Perfume: N°5, a cultural object

A simple number - 5 - is enough to designate what we are talking about. Like a few others, the famous Chanel perfume is one of the few consumer goods inscribed in the collective memory. “Chanel's N°5 is what is called an “archetype” of its category. Like Coca-Cola for sodas or Bic for ballpoint pens, it represents the feminine perfume par excellence, explains Caroline Ardelet, director of master's management of fashion and luxury at the IFM. He enters into these symbolic consumer purchases, bought for what they represent”.

Absolute sobriety

Among the elements that contributed to its success story, the strategy put in place by Chanel very early in the history of N°5. In 1921, Gabrielle Chanel was at the head of a house employing more than 300 seamstresses. For a decade now, she has imposed her revolutionary style which meets the needs of women's emancipation. The N°5 was born in this context. Gabrielle Chanel wanted an “artificial” and “composed” perfume, in her own words, which didn't smell of rose or lily of the valley and could accompany the active women she dressed in her dresses.

Behind these words "artificial" or "compound", we must hear a term that will become key in the legend of N°5: "abstract". Name, bottle, box… Nothing is figurative in this perfume, of an absolute sobriety. From its genesis, it possesses an essential quality found in best-sellers: its ability to fit in with its time, while getting ahead of it. No perfume creation had ever been the subject of such a radical approach to abstraction. This radicalization is part of the Avant-Garde of the time, which breathed a new spirit into the post-war world. Among his great figures, there are many friends of Gabrielle Chanel, Cocteau, Dali, Picasso, Stravinsky...

This historical link with the arts will be at the heart of the strategy chosen by Chanel to maintain the legend of the N°5. It will take many forms throughout the century. In the 1972 campaign, Catherine Deneuve, through the lens of Richard Avedon, takes up the perfect oval of the heads sculpted by Brancusi and that Gabrielle Chanel loved so much.

Dance, artistic reference

Already in 1947, the No. 5 posed in the manner of official portraits on a dark background and three quarters of the Renaissance. Gabrielle was passionate about the great female figures of the Renaissance. An interest that earned her to write an article on the subject in 1936 and then to pose herself in 1939 as a queen of the Cinquecento. Another artistic link highlighted by Chanel, dance, which very quickly permeated Mademoiselle's life from the beginning of the 1920s, with the Ballets Russes of which she was a patron. Dance will also be at the center of the latest campaign embodied by Marion Cotillard.

But it was undoubtedly American cinema that best contributed to the popularity of N°5 and its international influence. And this, well before the 1950s and the famous interview with Marilyn Monroe in which she said she slept naked with a drop of N°5… From 1924, significant means were put in place for its development. On April 4, Gabrielle founded the Société des Parfums Chanel with businessmen Pierre and Paul Wertheimer.

At the same time, two other sister companies were created, in London and New York. The No. 5 is immediately a box across the Atlantic, where Gabrielle Chanel is acclaimed by the American press. In 1931, MGM gave Mademoiselle a golden bridge to give its stars a makeover. She slams the door of the studios, but the American market is already conquered. So, to maintain the love story, what better than to distil a bit of the Hollywood dream in the image of N°5?

Hollywood inspired

If the era is not yet for muses, Hollywood glamor is gradually becoming an integral part of perfume communication. He thus appeared in 1931 alongside Gloria Swanson in "Tonight or Never", and in a 1940 Vogue, he appeared with the slogan "New glamor in Your Life".

In 1945, the same cinematographic inspiration when the perfume is represented under a Hollywood sky lit by cinema spots. In 1993, who knows that Carole Bouquet's line in the advertising film is a tribute to a mythical scene from Gilda? "It is through the cinema that fashion can be imposed today", declared Mademoiselle in 1931. This would also apply to perfume. “Chanel is one of the luxury brands that has anchored its “storytelling” and its image the most in the cultural world. It is exemplary at this level, especially since it is one of the first to have undertaken this type of approach”, observes Caroline Ardelet.

If the cinema, by its dimension both glamorous and popular, participated in its planetary influence, art raised it to the rank of cultural object inspiring works of artists such as Andy Warhol, Philippe Halsman, Grant Levy-Lucero or Erik Salin. In 1947, it will even be the subject of an operetta given in Berlin in 1947… Ultimate consecration: in 1959, the perfume will be exhibited at the MoMA as part of an exhibition on design. In 2013, it was Chanel's turn to organize a major exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo to decipher almost 100 years of artistic links. The name of the exhibition: “N°5 Culture Chanel”.

Icon through time

Another key element of its strategy: a design almost unchanged since its creation. No special editions, except for one that will make a mark in 2018, where the bottle is adorned with red. And when, in 2021, the centenary of perfume is announced, the same approach. We are not touching number 5. To celebrate, the house will launch its “Chanel Factory 5”, a collection of 17 perfumed by-products presented in everyday objects such as a tube of paint, a tea canister or a cruet. As for the campaign in ultra pop colors, it will also draw on the cultural world by evoking Andy Warhol's paintings featuring N°5.

"These very bright colors present in communication, it's a nod to pop culture, to pop'art which had paved the way for the possibility of a parallel between art and everyday products, explains Thomas du Pré de Saint Maur, Managing Director of Perfume and Beauty Creative Resources at Chanel. We also wanted to show that an object is not iconic from birth, but that it becomes so by what it conveys, what it says about its time. “We are waiting for the rest.