Grain de Musc turns 5 today

Five years ago, on the fifth day of the fifth month, I published my first post for Grain de Musc (to read, click here). I didn’t know it at the time, but the 5^th of May is a highly symbolic date in the history of perfume: it is because her fashion show was to be held that day in 1921 that Chanel is said to have kept N°5 as the name for her first fragrance. Oddly, it was Chanel N°5 that inspired that first post. Or rather, a blotter dipped one month earlier in a 40 year old bottle of N°5, still fragrant with musk… which was the last-minute inspiration for the name Grain de Musc.

So much of what my life is today grew out of that little grain of musk. The things I’ve learned. The friends I’ve found. Thank you for having been here these past five years!

Somehow, it seemed fitting that I should be invited to the N°5 Culture Chanel exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo two days before this fifth anniversary. Especially since Chanel is what kicked off my perfume writing even before the blog: my very first article about the theme, commissioned by the contemporary art magazine Particules, was about the Exclusives and the way they fractalized Chanel’s heritage. The first perfumer I met, as a result of this article, was Jacques Polge. 

My first blog post, Musk, the Phantom of perfumery, was about a ghostly presence. There is also a hint of the phantom in N°5 Culture Chanel since for the curator Jean-Louis Froment, the fragrance is haunted by the reminiscence of Chanel’s great lost love, Boy Capel. If Chanel created perfume, he believes, it was as a way to summon the presence of the love she'd lost (though he admits it's just his own, romantic vision of the story). When he told me that perfume was a way of conjuring the presence of the absent, I replied that perfume is also the future memory of what you’re living now, a phrase he said he’d totally steal.

Like the most powerful cultural artifacts – and like perfume, the only form of adornment that penetrates into our very body – Chanel N°5 can also weave itself into individual lives. Being at this exhibition brought together several strands of mine. The Palais de Tokyo, an institution devoted to cutting-edge contemporary art exhibitions, was co-founded by Jérôme Sens and Nicolas Bourriaud, who's been a friend for many years. Nicolas first introduced his relational aesthetics, a notion I think would be much more operational to apply to fragrances than shoehorning them into traditional art history categories, in the catalogue of Traffic, a seminal exhibition he co-curated in 1996 with Jérôme at the CAPC in Bordeaux, an institution founded by none other than… Jean-Louis Froment.

The number 5 is also part of my story in another way. It was by bringing back the 5th mod of Séville à l'aube months after we'd rejected it that the fragrance took the direction that would lead it to its final form, and that I asserted myself a creative partner for Bertrand Duchaufour... Was Coco watching over me? In perfume, it's always, at some point, about magical thinking...

I will get back to N°5 Culture Chanel in the next post. Meanwhile, to celebrate the 5^th birthday of Grain de Musc, I’d like to do a prize draw. I’d have loved for it to be a bottle of Séville à l’aube, but postal regulations have become too stringent for me to take the risk of sending a full bottle overseas. So I’ll have to stick to a draw for an inscribed copy of The Perfume Lover along with a sample of the scent.

If you’d like to be in the draw, please leave a comment to tell me which Grain de Musc post(s) struck you most. I’ll compile a list of them in a new post with the links, as a sort of “anthology”. The draw will close on Sunday May 12^th at midnight, Paris time. I will announce the winner on Monday May 13^th.

Illustration: Charles Demuth, I saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928)