Chanel unveils Bleu de Chanel L’Exclusif with a campaign starring Timothée Chalamet
In-house perfume creator Olivier Polge has reimagined the brand’s signature men’s perfume for a new era, featuring woody, leathery notes
Sensing that men’s taste in perfume has evolved significantly over the last few years, Polge wanted to offer them something “with more depth, more texture and more strength”.
The dapper Frenchman recalls how for a long time, men’s scents were supposed to be more “discreet” than their female counterparts, with an almost “hygienic” quality, as he puts it. His goal with this new take on Bleu – named Bleu de Chanel L’Exclusif – was to challenge those enduring stereotypes and “technically put as much intention, as much identity and as much craftsmanship behind it as we do for women’s perfumes”.
As with the original eau de toilette dating back to 2010, the starting point for Olivier was the colour blue. But how do you translate a colour into a scent?
“It’s not easy. What is true is that for perfumes, we have always been struggling with our vocabulary,” says Polge. “[It’s also the same for] music because I think that there are many parallels, but with colours, there are certain easy parallels to make between many scents, like how the smell of lemon recalls yellow. ... There are so many things that are blue for men, but this Chanel blue is a very specific dark blue, which I find interesting. And what I like is its proximity to black.”
