Chanel’s Coco Mademoiselle Crush Absolu stars Gracie Abrams in a Parisian café, and the creative director explains why

Du Pré de Saint Maur joined Olympian Siobhán Haughey, award-winning writer Wong Yi and actress, model and singer Amy Lo for a panel moderated by Divia Harilela on the third floor of Galerie Coco. where he shares the fragrance’s own origin story: a portrait of Coco Mademoiselle upon her arrival in Paris in the early 1920s, stepping into a world she was quietly about to overturn. “Picture [her] in 1917, at the opera house of Paris—all these women in big dresses. And then comes Coco Chanel, in a simple black dress. Everyone bristles, because the world [then] was driven by colour and expensive fabric. She’s a mystery to them.”

The newly released campaign film—starring American singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams—captures the same free spirit with a spontaneous celebration set in a Parisian café. “I was obsessed with making the scene in a café,” he tells Tatler after the panel. “Because in these neighbourhoods, every level of the community converges—in the French cultural fantasy, a café at night is where you’d find workers, ballet dancers, the bourgeoisie, prostitutes, alcoholic novelists, lost souls—every component of society in one room.”

Tai Hang’s storied streets feel like a natural echo of that idea. “The man repairing a car next door might sit down for lunch beside someone from Australia who found it on Instagram, and someone who lives just around the corner. I love that kind of mix—because for me, it represents what the world should be like.”

Abrams makes the soul of the film. She plays a polished, event-ready star who, at the last moment, vanishes into the night—pulling off her wig in the back of a car, smudging her immaculate eye makeup into something carelessly smoky, and slipping out onto the Paris streets in a little white dress. She runs, then stops outside a busy café. The mood lifts the second she walks in, and the room soon tips into a spontaneous celebration.

Abrams was named a Chanel ambassador last year, having since starred in the brand’s spring-summer 2025 pre-collection campaign and its Coco Crush collection campaign this January. This month’s Coco Mademoiselle Crush Absolu campaign marks her foray into the brand’s fragrance line.

“Gracie frees herself from predetermined paths, choosing the sincerity of creation over the ease of inheritance,” Du Pré de Saint Maur says of Abrams, who is the daughter of filmmaker J. J. Abrams and producer Katie McGrath. Growing up in the arts gave her not simply access, but a genuine and restless creative spirit. She announced herself in 2019 with debut single Mean It, and has since built into a devoted young following through hit songs like I miss you, I’m sorry.

Du Pré de Saint Maur finds in Abrams something similar to the fragrance’s muse—Gabrielle Chanel herself. “Above all, [what they share] is boldness,” he says. “Gabrielle revolutionised her time by breaking conventions and establishing a stripped-back, fluid style in tune with her era’s desire for freedom. Like Gabrielle before her, Gracie charts her own path, refusing to conform.”

It is the same spirit the Coco Mademoiselle fragrance line, first launched in 2001, has been celebrating for more than two decades. But the Crush Absolu brings that spirit to life in a specific setting—the Parisian café—for the very first time.

“The concept was unmistakably clear—it has to be a Coco Mademoiselle story: a girl who arrives in Paris, completely unprepared, but with great instinct. She makes things happen. That’s the story we’ve always told—but that’s not enough [for a new launch].” Du Pré de Saint Maur says, before showing us two photographs he credits as the first spark behind the campaign’s creation.

“One is from the ’50s, of [American model and actress] Suzy Parker playing pinball in a café. She’s dressed in couture. The people around her are workers. The second image is from the same setting—she’s walking out of the café into the rain with an umbrella, dressed immaculately. I sent both to Joe,’ he says, referring to filmmaker Joe Wright, “and said, ‘that’s the beginning of the story.’”

Neither the photographs nor the campaign position the perfume as its main subject. Yet that deliberate restraint feels quietly apt. Perfume, after all, is rarely the thing you see, but the thing you sense. As Du Pré de Saint Maur puts it: “It’s the effect of a fragrance [that fascinates]: an aura, a way of being that inspires people and brings them together.”

The fragrance opens on a fruity accord of grapefruit and lychee, leading into a floral heart of rose and jasmine. A woody amber base of patchouli anchors the composition, with vanilla notes and vetiver woven throughout.

It is a scent that gives form to the image Du Pré de Saint Maur could not shake. “My obsession was this: a woman absolutely unprepared to walk into what might be the most ordinary, even rough place in the world, wearing couture—and yet immediately relating to the people around her as equals.” He says, “that idea took hold and never let go.”

With no prominent male lead in the film, the campaign’s definition of crush reaches beyond romance—it is the freedom to follow your instincts, and the thrill of a future unknown—much like Coco Chanel arriving in Paris for the first time. What followed was undeniable: “she was the absolute crush of Paris, because she changed things in a way that was changed forever."  

That first instinct, says Du Pré de Saint Maur, is precisely what he hopes the fragrance carries with it. “More often than not, we just push those instincts aside—I really don’t think you should. Never forget why something excited you in the first place.”