The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

particular flower. She wanted it to smell like “a bouquet of abstract
flowers,” something pleasant but completely novel. More than any
other perfume, it would smell different on each woman. To take this
further, she decided to give it a most unusual name. Perfumes of the
time had very poetic, romantic titles. Instead, she would name it after
herself, attaching a simple number, Chanel No. 5, as if it were a
scientific concoction. She packaged the perfume in a sleek modernist

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bottle and added to the label her new logo of interlocking C’s. It looked
like nothing else out there.
To launch the perfume, she decided upon a subliminal campaign.
She began by spraying the scent everywhere in her store in Paris. It
filled the air. Women kept asking what it was and she would feign
ignorance. She would then slip bottles of the perfume, without labels,
into the bags of her wealthiest and best-connected clients. Soon
women began to talk of this strange new scent, rather haunting and
impossible to identify as any known flower. The word of yet another
Chanel creation began to spread like wildfire and women were soon
showing up at her store begging to buy the new scent, which she now
began to place discreetly on shelves. In the first few weeks they could
not stock enough. Nothing like this had ever happened in the industry,
and it would go on to become the most successful perfume in history,
making her a fortune.
Over the next two decades the house of Chanel reigned supreme in
the fashion world, but during World War II she flirted with Nazism,
staying in Paris during the Nazi occupation and visibly siding with the
occupiers. She had closed her store at the beginning of the war, and by
the end of the war she had been thoroughly disgraced in the eyes of the
French by her political sympathies. Aware and perhaps ashamed, she
fled to Switzerland, where she would remain in self-imposed exile. By
1953, however, she felt the need not only for a comeback but for
something even greater. Although she was now seventy, she had
become disgusted at the latest trends in fashion, which she felt had
returned to the old constrictions and fussiness of women’s clothing
that she had sought to destroy. Perhaps this also signaled a return to a
more subservient role for women. To Chanel it would be the ultimate
challenge—after some fourteen years out of business, she was now
largely forgotten. No one thought of her anymore as a trendsetter. She
would have to start almost completely over.
Her first move was to encourage rumors that she was planning a
return, but she gave no interviews. She wanted to stimulate talk and
excitement but surround herself with mystery. Her new show debuted
in 1954, and an enormous crowd filled her store to watch it, mostly out
of curiosity. Almost immediately there was a sense of disappointment.
The clothes were mostly a rehash of her 1930s styles with a few new
touches. The models were all Chanel look-alikes and mimicked her way
of walking. To the audience, Chanel seemed a woman hopelessly

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locked in a past that would never return. The clothes seemed passé and
the press pilloried her, dredging up at the same time her Nazi
associations during the war.
For almost any designer this would have been a devastating blow,
but she appeared remarkably unfazed by it all. As always, she had a
plan and she knew better. She had decided well before the debut in
Paris that the United States was to be the target of this new line of
clothes. American women reflected her sensibility best of all—athletic,
into ease of movement and unfussy silhouettes, eminently practical.
And they had more money to spend than anyone else in the world.
Sure enough, the new line created a sensation in the States. Soon the
French began to tone down their criticisms. Within a year of her return
she had reestablished herself as the most important designer in the
world, and fashions now returned to the simpler and more classical
shapes she had always promoted. When Jacqueline Kennedy began to
wear her suits in many of her public appearances, it was the most
apparent symbol of the power Chanel had reclaimed.
As she resumed her place at the top, she revealed another practice
that was so against the times and the industry. Piracy was a great
problem in fashion, as knockoffs of established designs would appear
all over the world after a show. Designers carefully guarded all of their
secrets and fought through the courts any form of imitation. Chanel
did the opposite. She welcomed all sorts of people into her shows and
allowed them to take photographs. She knew this would only
encourage the many people who made a living out of creating cheap
versions of her clothes, but she wanted this. She even invited wealthy
women to bring along their seamstresses, who would make sketches of
the designs and then create replicas of them. More than making
money, what she wanted most of all was to spread her fashions
everywhere, to feel herself and her work to be objects of desire by
women of all classes and nations. It would be the ultimate revenge for
the girl who had grown up ignored, unloved, and shunned. She would
clothe millions of women; her look, her imprint would be seen
everywhere—as indeed it was a few years after her comeback.
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