The Secret of Chanel No. 5 Read Free Page A

of his way to visit Ernest Beaux in January of 1922 at his laboratory. Chanel No. 5, Beaux remembered, “was already a remarkable success 4 … and it was the time of the Conférence de Cannes and the factory at La Bocca was the kind of thing that attracted distinguished visitors.” One day, Sem was among them. The caricaturist was quite taken with the beauty of the perfume, declaring in a witty punch line that Ernest Beaux was the new “Ministre de la Narine"–the “nostril minister” of France. He was willing to give Coco Chanel some credit, too. But he drew the line at flattering her personally.

    Tribute to the perfume Chanel No. 5 by the cartoonist Sem in 1921.
    The reason that the flapper couldn’t possibly be Coco is simple. The caricature doesn’t look like her, and, without a doubt, Sem knew perfectly well how to make Coco Chanel immediately recognizable to anyone who saw his satires. He had been doing it already for years. In fact, just two years later, in 1923, when it was clear that Chanel No. 5 was on its way to becoming a cultural institution, he published a wickedly clever cartoon that was devastatingly direct in its message. It was his second “tribute” to Chanel No. 5. This time, no one confused it with paid promotion.
    This next Sem image was a message about Chanel No. 5 and Coco Chanel’s illegitimate sexuality–and about the kind of “reputation” both had in the 1920s. It is only the second time in history that the perfume appeared in the world of print. For that reason, at least, it is a milestone in the history of this fragrance. It was also an image that would inevitably have consequences for how Coco Chanel would think about her signature scent.
    The picture in this caricature is a scene in Coco Chanel’s atelier, and it was a stark reminder to the French public of facts that Coco was keen to forget: that she started her career as a cabaret singer and was clearly
nouveau riche.
In it, the designer–this time clearly recognizable–is lounging on a divan, while a fashionable client is having an evening gown fitted by a kneeling seamstress. It is a seamstress who was likely, in this strange, new world, to have once been a princess. Everyone knew that, by the 1920s, Coco Chanel–who began life as a peasant–was employing those unlucky exiled Russian aristocrats to sew in her workshops. It all takes place inside the silhouette of that square-cut modernist bottle.
    If the image wasn’t enough of a jab, the words written below the caricature are an even more barbed little bit of humor. They are the lyrics of a song, written in imitation of the flirtatious old dance-hall tune “Ko Ko Ri Ko” that earned the young Coco Chanel her nickname. They read:

    The atelier of Coco Chanel by the cartoonist Sem in 1923.
    I declare quite shamelessly,
There is nothing less coco,
Than a design by Coco
Perfumed with eau de Coco
De Coco, de Cocologne.
    Her low-class social origins and history as a showgirl were no longer something Coco Chanel wanted to advertise. The entire thrust of the caricature, however, was at the expense of her peasant upbringing.
    In fact, the last line–a reference to Coco’s famous
Cocologne
–has another joke buried in it: a reference to the legendary land of Cockaigne (in French, the
pays de Cocagne),
the mythical land of luxury and ease 5 , the workingman or workingwoman’s dream, where everything in the real world is turned topsy-turvy. Here, peasants are kings and nuns take lovers. In this astonishing “New World"–the title of the collection in which this caricature was published–poor convent schoolgirls turned
demi-mondaine
mistresses luxuriate in riches and splendor, while a princess labors on her knees.
    For Coco Chanel, this image can only have been painful. While being caricatured was a mark that she had arrived in high society and had achieved a kind of chic celebrity,