For a few weeks around the turn of the year 2022, CHANEL invited Paris to a show about perfume. Le Grand Numéro de CHANEL ran from 15 December 2022 to 9 January 2023 at the Grand Palais Éphémère on the Place Joffre, with free admission, and led visitors on an olfactory journey through a sequence of rooms. The staging closed long ago, but it remains one of the clearest portraits the house has drawn of its own perfumery, and the ideal way into its story.
The tone was set at the entrance: giant white doors edged with black piping, and a Monsieur Loyal, the ringmaster of the French circus, as guide. Behind them opened a monumental square under a glittering sky of symbols, with bottle silhouettes larger than life. The first room carried the house’s creed. CHANEL perfumery does not build on a single ingredient, but on something harder to pin down: an idea, a style. Thomas du Pré de Saint Maur, Director of Creative Resources for Fragrance and Beauty and for Watches and Fine Jewellery, put it plainly: “CHANEL perfumery has an existential ambition.”
1921: the birth of N°5
The heart of the visit was a journey back to 1921. With virtual reality, visitors stepped into the role of Ernest Beaux, to whom Gabrielle Chanel had put a remarkable request: an artificial perfume, made like a dress. She chose the fifth sample and named the perfume after its number; she also presented her collections on the fifth day of the fifth month.
“Gabrielle Chanel does not choose this new perfume, she recognises it,” says Hélène Fulgence, Director of CHANEL Heritage. With N°5, Gabrielle Chanel became the first couturière to give a perfume her own name. Ernest Beaux went on to found the Laboratoire des Parfums de CHANEL, where three perfumers have followed him, and the house owns all of his formulas.
The bottle belongs to the legend as well: a plain flacon of fine, transparent glass that became the model for every CHANEL bottle after it and has been exhibited at MoMA. The first face of N°5, in 1937, was Gabrielle Chanel herself; Marilyn Monroe, Catherine Deneuve and Carole Bouquet followed. N°5 has also inspired artists such as Salvador Dalí, Oskar Schlemmer, Andy Warhol, Laurie Simmons and Burton Morris, and thirty exceptional works of art inspired by it were on show in Paris.
CHANCE, BLEU DE CHANEL and COCO MADEMOISELLE
From there the route turned theatrical. One room recreated the mood of a backstage and a cabaret, a nod to the young Gabrielle Chanel, who sang on stage in Moulins around 1901 and became “Coco” there. A wheel of fortune handed out real gifts and introduced the four faces of CHANCE.
BLEU DE CHANEL lived in a blue city at dusk, where lit windows told stories and clues led to a private speakeasy playing jazz and blues. COCO MADEMOISELLE, finally, belonged to a world of chess, in which visitors followed the trail of a mysterious seductress across the board.
LES EXCLUSIFS DE CHANEL: eighteen characters
The collection for connoisseurs had a room of its own. In a vernissage of moving works, eighteen characters stood for the eighteen LES EXCLUSIFS DE CHANEL, and an olfactory Rorschach test helped each visitor find an alter ego among them. It matches a line from Olivier Polge, Perfumer-Creator of the House of CHANEL: “Perfume expresses our personality, just like the clothes we wear or the way we speak and move.”
What remains
Le Grand Numéro is long over, yet its premise still helps anyone standing in front of a CHANEL counter: these perfumes are less a list of notes than a cast of characters, each with its own story. And of N°5, Thomas du Pré de Saint Maur says simply: “N°5 is the French spirit par excellence.”
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