Coco Chanel

AT 31, rue Cambon, near the Place de la Concorde and on the third floor above the Chanel store, there is an apartment with exquisite 17th-century Chinese wooden screens, no kitchen and no bedroom. Jacques Polge is the Chanel perfumer, and he knows the apartment well because it belonged to the woman everyone at Chanel refers to as “Mademoiselle.”

Owen Franken for The New York Times

Jacques Polge, the Chanel perfumer based his new collection on the places she lived in and the objects she loved.

Coco Chanel slept and ate at the Ritz, but she entertained here. (Dinner was brought in by servants.) On one of Mr. Polge’s visits, while the apartment was closed and off limits to all but the most trusted insiders, he noticed the screens. That was years ago, however, and that is getting ahead of the story.

Since 1978, Mr. Polge has exercised a unique power in the industry. He alone both curates and guards the work of his two (only two) Chanel perfumer predecessors, Ernest Beaux and Henri Robert. He also invents new Chanel perfumes.

His latest project was inspired in a roundabout way by his first encounter with Chanel’s apartment.

“I was new at Chanel, and I was very surprised by this décor,” he said. He was impressed by the rich and detailed silver and gold boxes, luxurious Art Deco furniture and leather-bound books, which stood out against the apartment’s celadon walls.

“I said, ‘What’s that, and what’s this?’ ” Mr. Polge said. “I was thinking, ‘I wonder how these objects are represented in her perfumes,’ not only the ones that still existed but also those that were no longer sold.”

On Feb. 12, Mr. Polge tried to answer the questions he posed to himself at 31, rue Cambon with the release of a collection of 10 perfumes called Les Exclusifs. There will be no marketing and no ads, and the perfumes will be sold only in Chanel boutiques and at Bergdorf Goodman, in 200-milliliter spray bottles of eau de toilette, an unusually large size. Each will cost $175.

With the collection Mr. Polge restores four Chanel fragrances that had disappeared: Chanel No. 22 (from 1922), which Mr. Beaux created the year after he created No. 5. The other three Chanel perfumes are also from the ’20s: the rich leather Cuir de Russie, the green floral Gardénia and the spicy Bois des Îles.

To complement them he has created six new Chanel perfumes, almost doubling the number of post-World War II Chanels “in print.” (Among those are Coco, Coco Mademoiselle and No. 19.)

In the scent business the collection is regarded as an audacious move. “A 10-perfume collection is a huge number,” said Alain Lorenzo, the president of Parfums Givenchy France. “Perhaps they felt a single perfume wouldn’t make an impact.”

But if Mr. Lorenzo expresses surprise (“Chanel has traditionally exercised more restraint in their launches”), he adds that, correctly managed, Les Exclusifs make strategic sense.

Mr. Lorenzo said, “A lot of traditional players — like us — are worried” by mass market perfumers, “who churn things out all the time with no content and no beauty but commercial appeal for a short-term win.”

“For the high-end players who believe in luxury and scarcity and real design and a perfumery about creative fragrances that will surprise people, this could work well,” he said. “There’s an element of rarity and high end in their proposition."

Kate Greene, the vice president for marketing fine fragrances in North America at Givaudan, said that 800 new fragrances are expected to make their appearance in 2007. Yet Chanel’s collection, she said, is “great for that part of the industry in search of innovation.”

All six of Mr. Polge’s new Les Exclusifs represent ideas that fascinated him.

“What interested me intellectually,” he said of one, "was to create a chypre,” a family of fragrances, “that characterizes a certain elegance, but to challenge myself to do it without the traditional chypre oak moss.” He took a journey through the patrimony of Chanel: the places she went, the houses she lived in and the objects she loved.

And because he had been so struck by the elegance of her apartment he named his elegant modernized chypre after it: 31, rue Cambon.

By Chandler Burr, Source: The New York Times