The rendering of the new Chanel flagship store in Beverly Hills is a picture that tells a thousand words. Designed by Peter Marino and inspired by the house’s iconic white and black trimmed fragrance packaging, it conveys a simple message: fragrance matters.

Although Paul Poiret was the first couturier to launch a fragrance (Rosine, in 1911) it was Chanel who showed the cleverly marketed way forward with No 5, created in 1921. That scent still tops the fragrance charts and, if you consider that a bottle of No 5 is sold every 55 seconds, its average retail price is £49, and, according to Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) its margins are 40 per cent (meaning of that £49, almost £20 is profit), you can understand how important the fragrance category is for the brand. Indeed, there have been times when the fragrance has likely sustained the house. “I imagine in the early 1980s, before Karl Lagerfeld got there, that the handbags and the fragrance probably played a larger than usual role,” says Pete Born, beauty editor at WWD.