The Art Inspired by Chanel No.5

Forget Warhol’s soup cans, Chanel No.5 is contemporary art’s drop du jour.

If art imitates life and life imitates art, then the answer to the meaning of it, the universe and everything is not 42, as was suggested by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but 5. As in No.5. That’s Chanel No.5.

Pablo Picasso once said “a picture lives by its legend, not by anything else”. Chanel No.5 is the gold standard, the gilt-edged prism through which we look at ourselves and the swirls of our 20th and 21st-century culture, its ivory towers, its romance, war, betrayal, liberation, its beauty, its promise, its Pop, its post-Pop, and it’s never anything less than eyes making love as they never dare to do again, Chanel No.5 insights our lifetimes. And if No.5 has increasingly become the de facto collector’s piece of street art and gallery art, then it should come as no surprise. It shares roots with the art movement Dada. Yet unlike Dada, in which audience expectations – and even those of its artists – outpaced the movement’s capacity to deliver, Chanel No.5 was so far in advance we’re all still playing catch-up.  

To understand the weight and breadth of the amber elixir’s provenance, it’s instructive first to understand Dada and the sentiment swirling through the air of change post-World War I. The Dada movement, christened by Tristan Tzara (a close friend of Chanel’s along with fellow Dadain, Francis Picabia), quickly became thought of as art that wasn’t art, or as Marcel Duchamp put it, “anti-art”.

In other words, Dada seemed to represent the opposite of everything art stood for. And from a Dadaist perspective, modern art and culture were considered a type of fetishisation, where the objects of consumption are chosen, much like a preference for Victoria sponge, or mango pudding, to fill a void. 

Consider this from Tzara, in the Dada Manifesto (1918). In the work: To Make a Dadaist Poem, he writes, with the below line spacing: 

Take a newspaper 

Take some scissors

Choose from this paper an article of the length you
want to make your poem. 

Cut out the article. 

Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up
this article and put them all in a bag. 

Shake gently. 

Next take out each cutting one after the other. 

Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag. 

The poem will resemble you. 

And there you are – an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

On one level, this is almost exactly as Gabriele Chanel and her Russian perfumer Ernest Beaux conjured in 1921. 

At the turn of the century, the fashion was for heady mono-floral fragrances such as Iris, cypress, gardenia and rose dubbed with pompous names: Suave Orient, Spellbound or Virginity. But Beaux woke Chanel to a revelation called aldehydes, powerful but unstable synthetic molecules that exalt aromatic scents. And the result was a bag full (or a bottle full) of revolutionary tricks. No fewer than 80 ingredients went into the composition of No.5, to which Gabrielle added capacious bundles of jasmine, in turn, intensified by the aldehydes. If Dada was pioneering non-art, No.5 was an olfactory pas de deux, the new era of “non-perfume” perfume. “A natural fragrance can only be the fruit of an elaboration, a construction of the mind,” Chanel said. And just as the Dada poem resembled you, No.5, the perfume, perfectly resembled the paradox of Gabrielle Chanel; she’d deduced that, in order to give off a natural scent, a perfume had to be man-made.

So on the one hand, the complexity of the No.5 fragrance set it apart from its fusty peers, but there was also another masterstroke: the stunning simplicity of the name, the radical graphic design of sans serif typography and the clinical elegance of the minimalist bottle (which joined the New York Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection in 1959 and from which Andy Warhol made nine screen prints in 1964). Chanel’s designs entered into dialogue with art itself. Naming a perfume by a matriculation number was genius. And the sobriety of the design lent it guaranteed lasting appeal. And that came straight from Dada. See the small paper texts signed by Tzara and his fellow Dadaists as part of their oeuvre, one Chanel knew well. And while the aldehydes have kept No.5 robustly artificial and anti-perfume, the bottle has been refined to reflect the times it’s seduced us through. 

Yet Dada rose and fell swiftly, over a roughly seven-year period. Or at least it splintered into various groups of modernism such as Expressionism, Cubism and surrealism 100 years ago. And No.5? The first abstract perfume, that manifesto of modernity. It hasn’t lost a drop (or the four Marilyn Monroe wore in bed) of its power as a trip to any art gallery in a capital city is a salient reminder.

Take London. What possessed an artist like Bambi (the female Banksy) based in North London (Islington, Shoreditch, Canonbury, Hoxton and more), to paint Chanel No.5 Quartet for a private client this year, which Prestige is revealing for the first time on these pages? Why? “Everyone loves brands,” Bambi tells us over the telephone. “But, Chanel No.5 somehow goes beyond that. It’s a kind of liquid infinity, and to paint it, or photograph it, or just to ‘art’ it and be near it is …” She pauses with awe. “It’s regal and rebellious, it’s a kind of ‘rogue-vogue’, like every queen, king and knave craves the 5. And it’s so classic and contemporary and timeless. The way Dada was non-art or anti-art, No.5 is anti-beauty. The name, the label, it still looks today so ‘avant-avant garde’, it’s a pre-and-post-punk potion, and it’s still… the future. It’s still ahead.” Coming from an artist already so advanced, that’s quite the compliment.  

Stroll into other London galleries, such as Clarendon or Maddox or Rose, and you’ll stumble across Mr Brainwash sampling a No.5 bottle, Nick Veasey X-raying one, Debra Franses’ artbags in plastic,
a future time capsule for the Anthropocene age, which she’s shown at Shanghai’s IFC, or Craig Alan’s Populus No.5s consisting of lines and rows of tiny figures making up the geometry of the hip-flask-esque vial; or David Arnott’s porcelain tiles in indigo and violet depicting No.5, or US photographer and former skater Tyler Shields, at Sotheby’s, whose totemic work Champagne Chanel No.5, shows a woman’s mouth in close-up drinking No.5 through a straw. It’s full-circle fetishism. Franses relates. “Yes, my No.5 bags are sculptures; like an arrangement of objects juxtaposed together to create a meta narrative of both consumption, memory, luxury and the spirit of a woman.”

Every person alive craves Chanel No.5. And to wear it is an art.