by Dana Thomas
Chanel decided to introduce No. 5 slowly, anonymously. First she did a test in Cannes: she invited Beaux and a few friends to dinner at a top restaurant, placed a bottle on the table and when a chic woman walked by, Chanel squeezed the atomizer bulb and filled the air with an invisible cloud of No. 5. Each time the woman stopped, smelled, and appeared to be enchanted by the scent. Pleased with the results, Chanel returned to Paris and quietly launched No. 5. She didn’t announce its arrival in the press or stock it in her store. She wore it herself, spritzed the shop’s dressing rooms with it, and gave bottles to a few of her high-society friends. Soon the buzz began: “Have you heard Mademoiselle Chanel has a perfume?” When the buzz rose to a clamor, Chanel instructed Beaux to put No. 5 into production. “The success was beyond anything we could have imagined,” recalled Chanel’s friend Misia Sert. “It was like a winning lottery ticket.”
Théophile Bader, the founder of the French department store Galeries Lafayette, wanted to sell No. 5, but to fill the order, Chanel needed to expand production. Bader introduced Chanel to his friend Pierre Wertheimer, co-owner of the Bourjois cosmetics company. In 1924, the trio hammered out a deal to incorporate Les Parfums Chanel: Wertheimer, who would produce No. 5 in his Bourjois factory, got 70 percent, Bader got 20 percent as a finder’s fee, and Chanel received a mere 10 percent. It didn’t take long for Chanel to realize she’d been crooked. She filed so many lawsuits to get more control and more profits—mostly to no avail—that by 1928, the Wertheimers had a lawyer on staff who dealt solely with, as Wertheimer called her, “that bloody woman.”
Throughout the 1920s, Chanel added new scents to her fragrance line: No. 22 in 1922, Gardenia in 1925, Bois des Isles in 1926, and Cuir de Russie in 1927. They were popular, but No. 5 surpassed them all and the competition, too: in 1929, it was named the number-one-selling perfume in the world. By the 1930s, Coco Chanel was earning $4 million a year and reportedly had assets of $10 million. “Under her glossy façade,” opined a French banker, “she is a shrewd, calculating peasant.”
When the Nazis arrived in Paris in 1940, brothers Pierre and Paul Wertheimer—Alsatian Jews who feared persecution—fled to the United States. Once settled in New York, they sent an American named H. Gregory Thomas to Grasse to secure the formula and the primary ingredients to produce No. 5 in the United States during the war. While there, Thomas helped Pierre’s son Jacques escape, via Morocco and Portugal, to New York. Thomas was later named president of Chanel in the United States, a post he held for thirty-two years.
Chanel closed her fashion house but continued to live across the street at the Hôtel Ritz, a Nazi headquarters during the war, where she took up with a young Nazi officer named Hans Gunther von Dincklage. In an extraordinarily evil power play, Chanel denounced the Wertheimers to the Nazis. But the Wertheimers had anticipated her treachery. In 1943, the family bought 50 percent of an airplane propeller company run by Félix Amiot, a French Aryan collaborator who sold arms to the German military. When Chanel turned coat, the Wertheimers signed Les Parfums Chanel over to Amiot, and the Nazis left the company alone. After the armistice, Amiot returned Les Parfums Chanel to the Wertheimers. Amiot’s help in protecting the Wertheimers’ company “saved his little neck” from the revenge-seeking Allies, Jacques’s son Alain Wertheimer told Forbes.
Chanel, however, was arrested by French resistance forces. She was released three hours later with the help, it was said, of Winston Churchill, a friend of another of Chanel’s former beaux, the Duke of Westminster. She immediately fled to Switzerland and continued to menace the Wertheimers. She threatened to produce her own version of No. 5—which she would call Mademoiselle Chanel No. 5—and two other new scents, and she filed a suit in France that charged that Les Parfums Chanel made an inferior product and demanded that it cease production and sales, and return ownership and rights to her. The Wertheimers negotiated a new deal with Chanel: instead of 10 percent of all French sales of No. 5, she would have 2 percent of world sales and the right to produce her own scents (without the numeral 5). She never did.
When No. 5’s sales began to lag in the early 1950s, Pierre Wertheimer paid a visit to then-seventy-year-old Mademoiselle Chanel at the Beau Rivage hotel in Lausanne. Within a few days, she was back on the rue Cambon in Paris, planning the relaunch of Chanel couture. Her first collection of slim 1920s gamine looks in the era of Christian Dior’s ample New Look designs was roundly dismissed. “A fiasco!” wrote one British paper. Another called the show “a melancholy retrospective.” The crowd snickered and grimaced. It was “one of the cruelest experiences I’ve ever witnessed,” film director Franco Zeffirelli recalled.
Chanel was unruffled.
“I want to go on, go on and win,” she told Pierre Wertheimer.
“You’re right,” he said. “You’re right to go on.”
She did, and each collection got stronger and better. Within a few seasons, the Chanel collarless tweed suit and the gamine flapper dress were the preferred silhouettes in fashion. Even Christian Dior went “back to Chanel’s beloved 1920s for inspiration,” Newsweek reported. “His mannequins had flattened busts, waistlines where hips usually are, and not a curve was to be seen.” All this fashion success further boosted Chanel perfume sales and Mademoiselle’s position in the company. Wertheimer negotiated his final deal with her: the family would pay for the rue Cambon headquarters, her personal expenses, and her taxes for the rest of her life in return for control of her name for perfume and fashion. As she had no heirs, upon her death the family would receive her perfume royalty payments, too. A few years later, the Wertheimers bought from the Bader family the remaining 20 percent of the house. When Chanel died at the Ritz in 1971, the Wertheimers became the sole owners of the company. They still are today.
WITH NO. 5, Coco Chanel had turned the idea of a fashion-branded perfume into a viable and quite remunerative business. Louis Amic, a respected French nose who ran the major perfume laboratory of Roure Bertrand Dupont, decided to make it a business unto itself. In the 1930s and 40s, he went to couture houses such as Elsa Schiaparelli, Piguet, and Balenciaga and told them, “You have good taste and you should have a perfume. Let me do it for you.” Back then, creating luxury brand perfumes was a relaxed, pleasurable assignment. Often the couturier and perfumer would meet for lunch and over a four-course meal and a bottle or two of good wine, they’d come up with the name, the basic recipe, the packaging, and the marketing plan. Louis Amie’s son, Jean, continued the practice, doing perfumes in the 1960s for Paco Rabanne, Givenchy, and Pierre Cardin. Only a handful of couture houses, such as Chanel and Patou, created, produced, and distributed their own perfumes.
In 1969, Roure Bertrand Dupont hired a young nose from Saint-Rémy-en-Provence named Jacques Polge to work for its New York office. Polge had become a perfumer by chance—he was recruited by a local firm while studying English and French literature at a university in Aix-en-Provence—but he soon became a respected young talent. While at Roure Bertrand Dupont, Polge helped create perfumes for Saint Laurent and Givenchy. In 1974, Alain Wertheimer, the twenty-five-year-old grandson of Pierre, took over as CEO of Chanel. By then, the company had dwindled down to the perfume line and the original shop on rue Cambon. “Chanel was dead,” Alain Wertheimer said a few years later. “Nothing was happening.” Wertheimer had little business experience—he had interned at the Moët & Chandon champagne winery in Épernay not long before taking over Chanel—but he saw quickly what needed to be done to revive the brand. He reined in distribution, pulling Chanel No. 5 off drugstore shelves. He launched the Chanel Beauté cosmetics line, which was sold only in high-end stores. Then, in 1979, he called Polge.
Chanel had employed only two noses in sixty years: Ernest Beaux, the chemist who created No. 5 in 1921, and Henri Robert, who did No. 19, Cristalle, and Chanel for Gentlemen. Robert, well into his eighties, was retiring. The perfume arm of Chanel had been creatively dormant for some time. “There was a new perfume every twenty years,” Polge remembered with a l
augh. “People in the industry said, ‘You’re crazy to take this job. You’ll have nothing to do!’” But this was the house of No. 5, Polge reasoned. “It’s a mythical perfume.”
His confreres were right. When Polge arrived at Chanel, there were a handful of perfumes at the time—No. 5, No. 19, and Cristalle—and No. 5 accounted for 80 percent of sales. “For a long time, [Chanel executives] didn’t want to do any new perfumes because they were afraid it would cannibalize No. 5,” Polge explained. But Wertheimer had different ideas. He told Polge to maintain the quality of Chanel’s existing perfumes and to develop new scents that would follow the same olfactory path. For his first creation, Coco, introduced in 1984, Polge visited Coco Chanel’s apartment in the rue Cambon headquarters. “She had died in 1971, and this was 1979, and no one had touched anything,” he remembered. “I was taken by the mix of Venetian and baroque decor. What would this decor produce?” He came up with a mix of Bois des Isles, Cuir de Russie, and sycamore—a profoundly oriental fragrance. For Coco Mademoiselle, launched in 2001, Polge revisited Coco “to see what the same ideas would produce ten years later.” The scent had evolved, like fashion. For Allure, which came out in 1996, Polge created a perfume that would be the equivalent of Chanel sportswear—something comfortable, easy to wear.
Among Polge’s chief responsibilities is to protect and nurture No. 5. “We care for No. 5 every day of the year,” he told me one winter afternoon in his office in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. “Look, there are two flacons of it here on my desk.” Indeed, among the little bottles of absolute and essence clustered on his otherwise empty desktop were two marked “No. 5.” He constantly tests it to make sure, as he puts it, “that it is always the same and always the best.”
Polge took me into the lab next to his office. It was all white, bathed in sunlight. On metal shelves above the worktables sat old-fashioned indigo blue flacons of absolutes, essences, and synthetics. Others are kept in refrigerator-like coolers originally built to store wine. He took a touche, dipped it into a flacon, and held it up to my nose. “This is the jasmine of No. 5,” he said as I inhaled. It was absolute made from Joseph Mul’s flowers. Jasmine from anywhere else, Polge explained, would change the scent of No. 5. The liquid was thick and syrupy and the color of amber. The aroma was pungent.
“What do you smell?”
“Flowers,” I said. “Rich earth, like the dirt in a kitchen garden.”
“And tea,” he added. “Do you smell the tea?”
Yes, he was right. A good strong Ceylon tea.
BACK IN THE EARLY twentieth century, “every luxury brand hired a nose like a restaurant hired a chef,” Jacques Polge said. “Poiret had a nose who later worked for Patou. Coty had a nose. Lanvin had one, who created Arpège.” Today, only a handful of perfume companies have a nose on staff. Chanel has Jacques Polge. Hermès hired Jean-Claude Ellena in 2004. Patou, which is owned by Procter & Gamble, has Jean-Michel Duriez, who took over when Kerléo retired in 1999. At Guerlain, which LVMH acquired from the family in 1994, the founder’s great-grandson Jean-Paul Guerlain retired in 2002 but still consults.
Most luxury brands today do not own, create, manufacture, or distribute their perfumes. Luxury brands such as Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein, Jil Sander, and Marc Jacobs license their names to conglomerates such as Procter & Gamble—“soap companies,” sniffed Polge—or big cosmetic firms such as Coty, Estée Lauder, and L’Oréal. (In 2005, Coty bought Unilever’s fragrance division, which included Calvin Klein, Vera Wang, and Chloé, for $800 million.) In return, the conglomerates produce, package, distribute, and market the perfume. Some designers are implicated in the perfume’s creation from the start; some arrive at the end of the creative process and simply choose the juice.
Most perfumes are created by a handful of big laboratories: Givaudan Roure in Switzerland; International Flavors & Fragrances in New York; Symrise in Holzminden, Germany; Firmenich in Switzerland; Quest International in Kent, England; Haarmann & Reimer in Germany; and Takasago in Japan. Together, they do about $20 billion a year in business, creating smells and tastes for everything from luxury brand perfumes to French fries. Givaudan Roure is the largest: in 2005, it did a staggering $2.1 billion in sales and possessed 13.2 percent of the business. Among its creations are Giorgio Beverly Hills, Calvin Klein’s Obsession, Cindy Crawford’s signature scent, and Guerlain’s new women’s fragrance Insolence. In late 2006, Givaudan stunned the fragrance industry when it acquired Quest for $2.3 billion (£1.2 billion), making it far and away the largest fragrance and flavor firm in the world, with expected combined annual revenues of approximately $3.26 billion. About 44 percent of the business—or $1.43 billion—would be in fragrance.
Givaundan’s biggest rival is International Flavors & Fragrances, a 170-year-old global conglomerate that began as a small family business producing pure drugs and essential oils and by 2005 had grown into a $2 billion business with ninety-six perfumers and sixty-seven flavorists on staff. Among its “Hall of Fame Fragrances” are Givenchy’s Organza, Lancôme’s Trésor (owned by Estée Lauder), Calvin Klein’s Eternity (owned by Unilever), Ralph Lauren’s Polo (owned by Cosmair), and Estée Lauder’s White Linen. The fragrance division of these conglomerates—which includes not only luxury perfumes but also scents for detergents, soaps, and lotions—is the most remunerative part of their business.
If a luxury brand—other than Chanel, Patou, and now Hermès—wants to launch a new perfume, the company puts together a brief that explains what it wants the perfume to achieve and invites the laboratories to compete for the assignment. Unlike luxury perfume’s golden years, when perfumers and designers used to dream up a new scent together over lunch, briefs today are written by marketing executives with polls, surveys, and sales figures as their guide. Briefs often have conceptual ideas or marketing pitches. Take Dior’s brief for Quest International to create J’adore in the late 1990s: it declared that the scent should be “sexy like a stiletto and as comfortable as a pair of Tod’s.” But generally, luxury perfume briefs all follow the same script. “Basically, it’s ‘We want something for women,’” a perfume executive told the New Yorker. “Okay, which women? ‘Women! All women! It should make them feel more feminine, but strong, and competent, but not too much, and it should work well in Europe and the U.S. and especially in the Asian market, and it should be new but it should be classic, and young women should love it, but older women should love it too.’ If it’s a French house, the brief will also say, ‘And it should be a great and uncompromised work of art,’ and if it’s an American brief it will say, ‘And it should smell like that Armani thing two years ago that did four million dollars in the first two months in Europe but also like the Givenchy that sold so well in China.’” All of this leaves Jacques Polge resigned. “I hear the briefs of brands that declare that they want to create a ‘classic,’ like No. 5,” he says with a sigh. “This is a false notion. We should try to create a perfume of its time, and perhaps it can become a classic.”
If the labs are interested, they take on the assignment and set their noses to work. Each conglomerate works on an average of ten to fifteen briefs at a time. Three weeks later, the labs present their essais to the luxury brand’s perfume executives. If the suits choose one of the proposals, they’ll initially order two or three tons of the juice. If it sells well, they’ll order more. The toughest part of the business, Polge told me, “is to beat the competition and win the brief.” No matter how wonderful the scent, a perfume only exists if it is chosen. Labs are known to recycle a scent they really believe in. They adapt their discourse to make it fit the brief and include marketing studies in the pitch that show it has strong approval ratings. Perfume companies will also buy juices they think are marketable and keep them in reserve until they find the right brand for them. L’Oréal sat on one such essai for three years until Viktor & Rolf chose it for Flowerbomb.
ON A BRIGHT MORNING in May 2006, I visited Hermès’s nose Jean-Claude Ellena at his laboratory, which
is in his 1960s contemporary home tucked in the fragrant parasol pines in the steep hills behind Grasse. Ellena is a dashing Frenchman in his late fifties, tan and fit with a flop of sandy blond hair combed back, a strong chin, bright eyes, and a wicked sense of humor. Dressed in pressed khakis and a crisp white shirt, he invited me to sit in his mod living room overlooking the forested valley and, over tea, explained to me how he makes perfume.
Today, a mere 10 percent of the ingredients used to create perfumes are natural. The remaining 90 percent are synthetic. Ellena told me, surprisingly, that this is not such a bad thing. When I asked him about the quality difference between synthetics and pure ingredients, he said, “I put natural and synthetics at the same level. They are constructive materials.”
Ellena ushered me into his lab—a small sunny room next to the living room—to make his point. He reached over to one of the two turning stainless-steel stands that hold the clear glass flacons of the 115 odors he prefers to work with. About 40 percent are natural, the remaining 60 synthetic. He opened a flacon containing a synthetic called alcohol phenylethylique, dipped a white touche into it, and handed it to me to smell. The odor was chemical and bitter. He dipped another into geraniol, put it with the first one, and I took a whiff: tea rose. He took a third touche, dipped it into ionone beta. Alone, it smelled of coconut oil, like Hawaiian Tropic sunscreen. But when Ellena put it with the other two, the overall odor was Chinese rose. “With a hint of sake,” he added. He dipped a fourth into acetate de benzyle and added it to the mix, and we had a big, full-blossomed rose like you find at the florist. “I am an illusionist,” he said with a laugh. “I make you believe.”