What is actually the secret of Chanel N ° 5, the most successful perfume in the world? Thomas du Pré de Saint Maur from Chanel has a quick explanation: “The secret of N ° 5 is the legend.” That just sounds complicated. Because if the secret is the legend, then what is the legend? Maybe the secret? In any case, the only reason the fragrance is celebrating its 100th birthday this year is because it exudes something vague. “The value of N ° 5,” says the Chanel fragrance specialist, “results from the product itself and from its symbolic capital.”
Perhaps one can get closer to the mystery of symbolic value by inferring it historically. Because there is a long history behind this invention. And this idea, too, would never have seen the light of day if it hadn’t mingled zeitgeist, art, society and, yes, fate as well.
Numerology? Numerology!
The first fate was childhood in the provinces. Gabrielle Chanel was the daughter of a peddler and a laundress. The mother died when Gabrielle was twelve years old. The widower gave her and her older sister to the nun-run orphanage in Aubazine. In the end it was lucky. There the girl was olfactory shaped by “the refreshing aromas of order and severity”, as the cultural historian Tilar J. Mazzeo writes. Equally decisive was the imprint of the ascetic architecture of the Cistercian abbey and the Christian number symbolism: the three arched windows of the choir as a symbol of the Trinity, the double columns as a sign of the duality of heaven and earth, the passages to the church with mosaics of geometric patterns in which the Number five played a huge role.
Coco Chanel (1883-1971) was just beginning her career when she invented the world’s most famous perfume.
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Bild: Picture-Alliance
These were important influences for their later numerology: On May 5th. Coco Chanel held shows, she selected the fifth fragrance in a long line of bottles, and the most famous Chanel bag to date is the 2.55, which she created in February 1955. Historical irony that her successor at Chanel since 1983, Karl Lagerfeld, had an almost metaphysical sense of symbolism: The last Chanel bag that he invented together with Virginie Viard, the Chanel 19, came out as planned in 2019. But fate would have it that Lagerfeld died in 2019, on February 19. Numerology? Numerology!
So depressed that she had the walls painted black
Gabrielle Chanel would have made a bad novice in the monastery. After all, she had learned sewing and discipline there. Two years in retirement, then she fled to the semi-sophisticated world of the Moulins variety stages. Coco, this is how the soldiers of the garrison town between Bordeaux and Clermont-Ferrand called the young singer. Coco, that was the name by which the world was to get to know her, if only because it was so easy to pronounce. And because in 1925 she was able to use the alliteration of Coco Chanel to create the distinctive identification symbol of the mirrored, intertwined double-C logo. This eye-catcher also came from the time of the monastery: for six years she had seen the intertwining circles of the lead glass windows as one of the greatest visual attractions in the abbey.
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