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stopper, however, has changed more dramatically. In fact, it’s the variations in the stoppers that experts use to date bottles of vintage Chanel No. 5 perfume. In 1921, when Coco Chanel first launched Chanel No. 5 from her boutiques to her admiring clients, the top was nothing more than a small, utilitarian square glass plug. Although the Charvet boutique was just a stone’s throw from Paris’s ritzy Place Vendôme, the original flask didn’t yet have that familiar faceted large stopper 10 that some people insist was inspired by the monument in the center of that famously chic square. The signature octagonal stopper was also added in 1924, when Les Parfums Chanel redesigned the bottle. Since then, there have been only three other alterations. In the 1950s, the bevel-cut stopper was made thicker and larger. In the 1970s, it was made even bigger. The last change was in 1986, when the size of the stopper was scaled back to balance the proportions.
    There is another small controversy about the origins of the famous Chanel No. 5 bottle, however, and it’s a story that suggests that the updated flacon in 1924 might have come with some hard feelings. The original flask for Chanel No. 5 hadn’t ever been entirely original. But some fragrance historians suspect that the changes to the bottle in 1924 also had their inspiration in the bottle for another perfume–a perfume that was already intimately entangled with the story of Chanel No. 5.
    At Chiris, Ernest Beaux had a former colleague by the name of Jean Helleu. Helleu was an accomplished painter who, because of his keen sense of aesthetics, was highly sought after as a designer of fragrance packaging. Some of his earliest designs were for Coty. But he had also worked for Chiris designing bottles in 1923, when–after the success of Chanel No. 5 and Ernest Beaux’s departure–Rallet No. 1 was being relaunched in the French market. This is where the controversy comes in: experts have uncovered at least one rare example of Rallet No. 1 11 packaged in a bottle that is immediately recognizable. In fact, it is iconic. It is the same bottle as the 1924 Chanel No. 5 flacon. Precisely.
    Who designed that Rallet No. 1 bottle? And what was the direction of the influence? It’s all a mystery of chronology. Jean Helleu–and his son Jacques after him–went on to spend distinguished careers working for Chanel, but according to the company archives there is no evidence of Jean Helleu having worked for the house before 1930. Meanwhile, the surviving Rallet No. 1 bottle, produced for export to the American market, is impossible to date precisely. Either way, though, the undercurrent was electric. If the 1924 updates to the Chanel No. 5 bottle were borrowed from the design for the 1923 Rallet No. 1 relaunch, then it’s difficult to imagine that the businessmen at Chiris–François Coty already among them–were anything but furious. Using a formula developed at Rallet was one thing. Packaging the new perfume in the same bottle as the predecessor must have seemed outrageous.
    More likely, it happened the other way and Rallet No. 1 was packaged in the “Chanel No. 5” bottle after 1924 in order to capitalize on its obvious success. But designing the Rallet No. 1 packaging to imitate deliberately the Chanel No. 5 bottle was still a pointed kind of irony. Only a small group of people knew or suspected the connections between those two scents until the 1990s, and, if that’s the case, then someone had a sharp sense of humor–someone who also knew the entangled history of those two fragrances and didn’t mind advertising it.
    Either way, the 1924 Chanel No. 5 bottle, of course, went on to become iconic. So did the distinctive small, white label that the company still uses, with its famous typeface. For the relaunch of the Chanel No. 5 flacon, the tag read simply “N°5–Chanel–Paris,” and, when not in