Chanel is augmenting its pan-world (and still running) Little Black Jacket touring exhibition with a masterfully-curated look at the very personal genesis of its iconic Nº5 perfume. The experience, billed Nº5 Culture Chanel and currently running at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, tells the story of what has surely become the world’s most iconic fragrance through the artworks, photographs and objects that most significantly impacted Mme. Chanel’s life and sensibilities. It “cracks the Nº5 code to reveal the links which connected it to specific moments in time and to the avant-garde movements it spanned,” and is a surprisingly rich method of crafting a narrative around the ubiquitous product.  

And while it may be a bit much to assert that any perfume has been responsible for avant-garde movements of any sort, there has been a clear uptick in serious thought surrounding the powerful links between olfaction and memory. Much like the Olfactive Studio project we wrote about earlier this month, in which a a series of new fragrances are sold online not by their actual smell, but rather by their associations with a particular photograph, Chanel is tapping into a deep and fascinating psychological realm that brands have only just begun to explore.