Miss Coco, Where Did You Go?
I wondered what became of the CHANEL perfume ad: its timelessness, the cinematic drama, and Coco Mademoiselle's moped.
It took me a while to write this, thanks to the University of Oslo rescinding its graduate access to the online library (damn you!) and my general dislike of writing anything on a phone. There’s probably many typos in the text, but since I wrote this out of a combination of fun AND hyperfixation, too bad!
While flipping through the usual holiday programming on TV over Christmas, the same CHANEL ad kept on popping up. My brother, ever the astute observer, quipped something along the lines of “this film looks shit” before realizing that this was not a film, but instead a perfume commercial that happened to feature movie stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi making goo goo eyes to the pulsating beats of Daft Punk’s “Veridis Quo.” It’s a meh ad, pretty indistinguishable from Yves Saint Laurent’s spot with Dula Peep and the incessant Marc Jacobs “Daisy” clips that feature models aggressively frolicking in fields. The lot of them indicated a kind of boring perfection that reminded me of a conversation a friend and I (probably in a haze of caffeine) had, where we reminisced about the CHANEL “Coco Mademoiselle” commercial that seemed to define our formative years.
“COCO MADEMOISELLE, the film with Keira Knightley,” originally released in 2007, was uploaded on the CHANEL Youtube channel on March 8th, 2011. The advert, directed by longtime Knightley collaborator and king of lush period dramas Joe Wright, delivered a Nouvelle Vague cum Gainsbourg tinged depiction of Parisian luxury, replete with chinoiserie and blue eyed soul…a marriage of the modern with the referential.
“Coco Mademoiselle” opens with a shot of Knightley waking up in an impossibly large bed, tangled in white linen sheets. Accompanying her reveille is Joss Stone’s blistering cover of James Brown and Betty Jean Newsome’s "It's a Man's Man's Man's World." As sunlight floods the room, she nimbly picks up the perfume bottle from her bedside and gently applies it across her collarbone. Knightley is devastatingly chic in the advert, donning what seems to be a suede CHANEL motosuit as she hops on a matching beige motorcycle. A monochrome taupe and beige queen, lean and panther-like on her ride, she speeds through the cobblestone streets of Paris, even navigating old staircases with ease. Nothing can stop Coco Mademoiselle! Not even the plights of urban planning!
She arrives at the photoshoot, revealing that what we thought was her waking up is actually the set of the aforementioned shoot. The photographer, probably the most Southern European looking man to ever grace Earth, directs her with a fierce eroticism reminiscent of David Hemmings in Blow-Up (minus the somewhat sadistic energy). In the midst of their (photography) session, Knightley slowly unzips her motosuit, prompting the rest of the crew to vacate the premises (HR need not be haste). Mr. Europa caresses her classy suede CHANEL boots, and begins to remove the rest of her motosuit (how does she pee?). In her state of undress, once again wrapped in sheets, she coyly teases the camera. As the two of them are about to kiss, Knightley speaks for the first time in the ad. “Lock the door,” she whispers to him. With a swagger in his step, Mr. Europa crosses the room to make sure they’re hidden from prying eyes. But before he can make it back to the bed, he turns around to discover that she’s gone, the french windows open and the curtains billowing in the wind. He runs to the balcony…where or where has his woman gone?! Below him, Coco Mademoiselle mounts her motorcycle. She gives him a smile, tucks the bottle of perfume in the breast of her motosuit, and away she goes. Vroom, vroom, vroom! Bon voyage!
CHANEL has a long history of over-the-top fragrance ads, most notably for Coco Mademoiselle and CHANEL No.5, favouring the partnership of various silver screen stars and their most frequent cinematic collaborators. But not all CHANEL fashion films and ads have been made equally. The new CHANEL No. 5 ad featuring Robbie and Elordi prompted an outpouring of Reddit threads about its confusing premise (when did we ever look to the perfume industry for narrative clarity) and lack of chemistry - which doesn’t bode well for their upcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights. I wonder what’s become of the CHANEL perfume ad, if it huffed and puffed a bit too hard on its cigarette a decade or so ago, only to choke on itself. There hasn’t been an attempt to fill the croissant sized Coco Mademoiselle hole in a while, save for last year’s BLEU DE CHANEL. Miss Coco, where did you go?
“What’s interesting about doing an advert is that people project on to it” Keira Knightley
How does one connote luxury in the advertising realm? The benefit of such an industry is its ephemerality, where trend depends on the constancy of renewal, which has primarily relied on “advertising and marketing strategies” (Von Wachenfeldt 353). In Brygida Hurek’s paper “The Communication of Luxury: A Semiotic Analysis of a Luxury Brand's Perfume Commercial,” she writes that “objects can be categorized according to their utility, their economic worth or they can be used to carry symbolic value, such as birthday presents” (Hurek 11). A perfume bottle is, in a practical sense, liquid fragrance in a container. Therefore, a luxury brand needs to attach meaning and connotations to the product, in order to lift it to a status of symbolic value that matches its steep price. As Hurek argues, “the acquisition of a brand new luxury vehicle [is] not for its speed or technologies, but for its ability to mark social position, status, membership or splendor” (Hurek 11). In addition to semiotics, luxury branding, especially in relation to the ephemerality posed by the perfume industry, relies on remembrance. Paula Von Wachenfeldt writes that “a sensual meeting between two people is a recognizable feeling from reality or from cinema and by associating CHANEL No 5 with it, the consumer can experience a certain familiarity. The perfume is the engine of this encounter revolving around beauty, sensations, and not least the unexpected” (Von Wachenfeldt 357). To state the obvious, when one advertises perfume, one doesn’t really promote the item itself. How did this luxurious aromatic essence orchestrate a moment? Allow one to shed an identity to slip on the mask of another? And how does it tie to the identity of the brand it’s from?
In his analysis of Karl Lagerfeld’s personal style and creative practice, Michael Langkjaer writes that the late designer “reworked his historicism into a fantasy of the past, which he then reinterpreted as fashion design [...] By going backward, various parallels between past and present epochs emerge” (Langkjaer 649). Although a fashion house’s head is not the “be all end all” of its creative ethos, Lagerfeld’s personal vision seeps into each commercial and film present in this piece, as the projects cling to this illusion of historicity as a site of meaning making and heritage. All of this can be considered as CHANEL’s DNA, “the recognizable lexicon of signature elements throughout a designer’s creations” (Garelick 157): ranging from 18th century decorative arts, to sumptuous interiors of Rococo inspiration and the classical age, including models who wouldn’t seem out of place as statues of antiquity (Langkjaer 641). This is central to CHANEL’s branding: an evocation of the past and its timelessness.
Fashion on film and film on fashion: Atonement, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Clueless, Romeo + Juliet, Funny Face, Phantom Thread, The Devil Wears Prada - the list goes on and on. But what about the fashion film, which is an entirely different beast in its own right? The earliest iteration of the fashion film form was born along with the emergence of early cinema at the turn of the 20th century (Noris and Cantoni, 154). Newsreel screenings made between the 1910s and 1930s, which presented the latest Parisian collections to American customers, could also be cited as forerunners of fashion films (Evans 2001; Soloaga and Guerrero 2016). Marketa Uhlirova provides a solid overview of the fashion film form in her article “Excavating Fashion Film: A Media Archaeological Perspective,” writing that the form was “distinguished by an aesthetic of display, one that privileges short visual spectacles, presentational (exhibitionist) style and musical scores over narrative continuity and dialogue – what Tom Gunning and others have theorized under the conception of the cinema of attractions” (Uhlirova, 341-342). These are videos by brands that distill the product (whether clothing, fragrance, or some other object) into an identity and lifestyle that adheres to the brand’s identifying factors (Buffo 222). Mijovic puts forward three ways to classify the fashion film format, summarized by Diaz Solaga as: “1) the nonnarrative ones (similar to a magazine editorial); 2) conventional narratives (reflect the aspirational nature of fashion and 3) organic narrative (focused on clothes and their properties)” (Diaz Soloaga 433). Since its newsreel iteration, the fashion film has adapted (or perhaps, flourished) in the digital world, asserting itself as “a ubiquitous presence and an essential aspect of the symbolic production of fashion” (Mijovic 176). Historically, most fashion films have relegated narrative to a subordinate position, if not entirely omitted it (Mijovic 177). The majority opt for a vibe that Mijovic describes as “fashion editorial that moves’, shot in an attractive setting/location and accompanied by a seductive soundtrack (typically classical, electronic or dance music)” (Mijovic 177). However, in the case of CHANEL and a few other fashion houses, the cinematic and a semblance of a storyline prove to be an integral part of the brand’s approach to the fashion film.
CHANEL “is renowned not only for its distinctive style and impeccable craftsmanship but also for its iconic advertising campaigns” (Liu 1). Through investing in specific streams and platforms, the house has disseminated content through various avenues “to elevate its worldwide brand recognition” (Liu, 2). The strength of the Keira Knightley Coco Mademoiselle era was its serialization, basically becoming a “fashion film series” consisting “of several videos, each of which tells a story about a single main character” (Lim 289-290). Each video allows us to watch Miss Coco in various situations with various outcomes, whether she is leaving yet another man she’s bedded or boating along the Seine. In an article about audience empathy in relation to fashion films, it was remarked that “when an individual develops a connection with a character, they will be more likely to develop a need to re-engage with the character. This need to reconnect will lead an individual to watch other episodes in a series that include the character. Thus, film series are beneficial for fashion brands in that storytelling can enhance consumers’ emotional experience with a brand and can result in tangible outcomes such as ad recall and ad persuasiveness” (Lim 291).
The intertwine between film and fashion extends into the collaboration between the industries nearly a century ago. At the height of studio era Hollywood in the mid-20th century, fashion houses developed relationships with female stars to dress them specifically for their films and stars' name dropped brands in the press. Think Audrey Hepburn’s longtime collaboration with Hubert de Givenchy, Edith Head’s designs that brought the continental chicness of the Dior new look to the American masses, and Marilyn Monroe’s famous quip about wearing a few drops of CHANEL No.5 and nothing else to bed. Directors such as William Wyler, Billy Wilder, and Josef von Sternberg frequently centered female leads who graced the screen in looks either designed by burgeoning fashion houses or costume designers with a knack for knowing the trendiest European pieces. The collaboration is far more obvious now, with 2004 seeing a Nicole Kidman & Baz Luhrmann CHANEL reunion (Rodrigo Santano was also there, for all you Love Actually fans) that was “allegedly the costliest advertisement ever” (Groves, 6). Apparently, the ad even played in cinemas before screenings and was edited down for a televsion spot on various networks. Of course, these would have been the options before the time of YouTube, but that’s a lot of visual exposure in both public and private spaces.
Back to Miss Keira whipping around on her moped. Knightley starred as the titular Coco Mademoiselle in several adverts since inking her contract in 2006. In a making of featurette from the 2007 commercial, Knightley and Wright discuss the vision behind the ad and their experience of collaborating for the fifth time. The editing of this behind the scenes glimpse is particularly amusing, as rather mundane comments from Knightley are paired with seemingly aloof shots of her on set and a tinkling piano soundtrack reminiscent of giallo and Euro noir of the 60s/70s (after further research, I found that this was royalty free music…cheap beats, CHANEL? Vraiment?). The combination is not unlike a moving picture version of scrolling on a bygone era’s Tumblr moodboard, where even the most quotidian must have a sense of the profound. “I knew it was something about a motorbike and I knew it was going to be beige,” Knightley states as the camera pans across her clad in catsuit. So camp.
What’s most notable in Knightley’s commentary is her description of Coco Mademoiselle, who she describes as “very much a character [...] I think I’d find her quite terrifying but I’d really like to be her.” Yes, Coco Mademoiselle is a perfume, but as stated above by Knightley, she is personified as “not only the sexy, romantic and passionate boldness of the woman represented by the perfume itself, but also the modern femininity that the CHANEL brand represents, which aspires to freedom, courageous resistance and the pursuit of equal rights.” (Diaz Soloaga 438)
“The wonderful thing about these adverts, about all of the adverts that CHANEL do for each of their perfumes and for everything, is that it should be a fantasy for the people that are watching it and they should project whatever they want into it and into the characters. Because that’s what I think perfume is about: it’s about turning you into the person you want to be”
Now, how does the star of such a brand’s promotional materials factor? Where does Coco Mademoiselle, the role, begin? Knightley, the willowy English actress renowned for her turns in both mainstream juggernaut films, such as the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and Love Actually, and smaller historical dramas, had the perfect star persona for CHANEL. She would have only been 22 or 23 when inking the initial deal, but touting a filmography replete with period piece, therefore symbolizing the combo of freshness and timelessness that the brand was so hinged upon. Knightley’s film star DNA was the same as Lagerfeld’s perception of CHANEL. Nicole Kidman embodied this too when she starred in 2004’s collaboration with Baz Luhrmann. In the 3 years prior to the ad, she had appeared in Moulin Rouge!, The Hours, The Others, Cold Mountain, Dogville, and The Stepford Wives - bridging both the big budget and the art house. Liu argues that her “association with CHANEL added a touch of Hollywood glamour to the brand and drew considerable attention” (Liu, 2). CHANEL next lined up director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Audrey Tautou (both from beloved French film Amélie) for a Grand Tour-esque romp that saw Tautou finding love on the Orient Express. You could argue that Lagerfeld’s mission was to make CHANEL the IT girl personified, as Liu writes that his “collaborations with prominent figures in the fashion industry, such as models like Cara Delevingne and Lily-Rose Depp, brought a fresh and youthful perspective to CHANEL's image” (Liu 2). And in a way, he hit the jackpot with Coco Mademoiselle. Her cultural impact was so great that the ad was banned from children’s programming after playing before an Ice Age 2 screening due to sexually suggestive content (how’s that for a 00s flashback?).
(lol)
Now, there’s a difference between CHANEL’s cinematic ads and their fashion films. The ads (for the most part) are good! The films are…well, bad. Once speaking is involved: woof. A lot of the dialogue is stodgy and canned, and the rest is purely atrocious improv (or at least, reads that way). Watching a Karl Lagerfeld fashion film can sometimes feel like watching a lazily regurgitated effort at recreating one of Fellini’s party scenes. They’re all highly referential, desperately displaying a coterie of highbrow cultural references, whether unhappy chic wives are named Luisa (sounds like 8 ½ huh) and Austrian empresses as portrayed by a young Romy Schneider. The aim is high, yet the execution low. Lagerfeld seemed to be influenced by the French and Italian New Waves; inserting himself into la politique des auteurs, which “maintained that the director is the principal figure to whom the authorship of a film is to be assigned,” that emerged at the height of these film movements (Mijovic 181).
In a blistering evisceration of Lagerfeld’s contributions to the fashion film realm, Mijovic stresses that the designer’s understanding of this all encompassing auteurness to be flawed at its core. While reviewing the fashion short Remember Now, Mijovic writes that “It is here that Lagerfeld’s directorial ineptitude becomes most manifest – he overlooks the basic premise of cinema: one should tell the story by visual means. Instead, his distrust of the medium comes across through repeated use of dialogue to underline the intertextual references that the entire piece is constructed around” (Mijovic 180). It’s curious that a heritage fashion house that is so excellent (or at least, was for a given period) at maintaining a recognizable chic and desirable brand image through a commercial format is so inept at it within the film medium. I remember one of the first CHANEL films I watched, 2014’s Reincarnation starring Pharrell Williams and Cara Delevingne. Boasting an original song called “CC The World” (a play on the brand’s initials and the influence of aforementioned Austrian empress Sissi), the film provides a fantastical re-imagining of Coco Chanel’s initial inspiration for the little jacket while on vacation in Salzburg. Thankfully, Reincarnation is slightly more music video inspired, only making the viewer suffer through two hectically staged scenes with dialogue that act as a bookend for Williams and Delevingne’s duet.
The Tale of a Fairy doesn’t offer its viewer a respite from mechanically delivered lines and borderline John Waters-esque melodrama. Taking place in a villa along the French Riviera, we follow several women as they face romantic and financial peril. “Imagined, written and directed” by Lagerfeld (I wonder if those three verbs in sequence can be considered a threat) screened as part of the 2011/2012 Cruise collection. You can even log these CHANEL cinematic ads and fashion films on Letterboxd! On iMDB! And I will not be the person to launch into a whole ontological tirade on these different digital forms both ending up on the same “movie forums.”
Even Miss Keira is dragged back into the dark depths of Lagerfeld narrative film hell, as she takes on the role of Coco Chanel in a ”yet not personally the famous woman that founded the brand and launched the production of the promoted perfume” instead portraying the “‘Coco Chanel woman’ that any woman can become.” (Hurek 25) Of course, this version of the Coco Chanel woman omits any potential collaboration with N*zis. You're also welcome to google to your heart’s content Lagerfeld’s extensively documented racism, fatphobia and misogyny. But perhaps it was these projects by Lagerfeld that through their maladroitness exposed the inherent flaws at the core of the 21st century CHANEL imagery that capable film directors were able to disguise with pretty packaging. Whitney Peak was announced as the new Coco Mademoiselle ambassador in this commercial directed by Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick and Tron: Legacy). Set aside the wonderful choice of an Amanda Lear track, the ad does not scream Coco Mademoiselle to me. Coco Mademoiselle should not be lawfully driving a car with her best gals in a hideous silver jacket. Put Whitney Peak on a motorcycle! Give her a catsuit! Some smudged makeup! She is mayhem and mischief incarnate, not girl next door! And God forbid, letting a CGI focused director be at the helm of the vision? Non.
I wonder about Coco Mademoiselle frequently. Could she survive in a world that no longer prized an anachronistic combination of 20th century French pop culture, orientalism, and luxurious intrigue? In an alternate universe is she still zooming around on her moped, a beautiful beige catsuit gazelle? Where did you go, Miss Coco? And will you ever come back?
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