GALLERY LINK:
PHOTO SHOOTS > 065

Launched in 1921 and an immediate world-class best-seller, Chanel No. 5 was for Coco Chanel, said her friend Misia Sert, “like winning the lottery.” For Diana Vreeland, the perfume’s streamlined cubic bottle was “the best packaging since the beginning … the most distinguished thing of any thing she put her name on.” Andy Warhol painted it, and Marilyn Monroe confessed she slept in nothing but the aromatic elixir. Now Brad Pitt—following in the fabled footsteps of Catherine Deneuve, Ali MacGraw, and Nicole Kidman—is the first man ever officially to endorse it. In anointing Pitt the new face of its signature fragrance, the House of Chanel is subtly circling back to its gender-twisting origins; the founding couturière cleverly revolutionized women’s fashion by raiding her boyfriends’ closets for such comfortable haberdashery staples as boaters, cardigans, tweeds, and jerseys. Pitt—whose gritty hit-man movie Killing Them Softly will open concurrently with his seductive Chanel ads—also stars in an allusive, unorthodox Chanel No. 5 spot directed by Joe Wright. The choice of Brad Pitt to articulate the male response to a female scent “was obvious,” explains Maureen Chiquet, C.E.O. of Chanel. “No. 5 is the most iconic fragrance of our time, and Brad Pitt is the most iconic actor of our time. Women in every culture love No 5. No matter where you are, No. 5 is there.”

Source