CHANEL Factory 5 at the Selfridges Corner Shop 

As I went out walking one fine summer afternoon, the heavens opened in an instant. All courting couples fled for shelter, and my friend Margot D. and I ducked into Selfridges to explore the CHANEL Factory 5 installation.

We’d already had a chance to examine the Factory 5 Collection: the range of limited edition No.5 products, created to celebrate the centenary of Chanel’s cornerstone perfume. This collection launched on July 5th, and we had popped into the CHANEL Covent Garden store to have a good nose at it. We were tipped off not to miss the spectacle that is the Selfridge installation. The ‘corner shop’ at Selfridges has a floor-space many times larger than CHANEL Covent Garden, and every inch of it has been fitted out to great make-it-utilitarian-but-FANCY effect.

There is something particularly decadent about CHANEL re-packaged in utilitarian shapes, and I think the proletarian slant on this perfumery collection might make some people fume (no pun intended) with rage. But me? I think it’s droll.

I also think it’s very buyable, with prices starting at £40 for things which, if you’re a N°5  fan will give you olfactive pleasure and a twist on a classic. And – if you look after the empty container with due reverence –  you will have a piece of  trés mignonne design to hand on to your descendants.

Were I not one of the ‘ExcludedUK’ (the more than three million self-employed people who received no acknowledgement or support from the British government when the Corona virus stopped their work)  I would absolutely have dug into my pocket for my bankcard.

CHANEL N°5 and Soap

And what would I have gone for? The CHANEL Factory 5 Soap in Shoe Polish Tin – (in photo above) for three reasons.

• I like the shoe polish packaging, and it would come in handy afterwards to hold mundane treasures like hair elastics or paper clips.
• I love tablets of posh soap. CHANEL could basically have wrapped this particular item up in a page torn from an old copy of Libération* and thrown it across the room at me, and I would have been delighted to spend my meagre earnings on it. The shoe polish tin packaging twist is a bonus.
• CHANEL N°5 is one of my favourite perfumes. What I treasure in N°5 – and what makes it irresistible to me – is a strong soap note. I don’t know and nor do I care if such a note is actually present in the formula. I just know that to my nose, CHANEL N°5 contains a suggestion of a hard bar of soap slithering over warm, wet skin, and so for me carries all the clean/dirty duality that bathing as an act of theatre implies. 

Chanel N°5 and My Skin

Duality is one of my favourite qualities in perfume, and I consider CHANEL N°5 to be the ultimate ‘Business up the front, party round the back’ perfume. In day to day use, N°5 is calm, elegant, and a modern-classic: it’s perfectly well-behaved in every way.

But under conditions of stress or excitement, I find that CHANEL N°5 seems to amplify itself on my skin: and as I heat up, it does too. It becomes headier, quietly insistent and gorgeously distracting.

I first discovered this effect when I was trapped in an airless room, attempting to pass an exam in spoken Irish. The hotter under the collar I became, as I attempted to remember any words of Irish other than sicín rósta, the stronger the scent of N°5 became. It was lovely! I became far more interested in this olfactory effect than in my failure to speak Irish. And with my perfume providing this helpful distraction and consequently freeing me from inhibition, some words returned to me and I was able to pass my exam. Buíochas le Dia!

CHANEL N°5 also has the same magical effect on me if I get all hot and heart-hammering when in the grip of un coup de foudre. It might do the same for you, but I can’t promise that it will. If it weren’t for the Corona regulations in place (and they are much valued by me, I don’t want us to relax restrictions whilst the Johnson Variant stalks the land) you could visit your nearest CHANEL outlet for a blast from the N°5 sample bottle and then wander out into the world and  – as they say in the Bongwater song – try and “find anyone* to have an affair with”. I doubt the effect will be there if you rub a spritzed blotter on your skin, but you could try!

You can find the CHANEL Factory 5 products at Selfridges Corner Shop until the end of July, but if you want to buy anything, get your skates on. They have limited the number of purchases to three items per person (a good and fair move: well done Selfridges) but they are selling out fast!

Footnotes on Fascism, and Flirting

* Yes, I am totally aware of the irony of linking  Mademoiselle Chanel to Libération-Sud, a newspaper that began its life as the journal of the Resistance, and that is precisely why I suggested it 🙂

I don’t like this new trend for suggesting that the CHANEL baby (the brand) gets thrown out with the bathwater of ‘only now realising’ that Gabrielle Chanel’s conduct during the war was horrible. How can you ‘only now realise’? It wasn’t a secret. Even if it weren’t documented in many places, the fact that she disappeared so fast and for so long after the war, and didn’t get a state funeral, are two big clues, surely?

Suggestions (and I’ve seen them) that the brand now be boycotted in a misguided gesture of anti-fascism are crazy. The Chanel brand – still owned by the Wertheimer family – continues to thrive despite Gabrielle Chanel’s wartime machinations against Pierre Wertheimer. I like to see this as a posthumous, karmic  smack in the eye for a woman who was a design genius, but politically vile.

** Disclaimer: obviously when I say ‘anyone’ I do expect you to use your common sense and not bat your lashes at any hopeless ne’er-do-well or clear wrong ‘un. Standards and self-preservation instincts remain important, even when conducting perfumery experiments.