Cuir de Russie

Cuir de Russie belongs to the earliest chapter of Chanel perfumery, the years when Ernest Beaux was building the house's scent identity from scratch. Chanel tells the story on its own product page and does not pretend it is anything but personal: this is the scent of an encounter between Gabrielle Chanel and Grand Duke Dimitri of Russia, who arrived in Paris in 1920 carrying memories of snow-covered steppes and Byzantine art. That same Grand Duke introduced Chanel to Beaux, so the leather and the aldehydes of N°5 come from the same handshake. The composition is commonly attributed to Beaux, who served as Chanel's perfumer from 1920.

The leather here is birch tar leather - smoky, tarry, faintly like a saddle left in the sun - and Chanel builds it against labdanum, jasmine and ylang-ylang so that it never reads as a pure animal hide. The opening is orange flower, bergamot and mandarin, surprisingly bright for what follows. Then the birch closes in, tobacco and musk deepen it, and the florals sit inside the smoke rather than on top of it. It is one of the very few classic leathers that stays elegant instead of turning brutish.

Two honest points. First, it was folded into the Les Exclusifs collection in 2007, and the strength on sale today is eau de parfum rather than the eau de toilette long-time wearers remember, which makes it fuller and rounder. Second, birch tar has been progressively restricted across the industry, so the modern version is softer and less acrid than pre-war bottles. Chanel has kept the character; it has not kept the bite.

Wear it in the cold. A Highveld winter morning, a fireplace, a wool coat. It is listed for women and worn freely by men, which has been true for most of a century.

Performance from the eau de parfum is strong - eight hours plus, with a warm, smoky trail in the first few hours that settles close and stays legible well into the evening.