I am N°5, an abstract perfume by Gabrielle Chanel, which she created in 1921 with Ernest Beaux, perfumer to the tsars.
I am a revolution, a defining new departure in the world of perfumery, which at a stroke made all the fashionable fragrances of the period seem old hat.
Gabrielle Chanel came up with a perfume like no one had ever before imagined.
I am the avant-garde, emerging at the same time as cubism, Dadaism, and surrealism.
I am their olfactory counterpart, and like them, I break the codes; like them, I write a new language and invent a collage of scents.
I am the first abstract perfume.
I am a manifesto, that of modernity, a dazzling bouquet.
Mademoiselle boosted the jasmine, the ylang-ylang, and the rose, yet no single identifiable note is left in my wake.
Thanks to the magical alchemy of the aldehydes, I throw people off the scent, not evoking any one flower, to become "a woman's fragrance with a woman's scent".
I am a mystery, the best-known yet most enigmatic of perfumes.