Gracie Abrams on becoming Coco: "I've always felt naked without fragrance"

Gracie Abrams' earliest fragrance memory belongs to her grandmother's bathroom sink, where a bottle of Chanel No. 5 sat within reach of a curious child. "I remember smelling it as a little kid and being like, whoa, this is womanhood," she says. It's the kind of association Chanel has spent a century cultivating. After all, it was the same bottle Marilyn Monroe once claimed was all she wore to bed. And the reason a spritz of it still registers, for most of us, as more than a scent. "It's all very trippy to be having this conversation now, and to be allowed in by Chanel in this capacity," Abrams says. "It means a whole lot."

Now Abrams has her own bottle to carry forward. Chanel has named her égérie of Coco Mademoiselle Crush Absolu. It is the latest chapter in a line first imagined by Jacques Polge in 2001 and now reworked by his son, perfumer Olivier Polge for the modern mademoiselle. "It's unreal to be the new face of Coco Mademoiselle, I feel an immense sense of pride," Abrams says. "I love that Coco is someone who leaves a mark everywhere she goes. Sometimes, I wish I could be more like her."

It isn't Abrams' first assignment for the house. She was named a Chanel ambassador last year, fronting the brand's spring/summer ‘25 pre-collection campaign before becoming the newest muse of Coco Crush. Crush Absolu takes the relationship a step further, officialising it in scent form.

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The very first, Coco, arrived in 1984 courtesy of his father Jacques Polge. "If you take it very broadly and go back to what the Coco perfumes were, there is something warm and sensual about all of them, in different ways." Crush Absolu keeps the house's amber-woody signature – rose, jasmine and patchouli – but pushes it further, folding in vetiver and vanilla alongside grapefruit and lychee for something more intense than its predecessors. "I started to think about what could be a new fragrance in the atmosphere of Coco," says Polge. He landed on “something a little dry, with patchouli," set against a brighter top note of grapefruit and lychee. Creating that “rosy, slightly yummy scent."

There's something almost Scandinavian in how Polge talks about Chanel fragrances and the process of producing them. Put to him how they tend toward a complexity that "masquerades as simplicity," he doesn't hesitate: "I think it's one of the pillars of Chanel's signature." It shows in the small refusals as much as the formula – he was careful not to let the fragrance's warmer register take over. "I didn't want this ambery vanilla note to be overtaking, to be too gourmand," he says. "I wanted it to be dressed up in dry or woody notes." Sophistication, in other words.

Abrams arrives at the same distinctly Nordic instinct from an entirely different direction. Describing how the fragrance actually wears, she notes how there’s an androgynous complexity to the jus. "There's a push and pull between masculine and the feminine to me," she says. "I oscillate between both often. Sometimes I feel myself wanting to appear and dress softer and other times I feel tougher." Her first impression of it, she says, was a sense of relief. "I'm such a creature of habit. When I smelled it for the first time, I can only describe it as a relief, because I immediately connected to it. I'm grateful that it's ambiguous enough that it sets you up to be the best version of whoever it is you feel like being on that day.

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Abrams arrives at the same distinctly Nordic instinct from an entirely different direction. Describing how the fragrance actually wears, she notes how there’s an androgynous complexity to the jus. "There's a push and pull between masculine and the feminine to me," she says. "I oscillate between both often. Sometimes I feel myself wanting to appear and dress softer and other times I feel tougher." Her first impression of it, she says, was a sense of relief. "I'm such a creature of habit. When I smelled it for the first time, I can only describe it as a relief, because I immediately connected to it. I'm grateful that it's ambiguous enough that it sets you up to be the best version of whoever it is you feel like being on that day.

Shooting the campaign, she says, felt "surreal and really thrilling but also comfortable," built around "this internal confidence that can be enough to carry you into any room that you find yourself in." Asked how she'd describe the modern Coco Mademoiselle woman, she doesn't hesitate: "The word freedom sort of comes to mind first. There's a really thrilling spontaneity that she possesses that I want to lean on."