How Fumes of Chanel No. 5 Transversed Decades

Many artists have fought the sands of time only to be buried miles under it and dusted off of the memory like specks of dirt from bookshelves. But Coco Chanel was a lady of her own agency, which many women of her time neither had the courage or privilege to possess and refused to resign to a similar fate. Her legacy is now timeless because she didn’t view fashion as mere drapes around the body but as both an agent and enabler of women’s liberation. Moreover, her inventions were equal parts memoirs of a “boyish” and independent woman who imbued her own lifestyle ideas into them, much like what Chanel No 5 smells like.

Chanel No. 5 which remains a bestseller worldwide was nothing short of a revolution in the making, which was undertaken in 1921 when Coco Chanel set out to make “a woman's perfume, with a woman's scent.” And I use the word ‘revolution’ with caution as before Chanel No 5, our label-loving society only considered single garden fragrances as respectable whereas other musks and jasmine scents were associated with promiscuity. Chanel aspired to create a new type of fresh fragrance that imbued the very spirit of feminine energy and stumbled upon Ernst Beaux the “nose” of the Spanish Royal family. Beaux took up the challenge and gave 20-24 samples to Coco Chanel who picked the number 5 out of them, unintentionally also christening the perfume.

It wasn’t wishful thinking that Chanel No. 5 would be rampantly famous but Chanel put it to experiment by spraying it around the tables of a popular restaurant. Of course, every woman stopped and asked about the fragrance because you see, it wasn’t a single-floral tone but had jasmine, rose, vanilla, sandalwood, and an accidentally huge amount of aldehyde. After that, Chanel being the visionary she is, marketed it in “an invisible bottle” which emulated the shape of a diamond and became endorsed by Marilyn Monroe at her prime followed by Suzy Parker, Candice Bergen, Lauren Hutton, and Nicole Kidman. Years later, the saccharine fragrance became an agent of blurring the lines between femininity and masculinity when Brad Pitt endorsed it. The tale of Chanel No. 5 isn't just one of a mysterious, fresh fragrance curated for the flapper girls but marks the perennial legacy of a woman who challenged the norms and used fashion as a weapon to shun parochial views.