Free The Secret of Chanel No. 5 by Tilar J. Mazzeo

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.

AFTERWORD
    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