Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel launched Chanel No. 5 on this day in 1921.
Chanel No. 5 has a complicated history, even involving Russian expatriates, and Chanel herself had a complicated, tragic and icky history that I'll not go into in depth in part because I can't remember the details and in part because I'm not interested enough to follow up on it. I personally find almost all perfumes gross and putrid smelling.
Chanel in 1920.
Having said that, Chanel No. 5 is clearly a landmark perfume. I wouldn't know the smell of it if I were to encounter it, which I am sure that at some point I have.
Chanel with Winston Churchill in 1921.
Chanel was already well known as a revolutionary clothing designer at the time, but it was the perfume, regard as the first modern perfume, that made her famous and a lasting household name. She remained active in clothing and in the perfume industry and was very well known in society.
Like more of the French than the French care to acknowledge, Chanel collaborated with the Nazis during World War Two although in her case it seems to have been in directly being involved with German intelligence. In her own case, she seems to have gone over to the German cause as early as 1941, which is much less surprising than it may sound as at that time, a year into the German occupation, causal observers would have regarded a German victory as nearly inevitable. When Paris was liberated in 1944, she opened her stores up to American GIs with the promise of free bottles of Chanel No. 5, but she personally fled to Switzerland in fear of prosecution. While the circumstances are unclear, there is some evidence that Prime Minster Winston Churchill may have intervened with the Free French to remove the threat of prosecution which, it is speculated, may have been as Chanel would spill the beans on British figures who themselves had been Nazi sympathizers.
Following the war her reputation recovered and she died in Paris in 1971 at the age of 87. In the 1950s Marylyn Monroe famously responded to the question of what she wore to bed with "five drops of Chanel No. 5" which shows the degree to which it was the aromatic symbol of status at the time, and in many ways it still is.
On this same day the Allied powers from the Great War, sans the United States, sent Germany an ultimatum regarding its default in reparation payments that had been due on May 1.
A photographer took this photo of The Palms in Florida
In Ireland, the heads of Sinn Finn and the Ulster Unionist Party met.
