1910-1939
Fractured Words and Scent
What happened when scent and literature simultaneously broke out the gates?
After the end of the First World War, soldiers returned home from across Europe, and a collective consciousness began to process the trauma through art, perfume, literature, and prose. Reality was fractured and a new world evolved.
All sensation holds time
Marcel Proust, 1871-1922
Cultural context
The years 1921–1922 are often seen as defining moments of literary and artistic modernism in the West. The world was emerging from the shock of war and a reframe was emerging. In 1921, the designer Coco Chanel changed fragrance through a collaboration with the perfumer and nose Ernest Beaux to create Chanel No. 5. This was something entirely new where perfume became a composition and an art form.
Literature changed too. In 1922 Ulysses and The Waste Land were published and Marcel Proust died, all giving this year a particular resonance. During this time, F. Scott Fitzgerald was also penning The Great Gatsby, often cited as one of the greatest works in American literature.
It's as if one form of understanding about the concept of time, through memory and continuity was closed, while more fragmented, external forms of expression emerged in today what is often coined the Modernist movement.
With Chanel No. 5 the result was a fragrance that rejected the single-flower perfumes that had predominated. These had been in traditional forms such as jasmine, violet or rose for example. It made way to favour another type of abstract and modern composition through synthetic molecules.
And so the post WWI period captured the spirit of a new world beginning, tentatively, to step out from the shadow of what it had endured. Perhaps this abstraction meant the world did not have to speak of the horror directly. It was a way of processing it. People seemed to be reaching for something else that was less defined and more open to interpretation as their interior and external reality had shifted so violently.
Chanel No. 5 felt like part of that shift: not simply a perfume, but a gesture toward other evolving possibilities.
Molecules
Chanel No. 5 was the beginning of the commercial scale of architecture in scent. Not built from flowers alone, but from aldehydes, alcohols, and abstractions. It was made of molecules that turned perfume from imitation into invention in line with the modernist movement. The breakthrough was a group of synthetic molecules called aldehydes, especially
C10 (decanal)
C11 (undecylenic aldehyde)
C12 (dodecanal and related forms)
In the world
A year of 'progress'
The world was becoming faster, louder, more connected. Cars were replacing horses, and by the early 1920s the Model T was everywhere, carrying people further and faster than before. Radio began to send voices into homes, while cinema gathered strangers together in darkened rooms, flickering with new ways of seeing.
Across art, film, literature, and music, something was loosening. Structure gave way to sensation, and narrative to mood. Form no longer held in the same way; instead, ideas began to surface in fragments, impressions, and atmospheres through poetry, jazz and abstraction.
Journeys that had once taken weeks were shortened and the sense of vast distance began to dissolve. As people moved between worlds more freely, between cities, languages, and identities, they carried fragments of one place into another. Manhattan, the Riviera, Paris and London were no longer separate, but part of the same drifting circuit and Coco Chanel positioned her fragrance inside that movement. Women didn’t just buy Chanel No. 5. Now they carried it across borders.
There are stories Coco Chanel gifted Chanel No.5 to soldiers to take home to their partners. It was a smell with no name, that resembled nothing that had ever grown before and the abstraction was the point. With the war the world had produced something too large to look at directly and the response was a fragrance that refused to refer to it.
Now
We're not in 1922. But we are in somewhat of an analogous moment where there are fragments before us to reinterpret our world.
We see violence on our doom scrolls in pixels and experience a demise of trust in institutions and their function. Despite being post-truth, much like the boats of the last line in The Great Gatsby, in this world we're constantly buffeted against the currents back to reminders of the past that we can't quite grasp but we can't quite forget.
And so we continue to reach for the comfort of scent. 6,000 new fragrances released in one year, all partially on a conveyer belt of our digital feeds, shouting to be chosen, collected and signalled.
Plant / material
If Chanel No. 5 were a plant, it would not be a single bloom, but something closer to the opening of cold petals at dawn. Frost edging each surface, holding the faint traces of neroli and ylang-ylang, preserving them in soft buttery wax. As if the idea of a flower had been imagined through a veil of dry ice, distant, diffused, and just beyond reach.