Vintage name and a vintage ad, but Chanel No 5 embodies modern

Luxury branding - don't you just love it? There's something riveting about the luxury trades coming to the boil so spectacularly, just as everything economic is going to hell in a handcart.

The luxury industry - that's what they call themselves in their international conventions now - has been on a roll for 20 years and more. There was a tricky moment in the early Nineties with the Japanese recession and all that, but the luxury boys stormed back for the dot-com and 21st- century booms.

As the seriously rich began to breed like rabbits in places we'd barely thought about - obviously in the Big Boom countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) but in all sorts of other places too - so the exotic brands boomed behind them.

The luxury trades help the less evolved sort of global New Money to say who they are. The goods that the "look I'm rich" types buy in the Borat Badlands of Eastern Europe and the factory towns of new China are the biggest, most bling and the most "legibly branded" - huge logos everywhere - things those brands sell. It's precisely the stuff they couldn't sell to the original Versailles "jolies madames". But now the luxury goods houses don't care much about Old Europe because they're opening a flagship somewhere in South East Asia practically every second.

All this growth, like the spectacular growth in wealth it has tracked, has meant compromises. For the luxury goods houses, it meant risking aesthetics and quality. If you could make super- normal profits - in places your original customers would hopefully never see, selling to people they'd never meet - then the huge temptation was to give them what they wanted. You could talk it up in post-modern ways as posh-pop reworkings of rapper or footballer style, but the truth was that it was often jaw-droppingly vulgar. The shareholders liked it, the designers didn't. (The designers and the big byline fashion journalists themselves still mostly dress like candidates for Holy Orders.)

And 30 years ago a certain kind of brand meant a certain kind of material, make and finish, sold to people who were assumed to know the difference. But under shareholder pressure to make super-normal mar-gins, there's been a move to outsource across the world.

The Chanel No. 5 commercial was "launched" in 2004, when the last global boom was getting into vertical take-off, as a sort of feature film. It starred global, $20m-a-film star Nicole Kidman, and it was made by film director Baz Luhrmann, who'd recently directed her in 'Moulin Rouge'. By all accounts it cost film-like money - Kidman got several million for several minutes' work. But Chanel has got value from it because it was run again in December - four years' trans- mission to every mud hut and igloo across the world.

High-design companies don't really trust advertising agencies - they'd far rather employ a known film maker or photographer directly. They want pure high impact, however off-strategy and however mad it seems. The veteran No. 5 commercial does look mad as a snake and daft as a brush. It's melodramatic, high camp - Kidman escapes her red-carpet life in an enormous dress of pink ostrich feathers - and it presents Chanel as the sort of world-domination organisation based somewhere like the Thirties gothic Chrysler building in New York.

The Chanel history is fascinating - the original designs, the charges of collaboration, Karl Lagerfeld, the lot - but the scent so I'm told, is old-fashioned, heavy and, worst of all, leaves a vapour trail.

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