Essence of an Icon
Thomas du Pré de Saint Maur, head of global creative resources at Chanel Fragrance, Beauty, Watches and Fine Jewellery, on Chanel No 5’s centenary celebrations
Many of us first encounter Chanel at a young age, when we see that bottle of Chanel No 5 on our mother’s or grandmother’s dresser. An iconic fragrance for both the brand and the fragrance industry, its distinctive scent includes notes of May rose and jasmine, and comes in a bottle designed along minimalist lines and featuring a stopper inspired by Paris’s Place Vendôme. To celebrate Chanel No 5’s 100th anniversary this year, the maison has released a line of high jewellery that also pays tribute to the number 5—purportedly Gabrielle Chanel’s lucky number.
When developing the scent, Chanel’s perfumers presented her with ten vials filled with fragrance samples; she picked the fifth one. Rather than housing the selected fragrance in conventionally ornate packaging, she opted for a laboratory bottle. One wonders if she knew that the fragrance and its bottle would go on to achieve iconic status.
“There are obvious links [in terms] of aesthetics,” says Thomas du Pré de Saint Maur, head of global creative resources at Chanel Fragrance, Beauty, Watches and Fine Jewellery. “Both the perfume and Gabrielle Chanel’s work with diamonds possess the same sense of refinement, a rigour that is never minimalist. I would say, too, that the No 5 fragrance is faceted and scintillating like a diamond, and its sillage [has a] radiance and richness that is also found in high jewellery.”
To mark the fragrance’s centennial, Chanel has launched a campaign featuring French actress Marion Cotillard. “We have been wanting to work with Marion Cotillard for a long time now,” says du Pré de Saint Maur. “As an actress, she conveys that French spirit, that supple combination of rules and hard-fought freedoms,” traits, he says, that are imbued within the No 5 fragrance.
Cotillard wears the 55.55 necklace, the collection’s show-stopping centrepiece that features a 55.55-carat emerald-cut diamond surrounded by 146 roundand baguette-cut diamonds. “This necklace embodies the spirit of the No 5 perfume in a remarkable way. Marion Cotillard, the face of No 5, had to wear it,” says du Pré de Saint Maur.
For an item to be seen as having such a high calibre, says Pré de Saint Maur, “requires luck. But most of all, the object has to speak the language of the time in which it lives, and stand as a referent for its era without fear of becoming contaminated by it.”
The fragrance—as timeless today as it was a century ago—has had an impressive shelf life; by Pré de Saint Maur’s reasoning, its longevity should continue for another century to come, and beyond.