A look back at the lovely ladies that graced Chanel No. 5 print ads through the years.
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- Coco Chanel, 1937
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- Lauren Hutton, 1968
Tags : Chanel
Archive for April, 2009
Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. France
Audrey Tautou, the new face of No. 5, gets into character for Coco Avant Chanel
A woman with glossy cinnamon-brown skin lies beside a jewel-bright swimming pool in a backless black maillot. The shadow of a passing airplane crosses her body, just as an equally tan man, clad in nothing but a tiny Speedo, materializes out of thin air on the other side of the pool and dives in. Over a delicate vibraphone melody, a breathy female voice says, “I am made of blue sky and golden light. And I will feel this way forever….” The man emerges from the water and disappears; the woman turns to face the sun; a new voice issues an unforgettable invitation: “Share the fantasy. Chanel No. 5.”
The first time I saw those images flash across a TV screen was on a snowy Christmas night in the early ’80s. I was only nine years old, but that commercial blew in on a hot wind from some previously untapped tropical zone in my imagination: All of the things I hoped to experience as a grown-up came to me in a giddy rush—glamour, romance, mystery, luxury, a place that obviously was not Kansas.
I’d never smelled Chanel No. 5; I’d never even heard of it. I had no idea that Ridley Scott directed that particular commercial (as well as an equally memorable Fountainhead-reminiscent follow-up that involved a skyscraper, a train, a woman in a red dress, and a rendition of the Ink Spots’ “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire”), that the haunting music was by the same composer who scored Chariots of Fire, or that it was a prime example of the kind of advertising alchemy that has long defined the brand. All I knew was that No. 5 stood for something I couldn’t define but very much wanted. To paraphrase Liz Lemon, I wanted to go to there.
Model Stephanie Naumoska, who is 1.8 m tall and weighs 49 kg, poses in a bikini in Sydney. Australian health experts are worried that the Ms Australia Universe contestant is sending out a wrong message. (Agencies)
France has by far the highest proportion of clinically underweight women in Europe, but only half of them think they are too thin, according to a new study.
In other European countries the opposite is true: the number of women in Britain, Spain and Portugal, for example, who see themselves as seriously skinny easily outstrips the number who actually are.
“This shows that what people consider an ideal weight in France is lower than in other countries,” said the study’s author Thibaut de Saint Pol, a researcher at France’s National Institute of Demographic studies, which published the study on Wednesday.
“If a French person who feels fat were to go to the United States,” – which has much higher rate of obesity – “he probably wouldn’t feel fat anymore,” he said.
The study also reveals a big gap, both objective and subjective, between sexes.
In western Europe, the mean weight of men in every country except France and The Netherlands tips the scales into the “overweight” category, according to World Health Organization (WHO) standards.
By contrast, in only three nations do women join the men in crossing that line: Britain, Greece and Portugal. And only among the Dutch does one find more overweight women than men.
France is the one country in which both sexes are solidly in the “normal” weight bracket, and the only one in which more than five percent of women are officially “underweight”.
The universal standard introduced by the WHO for assessing weight is the Body-Mass Index (BMI): one’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of one’s height in meters.
A BMI of 25-to-30 indicates being overweight, while above 30 means one is obese. The range of normal weight is 18.5-to-24.9.
The proportion of overly thin women in France has long been the highest in Europe, but has shrunk from 8.5 percent in 1981, to 7.8 percent in 1992, to 6.7 percent in 2003, according to once-a-decade national surveys.
In that same period, the proportion of underweight French men held steady at just under two percent.
Tags : fashion
Eighty-eight years ago, on 05.05.21, Gabrielle Chanel launched her first fragrance – Chanel No.5. Today, Chanel No.5 is still the world’s best selling fragrance and, according to Chanel, “a product in the Chanel No. 5 portfolio is sold every six seconds.” Because of this legacy, Chanel No.5’s advertising is always the pinnacle of ad campaigns.
It’s been several years since Baz Luhrmann and Nicole Kidman teamed up for the Chanel No. 5 mini film. As we’ve previously reported, Audrey Tautou will be the face of the new Chanel No. 5 campaign – and very fittingly, since she is also cast as Gabrielle Chanel herself in Coco Avant Chanel. Directing Ms. Tatuou is long-time collaborator Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who directed her in her breakthrough film, “Amélie.” Tautou admitted that she has refused offers to represent other fragrances, she stated, “I needed to have a connection with the product.”
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Tags : Chanel
SEOUL — Perhaps the only Korean celebrity missing from Prada’s party Thursday night to mark the launch of the Transformer project was Kim Jong-il. But the North Korean leader, a noted film buff, no doubt would have enjoyed a soiree full of actors on the grounds of a 16th-century Korean palace. Celebrities rubbed shoulders and clinked Champagne glasses with designer Miuccia Prada and Prada’s chief executive Patrizio Bertelli.
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Tags : Prada
