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the standard
parfum
concentration, it included the strength in
eau de toilette
or
eau de cologne
–two other early 12 versions of the fragrance. The sans-serif font was drawn from contemporary 13 avant-garde design. From the very beginning, however, even as early as 1921, on the top of each stopper Coco Chanel placed her symbol, also formally trademarked in 1924: those instantly recognizable double Cs. That has been there always, and it was Coco Chanel’s original contribution.
    There are conflicting tales about where those double Cs came from, too. One is a romantic story about the glittering world of the Roaring Twenties along the Riviera. In the south of France, Coco Chanel’s friends were wealthy socialites and some of the twentieth century’s great artists, including Igor Stravinsky, who was famously besotted with her. Since she only met Stravinsky for the first time in the summer of 1921, any notion that he directly inspired the scent of Chanel No. 5 is mere romantic fantasy. One of her other friends, however, was the American heiress Irène Bretz 14 –known during the 1920s as simply
la belle Irène
–who owned a soaring, white-stuccoed wedding-cake villa in the hills above Nice called Château Crémat. According to the legend, one summer night Coco Chanel looked up at a vaulted arch at one of Irène’s famous parties and found her inspiration in a Renaissance medallion: two interlocking letter Cs. Those double Cs became from that moment her signature.
    There are, however, other stories of where the symbol came from, and according to the officials at Chanel this tale about the medallion at Château Crémat is also nothing more than a persistently fanciful legend. After all, Coco Chanel also knew well the Château Chaumont, where one could find the very same motif, a famous symbol that dated back to the sixteenth century and the days of the Medici queens. At the royal château in Blois, the symbol was carved in white in the private apartments 15 of France’s Queen Claude, who found in the initial “C” an inspiring personal motto:
candidior candidis
–the fairest of the fair. Everywhere at the royal court and on the jousting fields, Cs blazoned forth, in homage to her. A generation later, Catherine de Medici became the next queen to live in those chambers, and she sensibly–and more famously–adopted the symbol and the motto as her signature as well.
    For Coco Chanel, nothing could have been more fitting. An ancient Renaissance perfume recipe used by the scent-obsessed Medici queens set her on the path that led to Chanel No. 5. The coincidence seemed almost destined. Because the initials for “Coco Chanel” weren’t the only inspiration she found in the iconography of two Cs, eternally embracing. It was also the symbol of those two last names that were never united: Chanel and Capel.
    When we think of Chanel No. 5 today, what comes to mind above all is the bottle. It’s the part of the product for most of us that is immediately iconic. In fact, it’s one of the curiosities of its history that far fewer people are able to identify the perfume by its scent alone–a strange state of things for a legendary fragrance. Our familiarity with the bottle of Chanel No. 5 certainly can’t hurt those staggering sales figures, but it was never the reason this perfume became world famous. If we are looking for the answer to Chanel No. 5's mythical success in marketing, we will have to look deeper.
    W hat is boggling, considering the marketing of the perfume in the 1920s and the selection of its original bottle, is that Chanel No. 5 ever became iconic at all. That first sales catalog in 1924 laid out the marketing strategy at Les Parfums Chanel precisely, and, while the simplicity of the bottle was always part of the conception, the focus was on the luxurious singularity of the perfumes.
    Perfumes plural.
    Because there is one bewildering