The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (16 page)

The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes–known at the time simply as the “expo"–was a cultural landmark that shaped the direction of style for another two decades, and it would have been the perfect opportunity to launch a scent as quintessentially modern as Chanel No. 5.

Indeed, the catalog for the exposition describes eloquently the coming of a new era of modernist fragrances that might have captured the spirit of Chanel No. 5 precisely. “Perfumery,” those sixteen million visitors read,

No fragrance aficionado in 1925 could read this description and not think of Chanel No. 5, a product that should have been singled out as one of modernity's great design achievements. While Chanel No. 5 wasn't the first perfume to use aldehydes and while it might not have been an entirely new invention, these materials were still rare in the fragrance industry until the late 1920s. The explosion of their popularity afterward owed a great deal to the astonishing commercial success of Ernest Beaux's creation and to the mad rush to create imitations. Just as Guerlain's Shalimar defined that year what it meant to use vanillin and coumarin in a fragrance and epitomized the modern oriental perfume, Chanel No. 5, already a cult favorite with an enviable sales record, was the first perfume to make aldehydes famous.

Yet, amazingly, the partners at Les Parfums Chanel did not display the fragrance. In fact, they didn't promote any of the Chanel perfumes, which is especially surprising since an entire salon in the pavilion was dedicated to the scents of Bourjois. It was a missed opportunity to introduce millions of visitors to Chanel No. 5, and it can only have been deliberate. Perhaps the company simply believed that the real market for Chanel No. 5 would be on the other side of the Atlantic. Tellingly, the perfume wasn't advertised in France until as late as the 1940s
⁷
. Even so, passing on such an easy chance to launch a perfume that was so much of the moment was a curious strategy.

Coco Chanel's design sense was part of what shaped this new Style Moderne, and nothing could have made more sense than that her signature couture scent should have been included. The very idea of the exhibition was to showcase the luxury products of France and to display them in a context that emphasized the decorative arts as personal identity–a concept she had helped to pioneer. It was a moment in history when “objects were defined as ‘expressive' of the identity of the consumer
⁸
” for the first time.

The Paris exposition of 1925 was the commercial highlight of the decade, and the exhibit was very near to the apex of Coco Chanel's celebrity. As one of her biographers writes, “The 1925 exhibition of decorative arts … saw her and her friends at the center of the excitement
⁹
.” Coco Chanel was the woman of the hour. Chanel No. 5 was conspicuously absent, however. Thinking about this new partnership, Coco Chanel was already beginning to feel the first twinges of regret.

D
espite this missed opportunity at the Paris “expo,” despite the conventional and rudimentary advertising during the 1920s, even despite the decision to market the perfume simply as part of a uniform line of Chanel fragrances, by 1925 Chanel No. 5 was flourishing in international markets. It was simply a word-of-mouth phenomenon, and those behind the department-store counters at places like Saks Fifth Avenue knew that it was a runaway favorite. Chanel No. 5 had been a popular perfume in Paris since Coco Chanel first launched it in 1921, and now it was quickly gaining a singularly important foothold in America, the world's largest market. When art deco swept the United States in the months and years that immediately followed, it only made Chanel No. 5–and Coco–more famous.

With that popularity came the inevitable imitations and a whole generation of new “number” perfumes. By 1927, it was clear to everyone in the world of fashion and perfumery that Chanel No. 5 was the scent to copy. That year, the designer Cristóbal Balenciaga launched his fragrance Le Dix–number ten–said to be a Chanel No. 5-type composition with the addition of violets. Before long, an advertisement in the French periodical
L'Illustration
flaunted another new perfume, Cadolle's Le No. 9
¹⁰
. This one imitated Coco Chanel's signature bottle–and perversely her competitor had moved in just down the street at 14 rue Cambon.

The real competition, however, came from a familiar quarter. It was an obvious riposte in a long-standing, private industry battle that had been heating up dramatically in the 1920s. The competition between François Coty–whose loyalties had been with the Chiris family for the better part of a decade–and the partners at Bourjois and Les Parfums Chanel had begun to take on what looks like a bitter undercurrent.

Coty and the partners at Bourjois and Chanel were naturally in competition. These were the commercial giants of the fragrance industry, after all, and Les Parfums Chanel was attracting amazing talent–chief among them Ernest Beaux and, by the end of the decade, Jean Helleu, widely acknowledged to be among his generation's most gifted designers. At stake were also millions of dollars. So, when Coty bought out Chiris in 1926, he had his sights trained on Les Parfums Chanel and on directly challenging the popularity of Chanel No. 5.

It was a multifaceted strategy, and Coty had considerable resources at his disposal. He began by releasing a wave of new advertisements for the original Rallet No. 1, which he resolved to keep in production indefinitely. In a seemingly pointed allusion to the numbered perfumes of Chanel, Coty next relaunched a series of scents with names like Rallet No. 3 and Rallet No. 33
¹¹
. Then, he told perfumer Vincent Roubert to go back to the laboratory and the archives and to create something extra to challenge the competition. He wanted a fresh version of Chanel No. 5–a Coty version. He planned to make a splash on the world market with it. After all, he had the original Rallet formula.

Released in 1927, that perfume was L'Aimant–"the magnet"–and what Coty wanted to attract were some of the lucrative Chanel No. 5 sales. L'Aimant was an edgy and daring reinterpretation of Chanel No. 5 with a more intense dose of those famous aldehydes. Like Chanel No. 22 (1922)–also one of the original reformulations of Rallet
¹²
No. 1 that Ernest Beaux had offered the designer, and even more strongly aldehydic–L'Aimant was the scent for women who wanted a lighter and more electric version. It had the advantage of also being considerably less expensive. Although never quite a blockbuster, L'Aimant did go on to be surprisingly successful.

If the goal had been to stem the sales of Chanel No. 5, however, Coty was disappointed. All the competition did was make Chanel No. 5 more desirable. In 1928, the department store of Jay Thorpe advertised the “light and sparkling” Chanel No. 5 as “the most famous” of the Chanel perfumes
¹³
, and it was a colossal understatement. Chanel No. 5 was the most famous scent in the world. It had soared during the great economic bubble of the 1920s, and, in an era dedicated to the pursuit of incomparable luxuries, it had become one of the most coveted. That glorious ride, however, was almost over. In 1929, a wild and heady decade was coming to a close, and Chanel No. 5 had captured the spirit of it all effortlessly. That year it officially became the world's bestselling fragrance. What no one understood yet, though, was that the world was poised on the brink of an unimaginable financial disaster. What would matter in the decade to come was whether it was possible for Chanel No. 5 to hold on to its bestselling status.

I
n New York and Paris at the end of the summer of 1929, it seemed as if nothing could stop the Roaring Twenties. Charles Lindbergh made his famous transatlantic flight, and the most daring women shocked the establishment by wearing trousers. Just the year before, Hollywood had produced the first talking feature film,
The Lights of New York,
creating a sensation. And Coco Chanel was an international celebrity, everywhere imitated. She passed the summer in luxury in Monte Carlo and at a new sprawling summer estate that she named La Pausa, in the company of dukes and princes and future British prime ministers. Sitting there in the warm breeze of the Riviera, surrounded by millionaires and their pleasures, the future seemed limitless.

Everyone, however, was on borrowed time–and soon there would be another generation of paupers to join her old friend and onetime lover, the prince Dmitri Pavlovich, in his genteel poverty. October 29, 1929 was a day few people of that generation would ever forget–especially the idle rich. It was the infamous Wall Street crash and the end of an exuberant era. That afternoon ended in panic amid the canyons of Manhattan's skyscrapers. In the days that followed, thirty billion dollars–the equivalent of $4,080,000,000,000–simply vanished
¹
. The Great Depression had begun, and the Roaring Twenties were categorically over.

That worldwide economic collapse would decimate the French luxury industry. The booming postwar American economy had fueled the sales of perfumes and Parisian high fashion, but many of the most prestigious houses were in precarious positions, living from season to season. Some of the small, elite designers had never fully recovered from the competitive extravagances of the art deco exhibit in 1925, where they had vied with one another to display the most fantastically opulent new kinds of modern artistry. More important, however, the devaluation of the French franc had been a boon to designers, making exported luxuries wonderfully–but artificially–affordable in America. The exchange rate was the reason that expatriates like Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce could live in Paris so cheaply during the 1920s. Now came the collapse of the American economy–and of the dollar
²
–and it brought the French luxury market in the United States down with it.

Within weeks, the most important luxury market in the world had all but evaporated. The numbers during those years are still breathtaking: from 1929 to 1941, more than a quarter of America's workforce were unemployed
³
. For the fashion and fragrance industry, however, employment wasn't the crux of the problem. The trouble was that sales of “must-have” indulgences–and the daring new national experiment with buying things on credit–had been fueling the boom of the 1920s from the beginning.

Now, the transatlantic cruise ships were suddenly empty, as tourism ground to a halt. French exports during the Great Depression plummeted. Unsurprisingly, spending on advertising in the fragrance industry as a whole also dropped precipitously
⁴
: from $3.4 billion in 1929 to $1.3 billion four years later. After all, there wasn't any point in saturating the press with advertisements for expensive French perfumes that most people couldn't afford to buy.

The partners at Les Parfums Chanel slashed their advertising budget. For three years–from 1929 to 1932–there was almost no marketing of any of the Chanel perfumes. While the company has never disclosed any of its sales records, even from the earliest decades, it's hard to imagine things back in Paris were looking entirely rosy. There was just one bright spot on the horizon: sales might be down, but that wasn't the same thing as share of the market. Chanel No. 5 remained a popular favorite.

So in 1932, the partners at Les Parfums Chanel launched a new concept. At least as early as 1928, they had marketed a small “pocket flacon” bottle for the entire line of Chanel fragrances. It was the perfect size for busy modern women–but it was also a clever way of encouraging consumers to sample a range of the perfume line, including all those numbers. Now, in a sign of the times, the company started marketing the small bottles aggressively–and they lowered the prices. In 1928, the “pocket flacon” had been offered at $3.75. In 1932, the company reintroduced the flacons as a “handbag” series and dropped the price to $2.25–the equivalent of less than twenty-five dollars a bottle, nearly a 40 percent discount. For the next several years, this was the almost exclusive focus of the marketing. Advertisements simply told readers that the fragrances were available “from $2.25.” The larger, vanity-sized bottles of Chanel No. 5 and the other Chanel fragrances remained expensive and exclusive, but their prices went unmentioned. It was a sample-sized marketing teaser–and an invitation to an ever-broader group of women in the midst of an economic downturn to think of Coco Chanel's perfumes as a small luxury. What those women thought of, however, was Chanel No. 5.

I
t may have been this small step toward marketing her fragrances for middle-class American consumers that gave Coco Chanel serious pause. As early as 1928, there were tensions brewing between the designer and the partners at Les Parfums Chanel, and later they would come to a head over the question of how to define luxury status. It can't have helped matters that, suddenly, fashion designers all around her were starting to launch signature perfumes and clearly imitating her strategy. Some of them were doing it in an opulent style–and offering their perfumes at a higher price point than Chanel No. 5. It was easy to wonder whether Chanel No. 5–and the house of Chanel–would remain the standard for exclusivity.

While Paul Poiret and Coco Chanel had been farsighted innovators when they launched their signature fragrances, throughout the 1920s designer perfumes had increasingly become the standard. It had been an era of perfumes by the letters as well as perfumes by the numbers. One couturier after another–each inspired by the astonishing commercial success of Chanel No. 5–released his or her own couture fragrance. Among this new wave of designers-turned-perfumers, Madeleine Vionnet and the house of Lenthéric had launched lines of fragrances
⁵
named not after numbers but after letters as early as 1924. Vionnet's A, B, C, and D fragrances were marketed in futurist geometrical bottles. Designer Lucien Lelong, rather unoriginally, countered with A, B, C, J, and N (1924)
⁶
fragrances of his own. Even the fashionable milliner J. Suzanne Talbot–in a nod to the famous Coco Chanel–came out with some letter perfumes, the J, S, and T fragrances, in 1925. By the early 1930s, designer perfumes were the norm, and each fashion house was looking for new and creative ways of promoting its scent.