CHANEL celebrates the year 1957 through a new eau de parfum in the collection EXCLUSIFS DE CHANEL, created by house perfumer Olivier Polge. 1957: the year of the American consecration for Gabrielle Chanel, but also 19, as her birth day, and 57, as the number of the street that hosts the largest CHANEL store in the United States. A creation that throws an olfactory bridge between France and America, with that iconic look as a point of meeting.
CHANEL and the United States: a love story
The love story between CHANEL and America begins with a fashion story. The hats of the young milliner are distributed in department stores in New York, and the press is racing for the avant-garde style of the designer: from their appearance in 1914, the Women’s Wear Daily predicts a great future for the famous sweaters created in Deauville, and the sketches of CHANEL bloom in the pages from Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar or Vanity Fair each season.
And then, of course, there is perfume. France discovered N ° 5 in 1921, and the Americans three years later, at the same time as the first make-up collection launched in 1924. “Americans buy all the luxury, and the first luxury is perfume “: Gabrielle Chanel’s intuition is, once again, the right one. In 1928, Vogue US slips into the beauty salon of the department store Jay-Thorpe, there meets a hostess trained in Paris by CHANEL who, in addition to caring with the products of the House, accompanies women in the choice of their perfume, “one of the most difficult things in the world when you have tried three or four“. The name CHANEL is on everyone’s lips, her style on all silhouettes. Her iconic little black dress was celebrated by American Vogue in October 1926. By renaming the Chanel model “Ford dress”, in a nod to the Ford T, the car that the country has been in love with since 1908, the magazine brings the little black dress in the history of fashion.
Profile portrait of French fashion designer Coco Chanel (1883 – 1971), 1920s. (Photo by Berenice Abbott/Getty Images)
Gabrielle Chanel takes on the United States
It’s in 1931 that Gabrielle Chanel travels to the States, as requested by Samuel Goldwyn to dress the the MGM actresses. Happy to finally discover the United States on this occasion, the designer first stops in New York with Misia Sert, where she is received with great fanfare. And when they return from California, the two friends visit Chicago and San Francisco before returning to New York. The trip lasts a month, and the American press takes the opportunity to finally try to unlock the secrets of Gabrielle Chanel, a businesswoman ahead of her time, that nothing seems to stop. From the New York Times to the New York Herald Tribune, to The New Yorker, Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, Coco is everywhere. Each of her outfits is observed with a magnifying glass, her pearl necklaces and her look arouse admiration. Now, in America, CHANEL embodies French elegance, is synonymous with fashion, the one that must be followed imperatively. If she then stays in the United States with her friends or photographers like Horst P. Horst, Gabrielle Chanel makes her comeback in 1957.
1957
That year, Stanley Marcus celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of his eponymous department store. Three hundred fashion designers are invited, but only one is welcomed as a star: arriving by the first foreign plane to ever land at Dallas Love Field Airport, Gabrielle Chanel rides in the only white Rolls Royce of the procession. Its destination? The podium on which she receives the Neiman Marcus Award for Distinguished Service in the Field of Fashion, thus declaring her as the most influential fashion designer of the twentieth century. Later in 1959, the love story between CHANEL and America is tightened again thanks to the world of arts: the Museum of Modern Art in New York exposes the packaging of the n°5 perfume bottle, presented as an example of minimalist elegance. Later Andy Warhol will reinterpret it. The musical Coco pays tribute to her in Broadway in 1969: Katharine Hepburn will play the designer for more than 300 performances.
A meaningful fragrance
As CHANEL reopens its New York boutique on 57th street, the House celebrates the year 1957 with a new Eau de Parfum in LES EXCLUSIFS DE CHANEL collection. 1957: the year of the American consecration for Gabrielle Chanel, but also 19, as her birth day, and 57, as the number of the street that hosts the largest CHANEL store in the United States. A creation that throws an olfactory bridge between France and America.