There is a particular kind of casting that feels less like a decision and more like an inevitability. When Chanel announced Jacob Elordi as the new global ambassador for Bleu De Chanel this week, the luxury house was not simply installing a famous face on a beloved bottle. It was making a statement about what masculinity looks like right now, and who gets to define it.
Elordi, the 28-year-old Australian actor who has spent the last several years methodically dismantling any single idea of what he is, steps into the role succeeding Timothée Chalamet, whose tenure gave the fragrance a poet’s melancholy. Elordi brings something different: a physical magnetism shot through with genuine intellectual curiosity, a combination that Chanel’s head of global creative resources for fragrance and beauty, Thomas du Pré de Saint Maur, recognized long before this moment. “I have been following Jacob Elordi’s career for several years, since Euphoria,” du Pré de Saint Maur said. “He perfectly embodies Bleu De Chanel: expressing freedom, mystery, magnetism, and a masculinity that blends modernity with a certain classic elegance.”
The relationship between Elordi and the house did not begin here. In 2024, he appeared alongside Margot Robbie in ‘See You at 5,’ the cinematic short film directed by Luca Guadagnino for Chanel No. 5, a collaboration that left a lasting impression on the brand’s creative leadership. Du Pré de Saint Maur has said that on that very set, he told himself he would love to work with Elordi on a masculine fragrance one day. The new campaign, titled Bleu De Chanel L’Exclusif and set to debut globally in May 2026, was shot by Alfonso Cuarón, the Academy Award-winning director of ‘Gravity’ and ‘Roma,’ bringing a cinematic ambition to the project that Elordi, a man who selects his roles with evident intentionality, clearly found compelling.
“Bleu De Chanel has strong ties to cinema,” Elordi said in the official announcement. “The filmmakers and actors who have collaborated with the House before me are people I deeply respect and admire. Being able to become part of this story is an honor.” The lineage he is entering is not a light one. Martin Scorsese, James Gray, and Steve McQueen have all contributed to the fragrance’s storied advertising history, films that treated a bottle of cologne as worthy of the same creative seriousness as any theatrical release.
The fragrance itself was created by master perfumer Jacques Polge and remains one of the consistently top-selling woody masculine scents across the US and UK. It opens with grapefruit, lemon, mint, and pink pepper before shifting into ginger, nutmeg, and jasmine, finally settling into a base of incense, cedar, vetiver, sandalwood, patchouli, labdanum, and white musk. The brand describes it as possessing “a modern, instinctive masculinity that favors individuality over convention,” a phrase that reads almost as a character description for Elordi himself, whose recent filmography, from an Academy Award-nominated turn as the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Frankenstein’ to Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights,’ suggests a performer as interested in destabilizing expectation as in fulfilling it.
Bleu De Chanel retails for $173 USD and is available now at chanel.com. The full campaign arrives in May.
