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

the true history of the world’s most famous fragrance comes to us at moments as a surprise. And it’s not just with the invention of “new luxury” in the 1990s that we began to map onto it the narratives of our own hopes and desires and sometimes even our losses. Chanel No. 5 has been about the stories we tell of ourselves from the beginning, and that includes all the people who have shaped its history.
    Some of those people are the characters whose lives were tangled up intimately with the history of this perfume–the characters whose lives this book touches upon. All of them found ways to connect personally and privately with this scent that they helped to make famous, and, of course, no one was as tightly bound to the fragrance as Coco Chanel. It was part of her history and her story. Its contradictory scents would capture something essential about what she loved and hated–and, at moments, the fragrance would become her
bête noire
long before it became the industry’s glorious
monstre.
For Dmitri Pavlovich, it was the familiar scent of a privileged life that had faded with the Russian empire and the remembered fragrance of an ultimately cruel imperial aunt and a well-loved fellow exile and sister. Even the unsentimental Ernest Beaux invested it with private meaning, with the memory of scents that seemed to capture the freshness of snow melting on rich, black earth at the northern reaches of the world.
    It has been the same for the generations of nameless and faceless men and women who have made this perfume the world’s bestselling and most famous fragrance for generations. It is our story–and in some fundamental way the story of the last complicated century. With no thought for the family histories behind Chanel No. 5 and heedless of the ugly newspaper controversies in occupied France that the sale of the company to Félix Amiot generated, German soldiers only knew that they loved it. So did the British. The American troops shared that passion, too.
    When the G.I.s arrived to liberate Paris, Coco Chanel’s famous boutique was the most beautiful perfume salon in a still beautiful city. The entire first floor was given over to the display of sparkling cut-glass bottles, their light reflected in mirrors. Chanel No. 5 was everything one imagined when dreaming of Paris. It was scent and sex: something to contain the years of losses, something promising the hope of something lovely surviving. Those soldiers lined up on rue Cambon in that photograph each had their own story. But the name of the girl back home, the mother or sister or lover, isn’t what mattered for the history of this perfume. It’s the fact that there were so many of these stories, each with private resonance and meaning.
    Who knows precisely what those American G.I.s were each thinking that day on the street behind the Ritz Hotel? Part of the brilliance of the partners’ commissary-based sales strategy during the war was that Chanel No. 5 became not just the most recognizable French perfume on the market but one implicitly approved by the United States Army as an appropriate object of desire in the midst of a time that was terrible and ugly. The thoughts of those soldiers were never recorded, but in the 1950s a young American woman named Ann Montgomery traveled to Paris to become a fashion model, and she remembers the meaning of Chanel No. 5 clearly.
    Ann–now Ann Montgomery Brower–remembers that when she was in college in the 1940s, Chanel No. 5 symbolized Paris and glamour. Today, Paris perhaps is not so far. Then, she muses, it seemed a great distance. Her first trip after the war took ten days by boat on a Holland America liner. Paris was still exotic and a symbol of luxury and splendor. And it was during the war, she says, that Chanel No. 5 became the perfume everyone coveted.
    By the end of the Second World War, to say “No. 5” was to conjure a narrative that was both