–and added to the permanent collection. Not quite so, it turns out. While Chanel No. 5
was
included in that famous exhibit, what captured the attention of those curators was the paper packaging, not the bottle.

Item number 22 in the catalog is “Box for Chanel No. 5,” with a note reading, “This is a most sophisticated use of bold black lettering on a white ground.
¹³
Bounded by thick black borders, this package becomes elegant through understatement.” It was the monastic simplicity of the white box in which it was sold that seemed distinctively modern in the late 1950s–a shape that Coco Chanel had first discovered in the twelfth-century convent of her childhood. What that catalog doesn't point out is that the design is also funereal: white paper bordered in black was associated with death and mourning, and everyone who had lived through the casualties of the Second World War knew it. Also featured among the collection were exhibits highlighting the perfection of the egg, an aluminum bottle for the Fragonard perfume Zizanie (1949), and plasticine perfume vials created by the Nips Company (1948–50)–but not the iconic Chanel No. 5 bottle.

This Museum of Modern Art exhibit featuring Chanel No. 5's packaging also dovetailed nicely with an important economic trend that had been emerging throughout the 1950s. With the postwar boom in the United States and the massive increase in the sales of domestic goods came the explosion of advertising, and it was the golden age of packaging in America. In the fifteen years from 1940 to 1955, the gross national product in the United States–always Chanel No. 5's key market–soared 400 percent,
¹⁴
and the average American had a discretionary income now five times that of 1940. For the first time, “The package became an independent communicator of its own brand personality.”
¹⁵

What happened to Chanel No. 5 in the 1950s is also a curious example of a larger phenomenon that characterized the decade. After an era of rationing and “making do,” in which denying oneself consumer pleasures was lauded as a form of patriotism, now Americans threw themselves into the pleasures of material comforts and cozy domesticity
¹⁶
. In postwar America, the mass-market commodity reigned supreme. Nothing was so tantalizing after years of war and destruction as normalcy, homogenization, and the pleasures of shared middle-class luxuries. Once again, Chanel No. 5 fit the mood of the moment precisely. It became not just a famous and successful perfume but also a symbol of the times–a cultural icon that captured something universal.

Creating a common cultural framework for those domestic, intimate narratives was the whole point of the marketing for Chanel No. 5 in the 1950s. During the first decade of its status as an icon, the advertising perceptively focused on the women who wore Chanel No. 5 and less intently on the product. The idea was to find a way to explain to women how they could enjoy mass-market luxuries and all the pleasures of a homogenized middle-class cultural experience but still express their individuality. The 1950s, after all, also saw the full expression of advertising directed at persuading people to identify themselves with the products around them in far more intimate and personal ways. This was especially true of the beauty industry. Writes one historian, “In 1955, $9,000,000,000 was poured into United States advertising, up a billion from 1954 and up three billion from 1950. … Some cosmetic firms began spending a fourth of all their income from sales on advertising and promotion. A cosmetics tycoon, probably mythical, was quoted as saying: ‘We don't sell lipstick, we buy customers.' ”
¹⁷

Psychologists in the 1950s began working for advertising firms, and the mainstream view became “any product not only must be good but must appeal to our feelings
¹⁸
.” It was a period in which marketers first identified the goal of brand loyalty and the idea that what mattered to consumers were images–especially self-images. One 1950s advertiser claimed, “Infatuation with one's own body … and sex [were] now used differently to sell products.”
¹⁹

The early postwar Chanel No. 5 advertisements were very much of the moment. During 1959, the campaign for Chanel No. 5 featured the tagline “Chanel
becomes
the woman you are"–with the text below explaining how “A perfume is different on different women because every woman has a skin chemistry all her own
²⁰
. Chanel No. 5 is subtly created to blend with your own delicate essence–to be like Chanel No. 5, yet deliciously like you alone. Chanel
becomes
you because it becomes you.” It was always chic because it was always Chanel No. 5.
You
are what makes it extra unique and special, the ads told women. Thus the popular–but largely unfounded–legend that a perfume smells different on each woman was invented.

While the campaign to remind women how “Chanel
becomes
the woman you are” was aimed at creating a personal, even intimate connection with what was already the world's most ubiquitous fragrance, the company had taken a different tack in introducing its first television advertisements in the United States in 1953. Bourjois had been using radio commercials successfully since the 1930s, and, by embracing this new mass media, Chanel No. 5 was the first fragrance ever advertised on television
²¹
. Intended to reach an even wider audience, the scene showed a handsome man in a tuxedo and a woman being transformed–through the power of a fine perfume–into a princess in a fairy-tale fantasy. It was a predictable narrative but one that satisfied. More important, it was a return to Chanel No. 5's long associations with cinematography and the glamour of Hollywood, which had started back as early as Coco Chanel's trip in 1931 to the MGM studios.

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. 5
²²
.” Today, it is still one of her best-remembered quips. Later, Marilyn Monroe said about that interview, “People are funny
²³
. 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 fading
²⁴
. Even more important, “In France, in Europe, in the United States, the sales outlets exploded
²⁵
.” 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.

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 playfully
¹
and to reduce objects to the disembodied circulation of images and surfaces. “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art
²
,” 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 racehorses
⁴
, there were reports that he had less passionate interests in the daily management of the company. Coco Chanel simply called him “the kid
⁵
.” 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.