Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Prepare for your exams
Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points to download
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Community
Ask the community for help and clear up your study doubts
Discover the best universities in your country according to Docsity users
Free resources
Download our free guides on studying techniques, anxiety management strategies, and thesis advice from Docsity tutors
Her signature scent, Chanel No. 5, is a revolutionary perfume, in many respects. Coco Chanel burst onto the scene of perfume with a brilliant ...
Typology: Slides
1 / 56
This page cannot be seen from the preview
Don't miss anything!
Stockholm University; Department of Journalism, Media & Communication Thesis for the Degree of Master in Media and Communication Studies
Author: Heidi Hautala Advisor: Kristina Widestedt Examiner: Kristina Riegert 30th May 2011
Stockholm University Department of Journalism, Media and Communications Thesis for the degree of Master in Media and Communication Studies Spring 2011
Title: The Glamorous Life of Chanel No. 5 – a contribution to the theory of glamour
Author: Heidi Hautala Advisor: Kristina Widestedt
Glamour is an ideal that permeates our highly visual culture, yet the concept still remains indefinite. Despite its highly ideological function, it has been included in the academic discussion only in the recent years. The aim of this study is to broaden the understanding of glamour as a modern phenomenon and elaborate it as an analytical concept. This is achieved by examining the advertising imagery of Chanel No. 5, the legendary French perfume from the influential haute-couturier and socialite Gabrielle ”Coco” Chanel. The theoretical frame consists of the history of glamour as well as the semiology of advertising. Semiology is also used as a method for analysing the adverts. The journey with Chanel No. 5 starts from the year of its creation, 1921, and one advert from every decade is chosen to a closer interrogation. Based on eight semiological analyses of Chanel No. 5's adverts, I argue that glamour is a myth that becomes activated through a system of signs. The glamour of Chanel No. 5 depends on the use of celebrity personas, on skillfull and exclusive media treatment, and on the circulation of signs which connote luxury and feminine sexuality, yet always with a fresh, contemporary touch. In the end, glamour is a highly manufactured, unattainable ideal which entices and invites for consumption.
What do Coco Chanel, Marilyn Monroe, Jean Shrimpton, Catherine Deneuve, Carole Bouquet and Audrey Tautou have in common? They have beauty that is iconic. They have changed ideas on feminine and sexy. And they all represent the face of Chanel No. 5 – the world's bestselling scent which still today, 90 years after its creation, is bought approximately every 30 seconds, all around the globe. Besides having been worn by the glamorous socialites, it must have been a defining scent of many moments in the lives of millions - continuously since 1921.
In this dissertation I will examine the concept of glamour by following the life of the world-renowned scent - Chanel No. 5 - through almost a whole century; through les années folles , the Great Depression, the Second World War, the booming post-war years, to the last half a century which has witnessed an ever increasing passion for consumption. Glamour has kept up with the modern history, not consistently the same, yet somehow it has been there - accompanying film stars, debytants, cars, design, and perfumes. ”The word glamour is ubiquitous in the mass media,” writes Joseph Rosa, ”where it always seems to allude to a potent combination of sex appeal, luxury, celebrity, and wealth - yet it is never entirely clear just what glamour is” (Rosa et al 2004: 38). The term is, indeed, widely used in connection with fashion, show business and entertainment, beauty and beauty marketing. According to Stephen Gundle, who has written comprehensively on glamour's history, glamour is ”an image that attracts attention and arouses envy by mobilizing desirable qualities including beauty, wealth, movement, leisure, fame, and sex”(2008: 390). In effect, the idea of glamour as seductive and artificial has been implicit in the meaning of the word from the outset, as social historian Carol Dyhouse reminds (2010: 156).
Glamour, like any concept and phenomenon, is easier to understand when we see it in the light of history. Therefore, this study takes on a historical perspective: I will approach the concept of glamour by examining the adverts of Chanel No. 5, the first one dating back to 1921, the year of the scent's creation. The fascination with advertisements as source material is motivated primarily not what they reveal about advertising, but what they reveal about the society and the culture (see McFall 2004).
The theoretical framework for the study will be composed of the history of glamour and semiology of advertising. The history of glamour will be drawn mainly on the pioneering work of Stephen Gundle, Clino T. Castelli, Carol Dyhouse, and Joseph Rosa. Along with Roland Barthes, Judith Williamson, Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson will provide the theoretical framework for the semiology of advertising, and semiology will also serve the tools for analyzing the adverts.
The aim of the study is to broaden the understanding of glamour as a quintessentially modern phenomenon and elaborate it as an analytical concept with the following research questions: *What kind of a sign system is created around Chanel No. 5; how do the adverts construct the myth of glamour? *What are the continuous respective irregular elements of glamour in the adverts? *How do the adverts reflect the changing female ideals? *How is glamour connected to the expanded fascination with media celebrities?
I hope the dissertation will encourage the reader to think of glamour from a critical and scholarly perspective, and thereby inspire for further research.
Chanel No. 5 has a history – a life! - of its own, and this chapter is devoted to telling the story of it, in line with Mazzeo who carried out her research on numerous archives. Mazzeo has also contributed to this study by providing the primary source material, and I hope that the analyses that follow in chapter four will give further insights on Chanel No. 5's brand image construction.
The story of Chanel No. 5 starts quite sadly. Not many could imagine that Chanel, one of the richest and most influential women of the twentieth century, came from very humble and undesirable origins. She was an orphan girl, who made her way in the world through many obstacles. We know her as Coco, but probably few of us know that she earned that nickname when she was a showgirl actress, her signature number being a famous Offenbach tune ”Qui qu'a vu Coco” and ”Ko Ko Ri Ko”. Being on public display for the entertainment of men, she belonged to the social outcast of demi-monde , which made her an unrespectable woman - something she wanted to fight against to. As a couturier, she was to be a major force in liberating women from old fashions.
Her signature scent, Chanel No. 5, is a revolutionary perfume, in many respects. Coco Chanel burst onto the scene of perfume with a brilliant timing, being among the first couturiers to launch her own perfume. Had she inkling of it or not, the 1920s and 1930s are still known as the golden age of modern perfumery. The perfume, which carried Chanel's lucky number, was an artistic creation of Ernest Beaux, the ”Nose”, who worked with aldehydes, powerful but unstable synthetic substances, which were brand new in the world of perfumery. Perhaps more significantly, the perfume would capture the essence of the Roaring Twenties and reject all the conventional stereotypes about the women of demi-monde and the respectable women, and the fragrances they could wear - ”It would be a scent that could define what it meant to be modern and elegant and sexy.” (p. 22) With the artificial composition of Chanel No. 5, she shifted the paradigm of fragrance - women should no longer resemble the smell of rose.
Coco introduced the perfume only “to some of her glamorous friends who set the trends in the world of high society”. It was an exclusive restaurant in Cannes where she first showcased it. Then, having introduced it to the glamorous socialites, the flasks of Chanel No. 5 would appear on the shelves of her boutiques, where it would soon take on a cult following. What is staggering, this would happen without any advertising. The flappers, as the trendsetting beautiful young things knew how to call themselves, knew that it was a must-have.
In 1924, despite the great success, Coco Chanel stood aside from the perfume business with the creation of Les Parfums Chanel, run by the Wertheimer brothers. The duo behind the perfume success story Boujoirs ”set out to make Chanel No. 5 a perfume with a global distribution and, by doing so, to gain worldwide fame for the product. [...] The transformation of Chanel No. 5 into the world's most famous perfume would happen with the opening of the vast American market.” (p. 99) There was a new kind of luxury market that included the middle-class consumer. ”The goal at Les Parfums Chanel, where Ernest Beaux had now been hired as the head of fragrance, was to bring Chanel No. 5 to the cultural mainstream, where it could reach the women who read fashion magazines like Vogue and patterned their hemlines after news from Paris.” (p. 100) In 1929, it was officially the world's best-selling perfume.
The Great Depression in the 1930s, however, meant black clouds above the perfume industry as well. But Chanel No. 5 was still coveted. That decade set the connection between the perfume and Hollywood's world akin to a dream. But it would be only on the good half of the next decade when the success would reach an abstract size. During the Second World War, Chanel No. 5 would grow into a cultural icon and a true symbol of luxury.
Chanel's famous shop at Rue Cambon would remain open during the Second World War, and all that would be sold on the first floor was sparkling perfume bottles with the double Cs. Chanel No. 5 was a reminder of ”a world of glamour and beauty that
adored by those risqué flappers in the 1920s. To transform the story of Chanel No. 5 again, Helleu hired Catherine Deneuve as fragrance's spokes-model.” (p. 198) Subsequently, the advertising came to feature even surrealistic ad-length films that played with sensual fantasy and mystery. Behind those spectacular film fantasies there are big names, such as Ridley Scott, Luc Besson and Baz Luhrmann - and a vast sum of money. Times had changed. Now, the glamour of the brand was almost solely dependent on the advertising.
Glamour is an intriguing concept; alluring yet elusive. It is a floating signifier: what we refer to when we talk about glamour is not stable but changing, depending on our frame of reference. Ideas of what constitute glamour have changed through time, and yet there are marked continuities. It is impossible, then, to reduce it to a simple formula. In recent years there has been a growing interest in the concept among scholars from a variety of fields – glamour does not pop up only on glossy magazine covers. Before conducting the study of Chanel No. 5, I will take the reader through the twentieth century and provide an overlook of the trajectory of glamour and the different elements of it, as argued by Stephen Gundle - film and television scholar; Carol Dyhouse – social historian; Joseph Rosa – design historian; and Valerie Steele – fashion historian. The chapter is built up on different themes that I consider to be the building blocks of the theory of glamour.
3.1.1 The origins of glamour
Gundle suggests that glamour as it is understood today emerged at a quite specific point in history. According to him, Paris of the Belle Époque in the beginning of the
twentieth century ”was the heart of a new type of civilization based on money and consumerism.” (1999: 271) Aristocracy had been in decline in the late nineteenth century and the industrial and financial revolutions had brought to the fore a new elite that was eager and able to buy access to social prestige. In this new kind of a society surfaces and appearances were central as a mass culture of entertainment and consumerism was already in formation. The upper class became a visible elite but the allure of luxury and wealth could only be perpetuated to the extent that it was perceived to be theatrically accessible to all. The desire to be seen, noticed and talked about was greater than ever before.
Gundle (2000: 12) argues that glamour is bound up with the expansion of publicity and the press. The alluring image became increasingly important as the mass media developed and provided opportunities for staging, representing and inventing people, events and commodities. The invention of international picture agencies which presented images of the personalities of the visible elite for the consumption of readers, and the marketing of the imagery of an elite lifestyle to the aspirant wealthy or the newly wealthy through luxury magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair, cultivated a curiosity about the lives of rich and famous (Gundle 1999: 274). Such publications diffused a certain idea of what was chic as their photographers and graphic artists furnished an ideal image of high life. Until then, the life of the courts had seemed inaccessible, but now, to lead a grand hotel lifestyle, one needed only ”to earn enough money to be able to afford a beautiful car and elegantly dressed woman.” (Gundle 1999: 275)
In order to grasp the meaning of glamour, it is important to enhance that it is a modern phenomenon; it could not exist before a high degree of urbanization, development in communications and a distinctive bourgeois mentality. Essentially, it involves ”the masses, it is comprehensible and accessible to them and requires their active participation through the dreams and practices of the market place.” (Gundle and Castelli 2006: 23) If Paris of the Belle Époque was a pioneer in glamorous
Glamour is not a product of individual taste or personality but rather a visual effect - created by fashion designers, hair-dressers, press agents and photographers (Gundle 2008: 4). Glamour, as identified by Gundle (2000: 45), is ”an enticing image, a staged and constructed image of reality that invites consumption. That is to say, it is primarily visual, it consists of a retouched or perfected version of a real person or situation and it is predicated upon the gaze of a desiring audience.” According to him, beauty, sexuality, theatricality, wealth, dynamism, notoriety, movement and leisure are all qualities which are closely associated with glamour, and which the manufacturers of glamour seek to captivate in order to engender the right effect (2008: 6).
Creating a mysterious appeal is, in the end, calculative image-making. ”Commodities needed an aura,” has been claimed, ”because large-scale manufacturing had stripped goods of their intrinsic value that derived from them having been made of human skill and effort.” (Gundle and Castelli 2006: 34) Thus, pompous efforts are being done to endow commodities with an aura that exceeds their use-value and incites temporary feelings of pleasure and luxury (ibid. 10). Catching the moment is vital, certainly, as novelties fuel the imagination of the consumers. What was glamorous in the 1920s, cannot therefore be directly translated ”glamorous” in the 2010s, yet contemporary glamour often mixes ideas and themes drawn from the past: ”It can be said, that glamour is heavily influenced by its own history and that back-ward looking elements are strong. If glamour sometimes acquires a dull and repetitive feel, it is because the weight of the past is heavy.” (ibid. 188)
3.1.3 Glamour and ”to-be-looked-at-ness”
Glamour seems to be strikingly feminine and to some extent always sexual. As both Gundle and Rosa et al write, it was in effect the courtesan of the nineteenth century that first used spectacular excess as a strategy, ”since a glamorous appearance
attracted attention – and wealthy men” (Steele in Rosa et al 2004: 40). Glamour, then, has much to do with the commercialization of sex, and engendering sex appeal is quintessential to glamour. The ”strategy of appearances” (term by Baudrillard, used in Rosa et al 2004: 41) was later applied especially to the Hollywood stars, and in the 1960s, following the popularity of pin-up girls, glamour began being associated also with erotic photography (Gundle 2008: 261). It is claimed that there is ”a connotative linkage of the erotic femininity and with the commodity and its assimilation to the structure of commodity fetishism.” (Solomon-Godeau in Gundle and Castelli 2006: 9)
John Berger's famous assertion in Ways of Seeing (1972), ”men act and women appear” and ”men look at women; women watch themselves being looked at” were a starting point for subsequent work on the 'male gaze' (Dyhouse 2010: 156). The male gaze theorized by Laura Mulvey as ”to-be-looked-at-ness”; ”the constitution of the feminine self as desirable and desiring” (Gundle and Castelli 2006: 10), is seen as a prominent feature of glamorous representations. Contemporary fashion designers sometimes praise vulgarity and make sex very much of an overt matter: ”Versace's fashions are more likely to be perceived as glamorous because of stylistic excesses such as intense color and lavish surface decoration, and especially their hypersexuality, which is expressed through revealing cuts and overt references to sexual fetishism [the notorious 1991-92 Bondage Collection, with its emphasis on straps and buckles]” (Steele in Rosa et al 2004: 38). As Dyhouse (2010: 162) observes, glamour has got louder as it has become more widely available and more democratized.
3.1.4 The trajectory and repertoires of glamour
The construction of glamour is highly dependent on the right context. Some places are, simply, more glamorous than others. Paris and New York have traditionally enjoyed the role of defining new trends, ever since luxury ocean liners connected both sides of the Atlantic (see Albrecht 2008). The medium matters too, certainly. Not
It is important to highlight that glamour is not a static phenomenon. As Dyhouse (2010: 89) writes, in the wealthy postwar years glamour ”was suddenly becoming both much more affordable and accessible. Not surprisingly, this fuelled fears about cheapness and vulgarity.” The line between glamour and vulgarity had always been blurry, but the 1950s New Look demonstrates that fashion industry and media did their best to erase the ”old” glamour entirely. The New Look, introduced by Christian Dior's debut couture collection in February 1947 (see Gundle 2008: 199- 20 1), contradicted much that had been associated with Hollywood glamour: ”Where glamour had allowed women to test the barriers of gender and class, the New Look reinvented traditional femininity with all its class-based, hierarchical associations. It was a style replete with limitations, its celebration of well-bred, ladylike containment making it much easier to stigmatise the vulgar and downmarket.” (Dyhouse 2010: 90) Glamour as it had been before the Second World War was, all of a sudden, out of fashion. However, as Gundle (2008: 198) puts it, ”it was far from true that glamour was coming to its end,” just that ”its production would never again be concentrated so powerfully in the hands of relatively few men.”
The late 1950s and the 1960s, then, were marked by a new kind of fresh youthful sexuality. Film stars, like Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot and Audrey Hepburn - the icons of the time - were still emulated, but it was the time of counterculture. Youth became much more visible, and the haute-couture was in decline whereas the street style became prominent (Dyhouse 2010: 114). A new sense of freedom took over the youth: the contraceptive pill was introduced liberating ideas on sexuality and they had ”the liberty to choose from a new and ever-widening range of codes about how to dress” (ibid. 124). Classic Hollywood glamour was still out of fashion; it was the youthful radiance that was much more important. It would not be until the 1980s the bold glamour would to return to mainstream – but then it would be big like the economic growth. Status, showy ostentation, big jewels and gilt earrings, shoulder pads and bold lipstick, as well as a revival of haute couture and the birth of supermodels, were all signs of the 1980s glamour (ibid. 138). It was shiny, and over- the-top.
Gundle and Castelli (2006: 187) argue that ”glamour evolved as a series of distinct visual effects which are still in wide use”. They present eight categories which serve as a palette for creating glamour, the ”aesthetic of persuasion” (ibid. 85). The visual language of glamour include making use of the exotic, using strong colors, sensationalizing with gold, embracing the non-colors black and white together and separately, glittering images, using thrilling graphics and alluring plastics. What is striking, according to the authors, is the continuity of these effects. This seems to suggest that ”glamour became wholly detached from class-related situations and rituals and acquired an autonomous dignity as a dynamic of seduction and enchantment.” (ibid. 187) The traditional displays of glamour, however, have seen a new element of postmodern irony. Steele (in Rosa et al 2004: 44) argue that the young people today are accustomed to a more casual style of self-presentation than the Hollywood divas of the past, but ”there is an increasing tendency to adulterate images of old-fashioned glamour with a deliberate undercurrent of irony or ambiguity. Madonna, for example, has drawn on Marilyn Monroe's glamorous image while also putting it on quotation marks”.
The concept of glamour has a close relationship to consumer culture and advertising; it can be seen as an offshoot of a new era based on consuming and visual spectacle. Glamour is always, at least to some extent, purchasable. In the end, it is a constructed ideal that saturates our highly visual culture - and advertisers have their own role in it along with other image makers. Not coincidentally, advertising imagery will be used as the primary source material in this study, and therefore it is necessary to ask: how do adverts make sense to us?
consume commodities, we thus consume them as commodity signs. We aim to acquire, through purchasing a product, the meaning with which it is encoded.” (ibid. 205-206) Similarly, Goldman & Papson (1996: 2) argue: ”Stripped of its glamour, advertising is a kind of cultural mechanics for constructing commodity signs. Advertisements are structured to boost the value of commodity brand names by attaching them to images that possess cultural and social value: brand name + meaning of image = a commodity sign.”
”French perfume” was long set a phrase, used to refer to the magical, mysterious scents that only the French could produce, fragrances so seductive that they were guaranteed to make any woman more alluring and to add a touch of glamour to any occasion (DeJean 2005: 249). How do we attach such qualities to a scent? Advertising, of course, strives for constructing brand images which appeal to the potential consumers of the product. In her classical semiological study Decoding Advertisements (1978), Judith Williamson analyses Chanel No. 5's advert which features French actress Catherine Deneuve's face. Williamson argues strongly that there is no link between Catherine Deneuve in herself and Chanel No 5. Instead, Chanel No. 5 tries to mean to us what Catherine Deneuve's face means to us: ”The ad is using another already existing mythodological language or sign system, and appropriating a relationship that exists in that system between signifier (Catherine Deneuve) and signified (glamour, beauty) to speak of its product in terms of the same relationship; so that the perfume can be substituted for Catherine Deneuve's face and can also be made to signify glamour and beauty.” In Williamson's view, then, the key function of advertising is to differentiate between products in the same category of use-value. Perfumes, then, are advertised mainly through the creation of images.
Signs can of course be used in many ways to evoke interest in potential buyers, and as advertising has developed, there has been an ever greater need to find new ways to trying to differentiate the product from other products of great similarity. Goldman and Papson (1994: 24) argue that advertising has, in effect, ”glamorized
itself into crisis by continuously painting an unreal world, and relentlessly trying to top one set of unattainable promises with yet another”. According to cri tics, advertisements promote an unreal world, separating them from daily life by glamorizing them and manufacturing 'false needs'. The overemphasizing of social appearances - ”superficial sign values” - and eclipsing the actual use and exchange value of goods led to criticism, which in turn led to a conversi on into competing stylistic differences in the 1980s. Some advertisers did indeed distance ”themselves from what spectator-buyers had come to regard as the unattainable perfection of GQ and Glamour models.” (ibid. 26)
Glamour is thus an up-to-date, seductive image that attracts attention and arouses envy, and in the end is only a highly manufactured attribute that requires mediators. As Gundle (2008), Rosa (2004) and Dyhouse (2010) map the history of glamour, it is apparent that even though glamour mobilizes desirable qualities such as beauty, wealth, movement, leisure, fame and sex, the face of glamour is not fixed but changing. The changes in glamorous representations are connected to other changes in society; people always seek to become better and more alluring versions of themselves but the idea of what that better and more alluring is change, going hand in hand with other changes in society. As the authors have underlined, the concept of glamour is strongly connected to consumer culture, and advertising: glamour is something we can achieve through purchasing the products that are attached with bearers of glamour. Therefore, conducting an analysis of advertising imagery of the century's perhaps most glamorous product may contribute to a better understanding of this modern, highly visual and mediated phenomenon.
