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thing about the first sales catalog: nowhere does it single out Chanel No. 5 for any particular attention. In fact, the scent that Coco Chanel had turned into a boutique bestseller was jumbled together with a whole new line of Chanel-labeled perfumes, all sold in precisely the same bottle–and nearly all of them had numbers.
    In 1924, with the creation of Les Parfums Chanel, Chanel No. 5 went from being
the
Chanel perfume to one among many. In the first sales catalog, there were almost a dozen perfumes for sale. Some of those new fragrances, oddly, were very traditional, old-fashioned scents like Rose. They were precisely the kind of girlish soliflores that Coco Chanel had been renouncing. This mixture of old and new wasn’t the most surprising thing, though. It was that suddenly Chanel No. 5 had plenty of competition–and it was of the partners’ own making.
    If Les Parfums Chanel were looking to create an international brand identity for Chanel No. 5, it is difficult to imagine a more curious marketing strategy. They advertised for sale that year a host of fragrances, including extracts Chanel No. 1, Chanel No. 2, Chanel No. 5, Chanel No. 7, Chanel No. 11, Chanel No. 14, Chanel No. 20, Chanel No. 21, Chanel No. 22, and Chanel No. 27, along with Rose, Chypre, and Ambre. All were packaged in identical fashion. In decades to come, they would add to the litany of perfumes Chanel No. 9, Chanel No. 18, Chanel No. 19, Chanel No. 46, and Chanel No. 55.
    There were so many numbered Chanel perfumes that, by the 1930s, the American chronicler of the Jazz Age, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, could write of the character of Nicole, in his masterpiece
Tender Is the Night
(1934) 16 , that
    She bathed and anointed herself and covered her body with a layer of powder, while her toes crunched another pile on a bath towel. She looked microscopically at the lines of her flanks, wondering how soon the fine, slim edifice would begin to sink squat and earthward. … She put on the first ankle-length day dress that she had owned for many years, and crossed herself reverently with Chanel Sixteen.
    He could rely on his readers to get the joke. Chanel No. 16 was almost the only one that never really existed.
    Part of the great puzzle of Chanel No. 5 is why, among all these numbers, it became the only perfume we all remember. Some of those early numbered perfumes were lovely fragrances in their own right–one or two even rivaled for a short time the success of Coco Chanel’s original. Yet most of the early ones have since disappeared completely, and no one even knows any longer what some of the first scents–especially the mysterious and very popular Chanel No. 55–might have smelled like. Yet, even in the 1920s, it already seemed that Chanel No. 5 was marked for some special sort of future. Consumers were poised to make Chanel No. 5 the world’s most famous perfume. It happened despite a decade of what should have been a modern marketing disaster.

SEVENTEEN
THE ART OF BUSINESS
    A product like Chanel No. 5 always had a problem. The balance between being an elite cultural icon and an object of mass-market appeal is a delicate business. Luxury demands exclusivity. For other twentieth-century commercial icons–Coca-Cola or McDonald’s, for example–things were inherently simpler. They made their fame as everyday products in which there could be a communal rite of participation, and more people buying what they were selling didn’t run the risk of contaminating their popularity.
    When Andy Warhol began creating his pop art lithographs in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this was part of the cultural moment to which he was responding. The whole idea behind pop art was to use mass-cultural imagery playfully 1 and to reduce objects to the disembodied circulation of images and surfaces. “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art 2 ,” as he once put it, and his work played with