Gracie Abrams Just Shh Chanel’s Newest Instinct

The singer-songwriter is the new face of Coco Mademoiselle Crush Absolu, a fragrance built around a woman who moves before she thinks twice.

Gracie Abrams spent July releasing an album named after the version of herself she used to apologize for. She spent July 15 finding out Chanel wanted that version too.

The French house named the 26 year old singer-songwriter its new égérie, or face, for Coco Mademoiselle Crush Absolu, a bolder amber reworking of one of its most enduring fragrance franchises. The announcement landed a little over a month before Daughter from Hell, Abrams’ third studio album, arrived on July 17 through Interscope Records, and Chanel did not pretend the timing was incidental. The campaign leans directly into the album’s title and the persona built around it: a woman who follows instinct over instruction, and who apparently smells like it too.

Gracie Abrams Behind Steamy Glass In Warm Light

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Crush Absolu is not a standalone launch so much as a deepening of a lineage. Coco Mademoiselle itself dates back to 2001, when Chanel’s then house perfumer Jacques Polge built it as a scent for a younger generation of women stepping into Gabrielle Chanel‘s world on their own terms. It has spun off several variations since, most recently L’Eau Privée, a hushed, nighttime interpretation released roughly six years ago. Crush Absolu goes the opposite direction. Where L’Eau Privée whispered, this one is built to announce itself.

The formula comes from Jacques Polge’s son, Olivier Polge, who has held the in-house perfumer-creator role at Chanel since 2015. He has described Crush Absolu as an intense, ambery composition designed to fill a room quickly and register the presence of the person wearing it, rather than unfolding slowly over the course of a day. The scent opens on a brightness of grapefruit and lychee, moves into a mid of rose and jasmine, and settles into a base built from patchouli, vetiver, and vanilla. Polge has framed the fragrance as an act of self-affirmation more than adornment, something closer to a decision than an accessory. It retails for $195 as an eau de parfum.

That idea, a scent as a decision rather than a decoration, is the entire premise of the campaign built around it.

It is also, notably, only the second full new addition to the Coco Mademoiselle line in a decade. Chanel treats its major fragrance franchises with a slowness that borders on reverence, releasing flankers rarely and only after long internal debate about whether a new formula actually earns a place in the family rather than simply diluting it. Olivier Polge inherited that caution directly from his father, having spent years working alongside Jacques Polge before formally taking over the in-house perfumer-creator role, and Crush Absolu carries some of that lineage’s fingerprints even as it pushes the scent somewhere louder. The grapefruit and lychee opening is new to the family; the rose, jasmine, and patchouli architecture underneath it is not, a deliberate throughline meant to keep Crush Absolu legible as a Coco Mademoiselle scent rather than a fragrance that happens to share its name.

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Chanel’s own lang around the announcement leaned hard into a comparison most brands reach for eventually and rarely earn: the new face as a spiritual echo of the founder herself. Thomas du Pré de Saint Maur, the house’s head of global creative resources for fragrance and beauty, framed Abrams as someone who “asserts herself without artifice, driven by a fierce sense of freedom and an instinctive elegance,” language that pointed directly at Gabrielle Chanel’s own reputation for arriving somewhere she wasn’t expected and setting the terms once she got there.

It is a big claim to hang on a pop musician a little over three years into a major label career, except Abrams’ relationship with the house did not start with this campaign. She sat front row at her first Chanel show in 2022 and has stayed a fixture at the maison ever since, wearing custom Chanel to red carpets and the Met Gala and becoming, earlier this year, the face of the brand’s Coco Crush fine jewelry line alongside a small group of other ambassadors. Chanel celebrated that jewelry milestone with a dinner at Los Angeles’ Chateau Marmont in January, where Abrams told press she gravitates toward Chanel pieces she can imagine pairing with an ordinary pair of jeans, an answer that says as much about how the house has positioned her as anything written in a press release.

For her part, Abrams described the new role in terms that sound less like a marketing talking point and more like someone still processing it. “It’s unreal to be the new face of Coco Mademoiselle, I feel an immense sense of pride,” she said in Chanel’s announcement. “I love that Coco is someone who leaves a mark everywhere she goes. Sometimes, I wish I could be more like her.”

The Coco Crush jewelry role that preceded this one is worth dwelling on, because it shows how deliberately Chanel appears to have built up to a fragrance campaign of this size rather than handing it to her cold. That earlier campaign, called Hide and Seek and directed by Gordon von Steiner, put Abrams alongside a small cast of other young ambassadors including Mona Tougaard, Qun Ye, Mathilda Gvarliani, and Akon Changkou, treating her as one face among several rather than the center of the story. The Coco Mademoiselle Crush Absolu campaign is a clear step up in scale and singularity, built entirely around her, and it arrives after roughly four years of Abrams showing up consistently enough at Chanel’s own events, from runway front rows to the Chateau Marmont dinner, that the house’s decision to hand her a flagship fragrance reads less like a sudden bet and more like a promotion.

 

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The campaign proper arrived roughly a month after the announcement, in the form of a two and a half minute film directed by Joe Wright, the British filmmaker known for Atonement and Pride & Prejudice, now applying the same instinct for tension and release to a perfume ad. It opens on Abrams in a glam chair, styled almost unrecognizably: long flowing hair extensions, winged eyeliner stretched nearly to her temples, dressed for a function she has clearly not chosen to attend. Before she reaches the event, she rips off the wig and wipes away the eyeliner. One spray of the fragrance, and she is out the door before the car has finished pulling up to the curb.

What follows is less a perfume commercial than a small chase sequence. Her driver arrives at the party and finds no one in the back seat. Paparazzi wait outside, and she is nowhere to be found. She sheds the formal, camera-ready version of herself for a white beaded slip dress and disappears into a local Parisian bar instead, where she dances on tables, plays a round of pinball, and gets passed overhead by a crowd that has no idea it is standing inside an ad campaign. It is styled less like glamour and more like relief, the fragrance positioned as the thing that lets her stop performing.

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Chanel has a long institutional habit of design fragrance with a specific person or character in mind before a face is ever cast, and the house has framed Crush Absolu the same way, describing Abrams as arriving at something the scent was already built to hold rather than being handed a finished product to represent. Whether that sequencing happened exactly as described is the kind of thing brands are rarely transparent about, but the campaign’s internal logic depends on it: a fragrance about instinct needed a face who could plausibly claim to run on it, and Abrams, mid pivot from beloved-but-cautious pop ingenue to the self-declared daughter from hell, arrived at the right moment to make that case.

 

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It also continues a specific Coco Mademoiselle tradition of pairing the fragrance with actresses and performers positioned as modern, self-possessed extensions of Gabrielle Chanel’s own persona, going back to Keira Knightley‘s 2006 campaign film reimagining the founder’s early life. Abrams is the first musician to front the specific Crush Absolu iteration, arriving into that lineage carrying a very different kind of public persona: not an actress playing at reinvention, but a songwriter who has spent three albums publicly narrating her own.

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None of this is happening in a hush length of Abrams’ career, which is very much the point Chanel appears to be making by attaching itself to her right now. Daughter from Hell, co-written and co-produced with her longtime convincer Aaron Dessner, arrived July 17 as her third studio album and the follow-up to 2024’s The Secret of Us, a record that produced the double-platinum-adjacent hit “That’s So True” and put her on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour as an opener. The new album’s lead single, “Hit the Wall,” dropped in mid-May, and Abrams has described the record as the most personally connected she has felt to any project she has released, telling press earlier in the year that she considers her albums time capsules of exactly where she is at any given point in her life.

That framing tracks closely with how she has talked about the Chanel campaign itself, and with what Coco Mademoiselle Crush Absolu is built to be: not a costume, but a marker of wherever she happens to actually be standing. Chanel’s own campaign copy describes the fragrance as something meant to accompany “every movement, every risk, every desire,” lang that could just as easily describe a tracklist as a perfume brief. Either Chanel timed the announcement to ride the album’s momentum or the two rollouts simply collided on the calendar, the pairing reads less like coincidence and more like two teams describing the same person from different rooms.

It has been a fast climb to this particular moment. Abrams released her debut album, Good Riddance, in February 2023 to a comparatively modest chart placement, and followed it a year later with The Secret of Us, which shot to number two on the Billboard 200 and topped charts outright in Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the UK. That album’s biggest singles, “I Love You, I’m Sorry” and “That’s So True,” have each cleared a billion streams on Spotify, and its Taylor Swift collaboration “us” earned Abrams a Grammy nomination for best pop duo or group performance. She picked up New Artist of the Year at the AMAs on the strength of that run, opened for Swift’s Eras Tour, and headlined arenas of her own in the process, all before Daughter from Hell had a title.

Chanel Flagship Store At 31 Rue Cambon In Paris

Abrams is currently expected to tour behind the new album via the Look at My Life Tour, with dates stretching from a December kickoff in Denver into the following spring, including a stop in Barcelona to close out the run. The Crush Absolu campaign, in the meantime, is rolling out across Chanel’s own channels alongside the fragrance’s global retail launch, positioning Abrams’ face on Coco Mademoiselle counters at roughly the same moment her voice is filling arenas built for an entirely different kind of audience to meet her in.

For more from the artist’s current chapter, read Drift’s review of Gracie Abrams’ “Good Reason”.