Star Wars Reloaded: Chanel Gabrielle vs. Twilly d’Hermès ~ Columns
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Who do you support: Chanel or Hermès? Even if the answer is impossible for you (why choose only one?), it’s fascinating to unravel the whys and hows each of the two iconic brands is navigating through in the complex game of fragrance and style.
With the luxury market vying for new gateways and witnessing stalling of growth for the foreseeable future (growing by only 1% last year, according to one study by Bain & Company, a global consulting firm), the fight for who will come up victorious in the most successful fragrance launch gains new significance. Chanel and Hermès emerged from the Great Recession virtually unscathed, giving them a reputation for being immune to market headwinds, but are lately showing signs of a holding pattern. Enter two pillar fragrance launches by each in 2017, both presented by the new head perfumers in-house, Olivier Polge and Christine Nagel respectively, to mark the new era. For Chanel, Gabrielle is the first pillar fragrance in 15 years, following Chance! For Hermès, Twilly hopes to sell more than Kelly Calèche ever did.
The target market for the two new fragrances is not wildly different.
Both houses are aiming at millennials, young women roughly in their 20s that is, eager to claim for themselves “a proper French fragrance”. A fragrance which would not alienate them via its obsolete allusions, but which would mainly be confident in connecting with the generation who believe they’re so very special that the pop culture term “special snowflake syndrome” has been specially coined to describe them.
Don’t get me wrong: the right to uniqueness is a human right and I respect it for what it is. Hey, I like to view myself as special too! The incongruent part nevertheless comes from the very irony of a mass market product being sold as something that is uniquely one’s own. There’s nothing new about that detail, but in today’s world, when anyone with an internet connection and a smartphone, and a little bit of cash of course (but I will revert to that in due order) can order a bottle of fragrance online no matter what, it does sound like a very cynical claim.
The premise of the two houses for their new pillar feminine fragrances is nevertheless antithetical.
Chanel is taking another shot at their heritage with Gabrielle the fragrance being a direct allusion to the founder: Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, nicknamed Coco, has provided hundreds of references throughout the years and seems like an inexhaustible (?) fountain of names, places, love stories and symbols.
This did sound fresh and exciting back in the 1980s (and even through the 1990s) when the Ritz apartment was shrouded in mystery and the coromandel screens that decorated it were such a striking antithesis to the starkly minimalist aesthetic the brand championed. Such baroque interiors for someone who championed black & white as the pinnacle of elegance! It was rather cute when lipstick shades were promoted a decade or so ago with nicknames of Chanel’s lovers; the illusion of kissing a boy with those lips painted a hundred rosy shades was the stuff dreams are made of.
But somehow, in my mind, the trope has now become tired. If Disney is the film studio which doesn’t let anything fall down without first milking it for all it’s worth, then Chanel might easily be the beauty industry equivalent. I do understand that owning a legend is not to be trifled with, but surely we all know about Gabrielle Chanel’s career milestones by now. How about admitting some of the darker shades of that personal history, steeped in antisemitism and Nazi collaboration during WWII for example? In an era when being upfront about one’s misgivings, it wouldn’t seem out of place to admit that the glorious past is not that glorious, but it is the aesthetics, and not the moral values, which count in the world of Art. If beauty and perfumery are considered art fields of course…which is another big can of worms.
Hermès on the other hand admittedly has it a bit easier. Although the Dumas family is personally invested in the brand, and arguably they embody the family values of artisanship and heritage clashing with conglomerates lying in ambush for a hostile take-over (I’m not making this up!), the brand itself isn’t connected to a single legendary person.
This is evident in a roundabout way. The advertising shots for the Twilly d’Hermès fragrance interestingly present varying faces of young models. In contrast Gabrielle by Chanel is unavoidably tied to a single person, Kristen Stewart; a celebrity which on first glance looks incongruent with the Chanel outlook on style, but who has a wide fan base and tabloid traction to make her hot news. Indeed her signing the contract for the promotion has been major news on beauty pages for quite some time. The controversial public image of Stewart, concerning her sexual direction, is a brownie point for the French brand; people around the world have become more sensitive to politics of sex and that’s a good thing.
It is fair to acknowledge at this point that Chanel was also there first with the multiple faces for a single perfume concept. The advertising for Allure eau de toilette was making waves in the 1990s with its inclusion of ethnic looking types of models and “real people”. So credit given where credit is due.
Arguably Hermès is also exploiting their heritage, using the Twilly silk scarf as the point of reference.
Although the house is best known for their inimitable carrés, which are the pride of every discerning wardrobe, the twilly scarf is equally famous as the less ladylike, more playful interpretation of the French je ne sais quoi of dressing effortlessly, but oh so stylishly. This is natural for a French brand to do. The French are exporting fashion since the times of Marie Antoinette after all. What makes it pertinent in this particular instance is that Chanel is selling an idea of aspiring style (the embodiment of a young Chanel), while Hermès is selling the transliteration of aspiring style into an actual object (part of the silky scarf is tied to the neck of the fragrance bottle).
And with that note I come to the actual presentation of the two fragrances.
Chanel has long held that their bottles have deeper meanings behind their design. Everything, from the Place Vendome serving as the prototype (or lucky reflection?) for her famous flacon for Chanel No.5, to the apothecary bottle that served as inspiration for the original creation, and the typeface recalling the austerity of the nunnery where she was brought up, has been invested in symbolism and nuance.
Place Vendome, Paris
The design of a new pillar fragrance bottle therefore has been a very crucial part of the launch. Many perfume lovers have questioned whether the new bottle is as fabulous as we have come to expect from the brand. It was critiqued for being too flat, too solid, not as elegant as the classic ones.
Despite all those claims holding it in my hand was satisfactory. The glass is solid, faceted in a sparse style that reflects the golden color of the liquid inside well, the cap is brushed matte and feels substantial in one’s palm, and the sprayer is highly functional as with all Chanel fragrances. The base in particular is fairly thin and sleek. and highlights the square contours most beautifully. There are no technical or aesthetic faults with the styling of the bottle, to be honest. Whether it lives up to the fairy tale expectations which the brand and the perfume’s name are fanning the fires of, is another matter.
By contrast, the Hermès bottle looks whimsical. It’s maybe a bit too frou-frou for my personal tastes, what with the small bowler hat and the brightly colored stripes on the outer packaging of the box. The silky fabric dangling from the neck is adorable, but could be impractical for everyday use; and Twilly is an everyday use fragrance, not an occasion one. Still, the success in this case lies not in the actual design (at least that is my humble opinion, as I prefer Chanel’s this time) but in the reflection of playfulness and youth appeal in one image.
You might be wondering why I haven’t yet expounded on the merits of the fragrances as actual smells yet. This is easily explained. There are already two detailed fragrance reviews of Twilly d’Hermès on Fragrantica (HERE and HERE). I concur that Twilly is joyous and very, very pleasant in its radiant, spicy and effortless sensuality, an exercise in weight lifting done with one finger only, as I have included it in my top pick for new fragrances for autumn 2017 in our Best in Show column.
On the contrary, Gabrielle has been mostly talked about in reference to its “hotly anticipated launch” rather than its scent (HERE and HERE). This is not to mean that I believe Gabrielle is a bad perfume, because it’s definitely not. It’s quite pretty, feels young and optimistic, as it should for something aimed at 20-somethings, and isn’t syrupy nor cloying, which is an admirable feat in today’s market. The real “problem”, if you can view it as such, is that it is very predictable, projects softly, lasts for only a little while on the skin, and costs €97 per 50 ml and €137 per 100 ml. That’s quite the price to pay for dreaming the dream. But, then again, no one has bottled the dream quite like the bosses at Chanel, I suppose.
