How Coco Chanel’s Recipe for Elegance Changed the Perfume Industry Forever
Fashion designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. (Photo: Getty)
Today marks 132 years after the pioneering fashion designer and perfume creator Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was born. Chanel is probably most famous for her modernist and liberating fashion design legacy — but the French mogul also revolutionized the fragrance industry with the creation of Chanel No.5, the first synthetically created perfume in recorded history. In many ways, the Chanel No.5 perfume, with its modern simplicity and deliberate artificialness (which Chanel claimed was more natural), is emblematic of the complex and controversial woman herself. Chanel grew as an orphan in rural France before becoming one of the richest women in the world, building her empire and persona of elegance and luxury and courting some of Europe’s most powerful figures, including Nazi officials, while effacing and obfuscating evidence of her past.
While the Chanel corporation is now the highest-earning privately held luxury fashion organization in the world, the roots of the legendary woman who founded the fashion house were not only humble, but also difficult to uncover. In her book, Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History, which she spent seven years researching, the world’s most foremost scholar on Chanel, Rhonda Garelick, noted, “Having sought all her life to hide her true origins — the poverty, her orphaned childhood, her lack of education — she replaced her life story with a series of ever-changing fictions, as carefully tailored as her clothes.”
Chanel’s father, Albert, was a charming and alcoholic traveling peddler who, at age 28, seduced her 19-year-old mother Jeanne Devolle, impregnated her, and abandoned her immediately. After Devolle’s family tracked down her father, he refused to marry her — they had a fake marriage for the sake of appearing proper, and Devolle cast aside her pride and proceeded to have four more children with him, the second being Gabrielle Chasnel. (The name on the baptismal certificate was misspelled.) When her mother died at age 33, Chanel and her sisters, abandoned by a father who never wanted to be a parent, went to go live in a convent orphanage. Chanel never saw her father again. “They tore everything away from me and I died,” she once said. “I knew that at twelve years old. One can die many times in the course of a life you know.”
According to Garelick’s research, Chanel was also famous for her many romances and affairs, she was neither a treacherous maneater nor was she a hopeless romantic as she has been cast. She was pragmatic, having her first business venture bankrolled by her lover Arthur “Boy Capel, whom she later paid back, and supported many of the men she later dated. “She was an unmarried woman without children who became one of the richest people in the world,” Garelick told Yahoo Beauty. “But it is also true that she would have liked to marry — she lost a number of beloved men in her life, to death and in a few cases when they chose to marry more traditional and socially ‘acceptable’ women. She was lonely often in her later years.”
Biographers like Garelick encountered difficulties in their archival research, as Chanel burned her own letters, asked her correspondents to do the same, and lied continuously to biographers and close friends, not even bothering to keep her stories consistent. Perhaps Chanel didn’t want anyone else to construct her life back together because she had worked so hard to construct it herself. “In her zeal to fit in, Chanel dissolved and re-created herself a thousand times. But more important, she figured out a way to let other women do that, too,” Garelick wrote.
The Chanel look that she created was the first to be called “a total look,” for it was a budget-friendly head-to-toe “recipe for elegance,” Garelick tells Yahoo Beauty. “Chanel took great pleasure in that fact, and used to love to see shop girls or secretaries on city buses wearing their own versions of her clothes: simple skirt, white blouse, faux pearls, a bow over a low chignon, and a chain-link belt. I think Chanel’s greatest appeal to women is that she provided an instantly available, complete ‘look’ that allows us to feel appropriate in almost any situation,” Garelick says. “She created that look after spending much of her own early life acutely aware of her own ‘outsider’ status.”
However it was her fragrance, not her fashion, that propelled her at age 40 into multimillionaire status — billionaire by today’s standards. “Chanel had long intuited that a fragrance could serve as an anchor or linchpin of her design universe,” Garelick wrote. “She knew that women who could not afford her high-priced garments would likely spring for a small bottle of perfume, in order to enjoy a bit of her glamorous aura.”
When Chanel first created No. 5 in the early ‘20s, perfumes were heavily floral, earthy, or animal-derived — but Chanel didn’t want her customers to smell like roses or sandalwood. She wanted her customer to smell like herself. “Women tend to wear the perfumes that men give them,” she said. “But you must wear perfumes you love yourself, that are yours alone! When I leave behind a jacket, everyone knows at once [from its fragrance] that it’s mine!” She developed No.5 with Ernest Beaux, who was a former perfumer to the Russian tzar, an aristocratic connection Chanel, infamous for her social climbing, would have liked. In 1924, Chanel created Parfums Chanel in partnership with the Jewish-French Wertheimer family, receiving 10 percent of the stock, licensing her name out, and removing herself from business responsibilities. With the Nazi’s seizure of all Jewish property during the Second World War, Chanel petitioned to regain control of the perfume company, but the Wertheimers were one step ahead of her — they had turned over official control of the company to a non-Jewish friend, Felix Amiot. Chanel, devastated, though hugely rich and famous partially due to the international success that the Wertheimers brought her, started a line of Mademoiselle Chanel perfumes in retaliation in 1946. Eventually, Chanel and the Wertheimers settled a deal, paying her two percent of annual royalties. Nowadays, a bottle of Chanel No.5 is sold every three seconds.
On her birthday all these years later, after her peasant birth as Gabrielle Chasnel, millions of women still aspire to be like her — which makes complete sense, considering that Chanel aspired to be someone else, too.
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