Chanel

Gabrielle Chanel was born in 1883 in a poorhouse in Saumur, France, and spent her early years in an orphanage where the nuns taught her to sew. She built her fashion business in the 1910s from a millinery shop in Deauville, became the defining couture designer of the 1920s, and decided in 1921 that her clientele needed a fragrance to match. She hired Ernest Beaux, the Russian-French perfumer who had worked for the Romanov court, and asked him for something modern. Beaux developed ten sample compositions and presented them numbered. Chanel selected the fifth — and the rest, as the saying goes, is history. Coco Chanel died in 1971 at the Hotel Ritz in Paris.

Chanel No. 5 launched on the fifth day of the fifth month — 5 May 1921 — to mark Coco Chanel's lucky number. Other landmark releases followed: No. 22 (1922), Cuir de Russie (1924), Bois des Iles (1926), No. 19 (1971), Coco (1984), Chance (2003), Coco Mademoiselle (2001), and Bleu de Chanel (2010). Marilyn Monroe famously told Life Magazine in 1952 that she wore nothing to bed but Chanel No. 5 — a quote that ran the brand's marketing for the next seventy years. Chanel acquired Bourgeois Holding in 1924, retained the perfumer Henri Robert (uncle of Guy Robert who created Amouage Gold), and developed in-house perfumer roles that today produce its current head perfumer Olivier Polge.