5th Avenue's bottle delicately conjures the sleek, elongated structures of New York City's sky scrapers. I tried to find a building that might fit its structure, and while looking at turn-of-the-century photographs of New York by Alfred Stieglitz, I came up with the RCA tower posted above.
Its scent is a whirlwind of florals; eleven according to the perfume website Fragrantica, which are interspersed in all three of its notes. The perfume, like the sky scraper, is an ambitious creation.
5th Avenue is clearly a reference to Chanel No. 5. The symmetrical, unadorned, modernist bottle from Chanel No. 5 has been elongated into the 5th Avenue flask. The bottle stoppers are also very similar. Chanel named her perfume after the laboratory vial labeled No. 5, which contained the scent that she chose for her perfume.
The five in 5th Avenue is also a systematic way of labeling, this time the long streets in New York City. 5th Avenue is where Arden opened her first store. It is also the center of fashion in the fashion center, New York City. It is thus an apt name for a perfume that references a famous fashion predecessor.
Yet despite the restraint in the bottles' adornments, and even names, the scents of both Chanel No. 5 and 5th Avenue are complex and unrestrained. 5th Avenue, on a conservative count, has eleven ingredients. The original No. 5 had 31 .
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By: Kidist P. Asrat