L’Eau

I don’t want to know what it takes to look like a smell – to be the perfect amount of sexy and pretty and rock-and-roll. I want to know what the mind’s eye sees when I inhale a fragrance.

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December 22, 2016New York, USA

What I find interesting about a lot of today’s fragrance marketing is that in a valiant effort to offer up a female embodiment perfectly manufactured aesthetic aspiration for their target market to emulate completely (by all calculations), most brands overlook the fact that today’s women are not in blind pursuit of skin-deep selfhood. They already have that. The internet has enabled people to shape the way they are perceived and has provided stimulus and sanctuary for common interests. We’re not lost on superficial identity. Overly polished narratives of abbreviated lust and self-discovery don’t strike any chords with a generation starved of an emotional connection to visual content in an oversaturated marketplace. I don’t want to know what it takes to look like a smell – to be the perfect amount of sexy and pretty and rock-and-roll. I want to know what the mind’s eye sees when I inhale a fragrance. I want to know the sensory experiences attached to being fresh and youthful. And I want others to share in that visceral reaction.

For those reasons, I’m super proud of what our team was able to achieve in this short film I directed with Chanel, in celebration of Chanel No. 5 L’Eau, to close out the year and set a bar for my further exploration into film in 2017.chanel

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DIRECTED BY MARGARET ZHANG

STARRING ROSIE COPPINI @ Chic Management

CINEMATOGRAPHY NICOLE COOPER

PRODUCED BY SAMANTHA BENNETTS

COLLABORATIVE ARTIST LANI MITCHELL

MAKEUP BY VICTORIA BARON FOR CHANEL

HAIR BY ALAN WHITE

SOUNDTRACK BY BEDE BENJAMIN- KORPORAAL

ASSISTED BY ARIANE KHALIL

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About

Margaret Zhang 章凝 is an Australian-born-Chinese filmmaker, photographer, consultant and writer based between New York and Shanghai. Since establishing her website in 2009, Zhang has gone on to work with global brands including CHANEL, Swarovski, YEEZY, Bulgari, Gucci, MATCHES, Under Armour, and Louis Vuitton in a wide range of capacities both in front of and behind the camera, while completing her Bachelor of Commerce/Bachelor of Laws at The University of Sydney. Zhang’s directing, photography, and styling has been employed by the likes of VOGUE, L’Officiel, Harper’s BAZAAR, NOWNESS, and ELLE internationally. She has been listed in Forbes Asia’s 30Under30 and TimeOut’s 40Under40, and her work has been recognized as shaping the international fashion industry by the Business of Fashion BoF500 Index for four consecutive years. CNN has identified Zhang as a leading fashion photographer in Asia and ELLE named her the region’s most influential digital voice. She went on to be the first Asian face to cover ELLE Australia. In 2016, she co-founded BACKGROUND, a global consultancy for which she specialises in Western-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-Western cultural bridging for a range of luxury, lifestyle, and brand initiatives. In 2017, she exhibited a series of 39 unseen photographic works as a solo show in Sydney, and premiered her first short film – a 15-minute exploration of her visceral relationship with classical music on both performance and abstract planes – to critical acclaim. In 2018, co-curated the first annual FOREFRONT Summit focused on inter-industry problem-solving at all scales of business. From this king summit, Zhang developed FOREFRONT+ – a round table series of candid conversations covering subject matters of universal concern. In 2019, THE FACE Magazine engaged Zhang as Creative-Director-at-Large for Asia for its relaunch. Zhang is currently working on her first feature film.