Breakout hit
With the release of its first new fragrance franchise in over 15 years, Chanel offers a rebellious take on a familiar floral.
The anticipation is high as I hopscotch puddles in Place Vendôme, the beating heart of Paris. It’s a drizzly afternoon, but nothing can dampen my expectations. I’m about to encounter Chanel’s latest fragrance, which until this point has only been referred to in hushed tones and code names. Through an incognito side entrance (think a marbled wall that shifts sideways to reveal a passageway), I’m ushered to Salone Vendôme above the Chanel fine jewellery boutique and into a sitting room. If first impressions are everything, then the grand unveiling of Chanel’s newest scent is shaping up to be a memorable one. The bottle, the name, the juice have been shrouded in a militarylevel of secrecy. A further 15 minutes passes – a macaron consumed, a glass of champagne sipped – before I’m summoned to an adjacent room.
“This is Gabrielle,” says Chanel’s in-house perfumer Olivier Polge, handing me a square, champagne-hued flacon. Despite the secretservice level of mystery surrounding the scent, Polge has been quietly tinkering away at the juice, on and off, for the past three and a half years, focusing on a singular objective: to create a white-floral fragrance. “The brief f was a new feminine fragrance,” he says off the perfume, the first new fragrance pillar for the brand in 15 years. “I didn’t know the name. Little by little all the pieces came together – the bottle, the packaging – but they come naturally around the scent. Which is not always the case.”
While adhering to the “white floral” directive, Polge knew he needed to propel it into new territory. “I didn’t feel that we had the right fragrance for the people who like floral fragrances.” In much the same way as Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel debunked traditional notions of attire for women in the early 1900s, the Gabrielle creation is reframing the conventions of floral scents, a fragrance family the house has continued to reference since the blockbuster debut of Chanel No 5. “When you speak about Chanel fragrances, you always end up speaking about flowers, and this is how our identity, our specificity, our vocabulary is expressed,” says Polge, who has firmly asserted himself as Chanel’s olfactory caretaker since taking over the “nose” gig from his father, legendary perfumer Jacques Polge.
Make no mistake, Gabrielle is still unapologetically a whitefloral bouquet: ylang ylang, jasmine and tuberose (the latter plucked from Chanel’s own fields in the French perfume playground of Grasse) are a heady mix on bare skin. But where Polge’s real prowess comes into play is with the melody of mandarin, grapefruit and blackcurrant that round out the petal punch and transform Gabrielle from yet-another-floral to what Polge describes as “abstract” – complex and more mysterious. More fluid. More commanding. More Chanel circa 2017. It feels refreshingly like the perfume equivalent of a perfectly tailored blazer with boyfriend jeans; an evening gown interrupted by a crew-neck T-shirt: it’s a floral that gets down to business. The clever alchemy is a subliminal play, says Polge, to echo the founder’s rebellious spirit, one that still reverberates within the walls of the storied house. “It’s a result of an instinctive process,” says the man who worked simultaneously on Gabrielle and No 5 L’eau, which was commended by fragrance fanatics and critics on its launch last year. “I made my fragrance with all these elements that were constantly coming back and, since [Gabrielle] Chanel is not a perfumer, I think this must be very true to herh – it’s unconscious on a taste level.” RebellionR is, after all, a thread sewn into Chanel lore. “In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different,” Chanel is quoted as once saying. AndAn she wasn’t kidding. Handbags with shouldershoul straps to free up the use of hands, tailoredtailor trousers for women and costume jewelleryjewell for daytime are all ingenious puppetry of the designer in the service of a brand that’s long giveng modern women exactly what they wanted,wante long before they knew they needed it. PolgePolg himself, and Gabrielle the scent, are in turn the modern-day messengers for Chanel’s historicallyhisto pioneering philosophy. “I think it [the scent] is contemporary yet nostalgic, and even though there are elements that are importantimp to us, you always have to transpose themthe into today’s world,” he says.
And the fragrance world is ready. Perfume houses are rife with disruption, particularly when it comes to who should be wearing it. What makes a scent feminine or masculine, when the parameters of each are increasingly, refreshingly even, blurred? It’s a sentiment not lost on Polge, whose present-day surrounds are what pique his creativity, and perhaps steer Gabrielle away from being traditionally feminine to something more. “I think it would be a pity to always look back and not see the world in which we live. I think there is a taste today for a certain type of fluidity that didn’t exist in the 1920s, at the time when No. 5 was created,” he says noting the “precious gesture” of historically putting just a drop of scent behind each ear. “Today we are expecting something different from fragrance and it reflects in the way we construct them.”
Gabrielle the fragrance is one part of a wider picture: the Gabrielle bag collection – backpacks and totes offering both form and function – launched earlier this year and round out the wonderful world of Chanel. All-round rebel, cool-girl and Chanel muse Kristen Stewart fronts the campaign, bringing a healthy dose of rough-and-tumble edge. The coming together of each individual element marks a fresh approach to femininity befitting a face like Stewart and, more poignantly, befitting the name Gabrielle. It seems the secret’s out.
“TODAYYWEWE ARARE EXPECTING SOMETHING DIFFERENT FROM FRAGRANCE”