"Chanel's competitors have spent millions of dollars in (mostly) ill-fated attempts to produce perfume bottles as memorable as No. 5's. Very few packages are as well known as, if not better known than, their contents: the Coca-Cola bottle is one, the Tiffany box is another. How has Chanel done it?...
"The bottle looked dramatically different from conventional ones and echoed the work of Chanel's favorite artists and designers. Its geometric shape evoked the 'purist villas' that pioneering Modernist architects like Le Corbusier were building for fashionable clients in and around Paris. The sans-serif lettering was similar to the radical typefaces being developed by avant-garde designers like Jan Tschichold and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in Germany...
"Critically, Chanel softened these influences in her bottle. The glass edges were gently rounded, making it seem less radical and more welcoming. She achieved a similar effect with the lettering. Whereas Tschichold and Moholy-Nagy were experimenting with sans-serif typefaces in lower-case letters and ditching old-fashioned capitals (on the grounds that they were not only undemocratic but, like decorative squiggles, unnecessarily distracting in the frenzy of modern life), Chanel did the opposite. By using nothing but capitals, she made her label seem more authoritative and less subversive...
"A few intriguingly designed bottles have surfaced since 1921. Chanel's archrival, Elsa Schiaparelli, kicked it off in 1937 with her surrealist-inspired Shocking bottle, shaped like Mae West's torso... Most other perfume bottles have been forgettable at best..."
from "Message in a Bottle", by Alice Rawsthorn, The New York Times Style Magazine, Women's Fashion issue, Spring 2009
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