The famous 5
STYLISH French fashion designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel once said: “A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.”
Her signature scent Chanel N°5 is celebrating its centenary this year and it is said a bottle of her classic fragrance is sold somewhere in the world every few seconds.
It was launched in 1921 and proved ground-breaking as one of the first examples of a perfume used as a fashion accessory by a leading designer. Hollywood film star Marilyn Monroe famously gave it her celebrity endorsement in 1952 when she appeared on the cover of Life magazine. She later said of the interview: “This fellow says ‘Marilyn, what do you wear to bed?’ So I said I only wear Chanel N°5.” She added: “I don’t want to say nude, but it’s the truth.”
Pop artist Andy Warhol celebrated the iconic perfume in 1985 as part of his silk-screened Ads series, which led to it becoming the first fragrance to find itself hanging on the walls of the Museum Of Modern Art in New York.
Coco herself said: “In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different” and she followed her own advice when it came to creating her signature perfume.
She was looking for something different from anything else that was around at the time and said she was searching for a “woman’s fragrance that smells like a woman”.
She turned to the “nose,” Ernest Beaux, a perfumier to the Russian Tsar and his family. Ernest had fled to France after the Russian Revolution and he worked on several different samples over many months to create Coco’s perfect scent. She tried them all before choosing number five. She also regarded five as her lucky number, and it was the date she often chose to present her new fashion collections.
The perfume contained more than 80 ingredients including jasmine and Rose Centifolia (May Rose) flowers, as well as synthesised aldehydes, to heighten the strength of the scents. May Rose only flowers for three weeks a year and they are one of the perfume’s rare, and expensive, ingredients.
Coco designed the shape of the first bottle herself and said it was inspired by the cubism art movement. She initially intended to give the perfume away as gifts to friends, but it soon became apparent that there was a huge demand for the sophisticated
Chanel fragrance.
The fashion designer was the first ambassador for N°5. Her photo was taken by Man Ray and appeared in newspapers and magazine adverts with the copy saying: “Her perfume, N°5, is like the soft music that underlines the playing of a love scene. It kindles the imagination: indelibly fixes the scene in the memories of the players.”
The entrance to her Rue Cambon headquarters was also sprayed with the perfume every morning before she arrived and she also sprayed the fitting rooms.
She said: “When I realised that my business had a life, my life, and a face, my face, a voice, my own, and when I realised my work loved me, obeyed me and responded to me, I gave myself over to it completely and I have had since no greater love.”
Many famous faces have promoted N°5 over the years including British model Jean Shrimpton, acting stars Ali McGraw and Candice Bergen and Amélie movie star Audrey Tautou.
Audrey also played the famous designer in the 2009 Oscar-nominated film Coco Before Chanel, which followed Coco’s life from growing up in an orphanage to rising to the top of the fashion world.
French acting star Catherine Deneuve appeared in a 1971 campaign for the perfume which declared: “You don’t have to ask for it. He knows what you want”, while Moulin Rouge and Strictly Ballroom film director Baz Luhrmann worked with Nicole Kidman on her Chanel N°5 advert – one of the most expensive adverts ever made.
In 2012 Hollywood actor Brad Pitt was unveiled as the new face of Chanel N°5 – the first man to endorse the scent, while in 2013, some 50 years after her death, Marilyn Monroe starred in an advertising campaign for the perfume that used archival footage of her.
The perfume was so popular that American soldiers during the Second World War bought bottle after bottle, following the liberation of Paris, as presents for their wives and girlfriends back home.
The famous bottle was given a special red makeover in 2018. Red was Coco’s favourite colour and, if money was no object, you could pick up one of 55 numbered bottles made from red Baccarat crystal that came with a price tag of €28,000.
Chanel N°5 has certainly stood the test of time and remains one of the world’s most popular perfumes, 100 years after it was launched.
In the words of Coco Chanel herself: “Fashion fades, only style remains the same.”
As Chanel’s signature perfume turns 100, MARION McMULLEN looks at some of the stars to have endorsed the stylish scent