How a Perfume Became a Legal Icon in the World of Fashion Law
“I wear nothing but a few drops of Chanel No. 5.” – Marilyn Monroe
Chanel No. 5 is more than a fragrance. It’s fashion’s most enigmatic artefact, a distilled form of identity, power, and legal intrigue. Behind its pristine flacon lies not just aldehydes and florals, but a century-long saga of ownership battles, wartime maneuvering, and IP strategy that rewrote the business of beauty.
A Revolution in a Bottle
When Coco Chanel released Chanel No. 5 in 1921, she didn’t just create a perfume, she launched a manifesto. Partnering with perfumer Ernest Beaux, she produced an avant-garde scent driven by aldehydes, defying the era’s norm of soliflore perfumes. The result? A chemical abstraction that mirrored the modern woman: cool, bold, and unapologetically independent.
The design of the bottle itself became a legal hallmark. Minimalist, angular, and devoid of ornate embellishments, it would go on to become one of the earliest examples of product design being protected under intellectual property law not for utility, but for visual identity.
The Wertheimer Deal: Where Art Met Commerce
In 1924, Chanel entered into a business agreement with Pierre and Paul Wertheimer of Bourjois, giving them 70% ownership of Parfums Chanel. Chanel retained just 10%, a move she would come to deeply regret. While the Wertheimers scaled the perfume into a global empire, Chanel found herself legally ousted from the very brand she had created.
This arrangement laid the foundation for a legal tug-of-war that would define much of Chanel’s career. At the core was the idea of naming rights and moral ownership, a concept now central in fashion law, where designers often lose legal claim to their names once licensed or sold to conglomerates.
Shadows of War, Clauses of Survival
During the Nazi occupation of France, Chanel attempted to exploit anti-Semitic laws to reclaim Parfums Chanel from the Wertheimers. She filed legal documents asserting that as Aryans, she should be the rightful owner.
But the Wertheimers, anticipating Nazi expropriation, had already transferred their shares to a Christian business associate, a wartime legal strategy known as a fiduciary transfer to evade racial asset seizure laws. This maneuver not only preserved their stake but became a textbook example of how contract law and foresight can preserve brand ownership in times of political turmoil.
The New Look, the Apple TV series that dramatizes Coco Chanel’s later years sheds new light on this murky period. A particularly powerful episode hints at the perfume’s symbolic importance to the Nazi elite, revealing how luxury, survival, and moral compromise often converged in the legal gray zones of wartime France.
Fragrance and the Law: When Scent Meets IP
Legally, perfume compositions remain one of the most elusive areas of IP protection. In most jurisdictions, including the US and India, scents cannot be copyrighted unless they are chemically unique and meet the threshold for artistic expression, a standard nearly impossible to meet.
So Chanel got creative. The company registered trademarks not only for the No. 5 name, but also for the bottle shape, its font, packaging layout, and even the ad scripts. It pioneered what we now call “total brand IP strategy”, combining trademark, trade dress, and unfair competition laws to fence off imitators.
Cases involving No. 5 have set precedents on issues like:
- Trademark dilution when others tried to use “No. 5” in unrelated product categories
- Trade dress protection for the shape of the bottle
- Secondary meaning in advertising slogans like “The world’s most timeless fragrance”
In short, Chanel built a fortress of legal protection around a scent that, ironically, the law itself refused to directly recognize.
Relevance to Fashion Law Today
Chanel No. 5’s story is the blueprint for how intangible assets, scent, aura, and aesthetic can be made legally tangible. Today, when fashion brands battle over NFTs, AI-generated designs, or digital perfumes in the metaverse, they are walking a path first carved by this 100-year-old fragrance.
Modern fashion lawyers regularly advise on issues Chanel encountered decades ago: How do you retain IP control in licensing deals? What if your brand name is your personal name? Can you preemptively protect against future geopolitical risks? Chanel’s story isn’t a perfume ad, it’s a law school casebook.
Editor’s two cents
Chanel No. 5 is not just about scent or status, it’s about strategy. As a fashion lawyer, what strikes me most is not the timelessness of the perfume, but the foresight of those who legally armored it. From fiduciary transfers during wartime to the genius of trade dress protection, every detail was curated, not just by designers, but by sharp legal minds.
In an era where fast fashion runs on aesthetics and not authenticity, Chanel No. 5 reminds us that the most iconic creations don’t just need marketing, they need ironclad legal muscle.
So the next time you dab on a designer scent, remember: you’re not just wearing fragrance. You’re wearing jurisprudence.
Editor-in-chief: Diya M. Kumar
Contributing writer: Gina Grace Zurbrügg