Why Chanel No. 5—Which is Celebrating 100 Years—is Hotter Than Ever

Why Chanel No. 5—Which is Celebrating 100 Years—is Hotter Than Ever

Is there any corner of God’s green earth where a flacon decorated with interlocking Cs and a single prime number does not bring forth sighs of desire and shrieks of delight? This year marks the 100th anniversary of Chanel No. 5, the revolutionary fragrance that is perhaps Coco Chanel’s most enduring confection—an ode to modernism in a bottle that laughs at the passage of time.

If every woman alive wants Chanel No. 5, it may be because from the start the scent represented a new woman—a person who flung off her corset, slipped into a little black dress, and fearlessly marched off to face the future. Its powerful allure may never be fully comprehended (like love, can it ever be completely understood?), but there are clues in the backstory.

Coco Chanel in the 1920s. Her style defined the decade. FPG Getty Images

The year is 1920. World War I has ended, flappers are beginning to bob their hair and roll up their stockings, and Coco Chanel is meeting with the French-Russian perfumer Ernest Beaux. She asks him to concoct a scent that isn’t sticky and floral and sweety-sweet, as so many were at the time. In short, she tells him, she wants a bouquet that evokes “the scent of a woman.” In a story straight out of a fairy tale, retold at an exhibit this year at the Palais Galliera in Paris, Beaux scours the planet, even supposedly traveling to the Arctic Circle, in search of ingredients that will bring to life Coco’s aromatic fantasy. He finds ylang-ylang in Comoros, tonka beans in Venezuela, sandalwood in New Caledonia, and, closer to home, rose de mai and jasmine, produced exclusively in Grasse, the perfume capital of the world. The all-important aldehydes that give the fragrance its legendary “clean” scent? To me, there’s a hint of arctic snow.

From these delicious elements Beaux whips up several candidates to lay at Chanel’s dainty feet—or, should we say, nostrils. As history has it, she selects the fifth sample, declaring that five is her lucky number—she showed her collections on the 5th of May, which is the fifth month of the year. And just to make sure that women get the point, she dispenses with the traditional perfume bottle, typically adorned with Belle Epoque blossoms, and introduces a vial whose austerity is an elegant homage to a symbol of the scientific method: the laboratory flask. Et voilà: Chanel, a pioneer in so many other ways, becomes the first fashion designer to brand her name as a fragrance, her scent ex machina an immediate staple.

Coco Chanel asked perfumer Ernest Beaux to put the “scent of a woman” in a bottle. Photographer Weegee took her up on the challenge. Weegee(Arthur Fellig)/International Center of Photography Getty Images

That was then. It doesn’t account for the hold this ageless centenarian still has on our imaginations. Like the multitude of petals on a rose de mai, the floral hybrid Beaux threw into the original formula (Rosa x centifolia to a botanist), there are a hundred reasons for No. 5’s staying power, but a few other interlocking Cs come to mind: confidence, conviction, change. And if the individual ingredients of this potion haven’t been fundamentally altered in 100 years, its perception has. By arriving first, No. 5 got under our skin and never left, a Promethean creation that set the standard for all that followed. From that moment on, there would be No. 5 and everybody else. That pedigree elicited the most captivating of aphrodisiacs: envy. We want what we believe to be the best, and we want to be the first to possess it.

And then there’s that elusive quality we once associated with movie stars: mystique. “Gabrielle Chanel wanted a fragrance that was built like a dress, both artificial and abstract, which gives it a mysterious dimension,” says Olivier Polge, Chanel’s in-house perfumer and resident nose. “There is always something in No. 5 that you cannot grasp.”

We cannot grasp it, perhaps, but who can blame us for trying? The truth is that it is the rare thing—in fashion, in culture, in life—that retains all its seductive modernity. Marilyn Monroe famously confessed in a 1952 interview that she wore “five drops of Chanel No. 5” and nothing else in bed, and can’t you just hear her say it in her breathy voice? It’s not just Monroe—the scent has been associated with women from Catherine Deneuve to Nicole Kidman. It has even ensnared a gentleman or two; Marlon Brando was said to be a fan, and Andy Warhol immortalized it in silkscreen in 1985. Who can forget Brad Pitt’s moody rhapsody in black-and-white in a series of ads in 2012?

Marilyn Monroe daps herself with Chanel No. 5 before attending a 1955 performance of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Michael Ochs Archives Getty Images

To mark this centennial, Chanel has introduced a inspired by this perennial four-quadrant beauty, a task not without daunting challenges. How do you take something as ephemeral as smoke and translate it into precious works of wearable art? The collection plays with five distinct elements—the signature stopper, the geometric bottle, the numeral 5, the flowers at the center of the fragrance, and the invisible sillage—to evoke the soul of the scent, with one piece dripping diamonds that are meant to suggest droplets. The most thrilling specimen (not for sale) is a necklace that boasts a striking 55.55-carat custom-cut diamond befitting this rarest of milestones.

N°5 Eau de Parfum CHANEL sephora.com $80.00 SHOP NOW

“The difficulty was to even touch that icon. It’s a little intimidating. It’s risky,” says Patrice Leguéreau, director of Chanel’s Fine Jewelry Creation Studio. He wanted, he explains, “to be inspired, to celebrate, and to design something new—not just to reproduce the bottle but to touch its spirit.”

And isn’t that what we all want: a touch of magic? To wriggle into our Chanel frock, toss a cardigan over our shoulders, dab our wrists with this elegant miracle, and step out into the world as if on a higher plane. The ancient Greeks had a word for it: ekstasis, the sensation of being rapt outside oneself. Sometimes, all it takes is five little drops.

This story appears in the October 2021 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW

Lynn Yaeger Lynn Yaeger writes about fashion and design and contributes regularly to The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vogue.

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LIVE: Chanel Spring/Summer 2022 Ready-to-Wear show

Nobody does it quite like the French when it comes to the art of living - just in time for Paris Fashion Week.

Chanel gathers its métiers d’art ateliers under one roof

Seven years ago, French embroidery house Montex combined tiny concrete cubes with pieces of leather, inventing a totally unique fabric for Chanel’s A/W 2014 haute couture collection. Now Chanel has turned concrete into a sort of fabric once more, with a head-turning new building, designed by French architect Rudy Ricciotti. Chanel 19M is wrapped in a chrysalis of white concrete threadlike structures.

Located on the northern edge of Paris, the building covers 25,000 sq m on seven floors. It houses 600 people and 11 métiers d’art, the ateliers behind millions of hours of painstaking craftsmanship (embroidering sequins, trimming feathers, sculpting sunburst pleats) that transforms apparel into art. Chanel has named the building Le 19M – ‘M’ for mains (hands), métier (craftsmanship) and mode (fashion), and 19 for the arrondissement and Coco Chanel’s birthdate.

Chanel 19M: the maison brings its metiers d’art ateliers into the fold

Embroiderer Lesage

Montex and its architectural offshoot, MTX, were the first ateliers to take up residence, in March 2021. Nine others followed: pleater Lognon, shoemaker Massaro, feather and flower expert Lemarié, flou (delicate fabrics) atelier Paloma, milliner Michel, goldsmith Goossens and embroiderer Lesage, along with its school and Lesage Intérieurs. (The building also houses swimwear maker Eres, which belongs to the Chanel group.)

At one time, workshops like these numbered thousands across France, many of them family businesses going back generations. Coco Chanel had a special connection to the métiers d’art – Lemarié developed her fabric camellia, Massaro the bi-colour slingback shoe, Goossens the bird’s nest earrings, to name just a few. Karl Lagerfeld reinforced the relationship when he arrived as Chanel’s creative director in 1983. And ever since current creative director Virginie Viard joined Chanel as an intern in 1987, then becoming studio director (Lagerfeld called her his ‘right and left hand’), she has served as a direct liaison between the house and the métiers d’art.

Over the years, most of the workshops disappeared, victims of industrialisation, changing fashions and a lack of family heirs to run them. Concerned about their future, Chanel began to acquire those it deemed most essential, starting with Desrues (buttons and jewellery) in 1985. It now owns 38 métiers d’art, representing some 5,000 jobs, under a subsidiary called Paraffection. ‘Without them, creation couldn’t be what it is today in Paris,’ says Chanel’s fashion president, Bruno Pavlovsky, emphasising that these highly skilled artisans and the couture industry depend on one another for survival.

The ateliers had been scattered around Paris, many in buildings that were charming but dilapidated. In 2011, Chanel moved several of the ateliers to a 5,000 sq m building in the suburb of Pantin, but soon that was too small, and they spilled over into another building in neighbouring Aubervilliers, a gritty suburb just starting to gentrify. So Chanel hunted for a site large and accessible enough for all, and found a neglected industrial plot of land on the edge of Aubervilliers. ‘This area is evolving, and the upcoming Olympic Games will have an interesting impact,’ says Pavlovsky. ‘I think this will be a strategic location, full of an energy that goes well with what we do.’

Le 19M: the building by Rudy Ricciotti

The execution of the building was particularly challenging, says Ricciotti, who regularly collaborates with a slew of engineers to do revolutionary things with ultra high-performance concrete. Its exoskeleton is composed of 231 slim concrete modules, each 24m high, in different configurations, and each cast as a single piece. Trucks delivered the enormous structures to the site in the middle of the night, and special tools were used to carefully lift them into their vertical, weight-bearing position. Ricciotti compared the physics to the handiwork at Lognon, a workshop that pleats fabric using accordion-like cardboard moulds. ‘A sheet of paper has no mechanical resistance, but when you fold it and place it vertically, it is incredible the amount of resistance it assumes.’

The façade might appear delicate, but don’t be fooled. Each module is able to support its own weight, the exterior corridors, weather (such as snow) and live loads (such as people). The building is triangular in shape, following the footprint of the site, and Ricciotti created a garden in the centre, enclosed by the arcades. Jean-François Lesage, founder of Lesage Intérieurs, admits, ‘I was a bit apprehensive at first, leaving a place where we worked for more than 100 years. But the garden, the luminosity, the monastic feeling, it’s extraordinary – like a cloister where you can fully concentrate on your passions.’ Within the building, the architect achieved a perfect balance of natural and artificial light. ‘I can finally see the real colour of the feathers,’ says Julie, a young plumassière at Lemarié.

Top, Montex. Above, detail from a dress embroidered by Montex for Chanel ’s 2011 Paris-Byzance collection evokes Byzantine mosaics

Pavlovsky made sure to create physical separations between the ateliers to maintain each one’s unique style and savoir-faire, saying, ‘One should recognise right away whether something is embroidered by Montex, Lemarié or Lesage’. At the same time, the new building gives the artisans opportunities to easily interact. Montex’s artistic director Aska Yamashita recounts that Virginie Viard stopped in one day and had lunch with all the ateliers’ artistic directors, something that never would have happened before.

A hub for engaging and connecting

Chanel also encourages the ateliers to continue working for a range of brands, both to feed their creativity and maintain their business models. Each workshop pays rent and is expected to turn a profit. Fortunately, they are all growing, their rare ancestral skills being passed on to new generations. Recruitment was an issue about 20 years ago, says Pavlovsky, when the métiers d’art were considered fallback professions for those who flunked out of school. That is no longer the case. Many of the artisans are under 30 and as comfortable embroidering on antique Cornely machines as manipulating a 3D printer.

While an influx of youth is key, so is exposure to life outside this hive of activity. To this end, Le 19M includes a 1,200 sq m gallery on two levels, La Galerie du 19M, opening this autumn. La Galerie has already hosted artist workshops and signed partnerships with alternative film school École Kourtrajmé, headed up by film director Ladj Ly and artist JR. ‘If this building is insular and unengaged, it will be very difficult to maintain a positive energy,’ says Pavlovsky. ‘Keeping these métiers d’art connected to the world of today is the best guarantee they will still exist tomorrow.’ §