The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (28 page)

When Jacques Polge became perfumer in 1978, he faced a similar task of maintaining the scent's legacy, and the problem Chanel faced then wasn't just one of the soon-to-be-banned nitro-musks. It was–as always with this scent–one of flowers. The production of jasmine from Grasse was declining, and Polge went to the south of France to meet the farmers who grew this unique jasmine, hoping to convince them to grow more of it at the finest level of quality. What he discovered was that the plantations were dying. Less expensive exotic jasmines were flooding the world markets, making it not worthwhile for the farmers to try to save them. Without jasmine–much of it from the fields of Grasse–in large quantities, however, Chanel No. 5 would be compromised.

Responding to this threat, in the early 1980s Chanel brokered an exclusive long-term agreement with the Mul family
¹¹
–which has been growing flowers for the perfume industry in Grasse for five generations–to save the last commercial jasmine plantations from destruction. For this project, a resistant jasmine stock was found onto which could be grafted the traditional jasmine of Grasse. Today, at least 99 percent of the production of jasmine from Grasse, universally agreed to be the finest quality in the world, goes into just one perfume: Chanel No. 5.

New IFRA allergy restrictions won't threaten the perfume either, because for several years researchers at Chanel have been committed to finding a permanent solution. Among those hundreds of molecules in natural jasmine, it is only one or two that have the potential to cause even the most sensitive among us any problems. Creating a synthetic jasmine as nuanced and subtle as the natural jasmine of Grasse would be an impossible undertaking, but breeding just one or two molecules out of a plant or finding a technique to remove one or two molecules from an extract is entirely possible. Soon, Chanel hopes simply to have resolved the problem of jasmine sensitivity entirely
¹²
. They hope that, eventually, the jasmine from Grasse will be something anyone can wear without hesitation–no matter how daringly high the doses.

For now, the legacy of the perfume is safe. Despite changes around it, the world's most famous fragrance remains essentially unchanged and timeless.

I
n the history of Chanel No. 5, there have been a series of moments like this: moments where it could have failed to keep pace with cultural changes or where its changes might have been too dramatic. The greatest temptation with any product over a ninety-odd-year history is the one to alter it beyond recognition in the name of progress. Indeed, reformulation is a great temptation in the face of slipping sales or marketing missteps, and many perfume houses have been unable to resist this kind of updating. At that moment in the 1970s when the brand management for Chanel No. 5 was being fundamentally reimagined–a moment when, for the first time, Chanel No. 5 ran the risk of seeming mass-market and outdated–it would have been easy to experiment with the formula and relaunch it as a “new” No. 5. It might even have seemed a logical extension of the strategy that first led the partners at Les Parfums Chanel to introduce alternative versions of the scent with Chanel No. 22 and Chanel No. 46 in the 1920s and 1940s.

Today, the scent of Chanel No. 5–particularly at the luxurious
parfum
concentration considered the ultimate version–remains true to the original 1920 fragrance. It's the scent that the perfumers at Chanel work to preserve, and that has meant, in the face of changes, finding ways to adapt without compromise.

And this commitment to reinventing itself–in order to remain itself–at any cost is the reason why, generation after generation, Chanel No. 5 has persisted as a perfume and as a symbol. At any number of critical moments in the history of this fragrance, the scent that first enticed diners on a warm night in the south of France might have disappeared. It might have faded into obscurity like so many of the other great scents of that golden age of perfumery. It might have ended with the death in the 1970s of the complicated woman whose name it carried or have quietly disappeared from the cultural imagination.

Instead, Chanel No. 5 has proven astonishingly resilient. An enduring monument, it has escaped the dangers of ossification. Now nearly ninety years old, Chanel No. 5 is poised to remain the world's most famous perfume for a second century.

T
he title of this book is not meant to be coy or provocative. In the history of Chanel No. 5, there is a real secret here to be unraveled, an untold story that explains so many decades of fabulous success. That real secret isn't about the origins of this famously original perfume in a lost fragrance from imperial Russia. There is a reason one survived and the other didn't. Nor is it a secret about how Chanel No. 5 became a bestseller because of some ingenious and aggressive marketing push in the 1920s. It's certainly not that. Chanel No. 5 succeeded
despite
a campaign that was at best uninspired and, at worst, confounding. More to the point, had those early advertisements been responsible for No. 5's rapid ascent, they would have turned those other numbered perfumes into the same kind of smashing success. Yet only Chanel No. 5 became a commercial triumph. Only Chanel No. 5 became a monument.

As beautiful as it was–and as it remains–the scent isn't the secret either. Today, it doesn't take dusty company archives or stolen formulas to produce knockoff copies of any of the world's great perfumes, just some moderately expensive equipment and a decent laboratory. Generic versions of Chanel No. 5 are for sale internationally in cheap drugstores and on websites. Versions of Chanel No. 5, in fact, were readily available to consumers by the 1920s. It never made any difference. It was always Chanel No. 5 that women wanted. By the same token, there are also half a dozen great perfumes from the golden age of the 1930s and 1940s, once found on dressing-room tables around the world, that have long since disappeared, although their dazzling scents should have made them classics. Perfume aficionados are still saddened by their loss. But a great product has never been, in the world of business, a guarantee of anything.

The secret isn't even found in the story of the perfume's imperfect creator, her ill-considered wartime love affairs, or her calculating and distressingly opportunistic business tactics, although Chanel No. 5 was at the heart of those years and what came after. Nor, even, is it in the story of the partners who quietly triumphed. Long before the Second World War, Chanel No. 5 had slipped free of the life of the woman who had invented it and had become a product with its own destiny.

Instead, the secret at the heart of Chanel No. 5 and its continued success is us and our relationship to it. It's the wonderful and curious fact of our collective fascination with this singular perfume for nearly a century and the story of how a scent has been–and remains–capable of producing in so many of us the wish to possess it. Think of that number: a bottle sold every thirty seconds. It is an astounding economy of desire.

Chanel No. 5 is arguably
the
most coveted consumer luxury product of the twentieth–and twenty-first–centuries. But it hasn't changed in any of the essentials; rather, decade after decade, we have reinvented it in our minds. At moments, primarily since the 1980s, brilliant marketing has been part of what has guided us. But Chanel No. 5 was never the creature of crass commercialism. Instead, something larger, something more timeless, almost immediately made it an unprecedented success.

All along, we have been willing participants in the production and reproduction of its legend. Indeed, we have been the principal agents of it. It's part of the reason stories about Chanel No. 5 proliferate. We have sometimes invented and dreamed our way to those legends, so the true history of the world's most famous fragrance comes to us at moments as a surprise. And it's not just with the invention of “new luxury” in the 1990s that we began to map onto it the narratives of our own hopes and desires and sometimes even our losses. Chanel No. 5 has been about the stories we tell of ourselves from the beginning, and that includes all the people who have shaped its history.

Some of those people are the characters whose lives were tangled up intimately with the history of this perfume–the characters whose lives this book touches upon. All of them found ways to connect personally and privately with this scent that they helped to make famous, and, of course, no one was as tightly bound to the fragrance as Coco Chanel. It was part of her history and her story. Its contradictory scents would capture something essential about what she loved and hated–and, at moments, the fragrance would become her
bête noire
long before it became the industry's glorious
monstre.
For Dmitri Pavlovich, it was the familiar scent of a privileged life that had faded with the Russian empire and the remembered fragrance of an ultimately cruel imperial aunt and a well-loved fellow exile and sister. Even the unsentimental Ernest Beaux invested it with private meaning, with the memory of scents that seemed to capture the freshness of snow melting on rich, black earth at the northern reaches of the world.

It has been the same for the generations of nameless and faceless men and women who have made this perfume the world's bestselling and most famous fragrance for generations. It is our story–and in some fundamental way the story of the last complicated century. With no thought for the family histories behind Chanel No. 5 and heedless of the ugly newspaper controversies in occupied France that the sale of the company to Félix Amiot generated, German soldiers only knew that they loved it. So did the British. The American troops shared that passion, too.

When the G.I.s arrived to liberate Paris, Coco Chanel's famous boutique was the most beautiful perfume salon in a still beautiful city. The entire first floor was given over to the display of sparkling cut-glass bottles, their light reflected in mirrors. Chanel No. 5 was everything one imagined when dreaming of Paris. It was scent and sex: something to contain the years of losses, something promising the hope of something lovely surviving. Those soldiers lined up on rue Cambon in that photograph each had their own story. But the name of the girl back home, the mother or sister or lover, isn't what mattered for the history of this perfume. It's the fact that there were so many of these stories, each with private resonance and meaning.

Who knows precisely what those American G.I.s were each thinking that day on the street behind the Ritz Hotel? Part of the brilliance of the partners' commissary-based sales strategy during the war was that Chanel No. 5 became not just the most recognizable French perfume on the market but one implicitly approved by the United States Army as an appropriate object of desire in the midst of a time that was terrible and ugly. The thoughts of those soldiers were never recorded, but in the 1950s a young American woman named Ann Montgomery traveled to Paris to become a fashion model, and she remembers the meaning of Chanel No. 5 clearly.

Ann–now Ann Montgomery Brower–remembers that when she was in college in the 1940s, Chanel No. 5 symbolized Paris and glamour. Today, Paris perhaps is not so far. Then, she muses, it seemed a great distance. Her first trip after the war took ten days by boat on a Holland America liner. Paris was still exotic and a symbol of luxury and splendor. And it was during the war, she says, that Chanel No. 5 became the perfume everyone coveted.

By the end of the Second World War, to say “No. 5” was to conjure a narrative that was both culturally universal and deliciously private, and Coco Chanel always knew there was a kind of magic and a uniquely human destiny in that special number. Today, the charm remains as powerful as ever. Women wear Chanel No. 5 because it is still capable of that same invitation to–as the current company slogan puts it–"share the fantasy.” Young women wear it to feel rich and sophisticated. Rich and sophisticated women wear it to feel sexy. Sexy women know precisely why Marilyn Monroe made it her signature perfume.

Or perhaps they wear it for some other reason–some reason that is almost certainly personal. But that is what has always been at the heart of the Chanel No. 5 legend. This is the biography of that scent, and the story of our collective participation in its production–participation that has made Chanel No. 5 a perfume with a life of its own.

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