How Vanessa Paradis -- French songbird and Chanel's new bird in a gilded cage -- became the new face of Coco.

The young woman in the long-sleeved T-shirt, cinch-waisted jeans, and chunky motorcycle boots looks, at first glance, like any other 19-year-old Parisienne. Only the wide-set grey eyes with their Bardot-style tracing of black eyeliner are a give-away that she is anything but the fille-next-door.

Vanessa Paradis' gaze challenges anyone to suggest she's just another pretty face -- even if, as the new image for Chanel's Coco fragrance, it's an obvious compliment. "Chanel chose me for what I was before," says Paradis, just a tad defensive. "Before" refers to a flourishing five-year career as one of France's most successful pop singers. At 14, Paradis was already warbling her hit song "Joe le Taxi" to packed concert halls all over the country. At 17, she won a Cesar, the French equivalent of an Oscar, for her provocative performance in the film Noce Blanche. And her 1990 album, Variations sur le meme t'aime, recorded in collaboration with France's late, great bad boy of music, Serge Gainsbourg (who died in '91), and promoted by a steamy, award-winning black-and-white video called "Tandem," which bore the coveted signature of sought-after video producer Jean-Baptiste Mondino, earned Paradis universal "cool" status.

But Paradis as Coco? A novel -- but risky -- notion, introduced by Chanel Perfume's artistic director Jacques Helleu as an inspired alternative to Ines de la Fressange, whose dark, aristocratic beauty had incarnated Coco in its advertising since 1985. In 1991, Ines seven-year contract with Chanel finally expired, in the aftermath of a bloody rupture with Karl Lagerfeld. Chanel needed a new face for its fragrance, and Vanessa Paradis -- Azzedine Alaia mini dresses, bee-stung pout, and all -- was it. "Vanessa Paradis is the woman of the '90s," Helleu declares. And, "She's the most charming myth since Brigitte Bardot," echoes Jean-Paul Goude, the director who masterminded the whimsical new Coco ads which will appear in Canada this fall.

Paradis was as surprised as anybody by Chanel's choice. "Associating Paradis with Chanel would be the last thing on anybody's mind -- especially mine," she laughs. But Goude's concept for the new Coco campaign "totally seduced" her. Playing on the idea of Paradis as a bird of paradise (yep. you guessed it: paradis means "paradise" in French), Goude placed Paradis on a trapeze in a gilded cage. Dressed in black fishnets and feathers, and trailing a bottle of Coco in an outstretched hand, she is half-trapeze artist, half-exotic bird in this 30-second commercial -- with a fluffy white cat eyeing her hungrily through the bars. It's a rainy night, and the French doors of a suite in Paris' Hotel Ritz are flung open to the storm. As lightning flashes, the suited figure of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (played by Canadian super model Michelle Legare) is silhouetted, ghost-like, against the stormy sky. The image is haunting, and surprisingly nostalgic for a fragrance that has, up until now, been marketed as resolutely modern.

The "modern" factor in the new Coco equation in undoubtedly Mademoiselle Paradis. She's a singularly contemporary creature, juggling her recently acquired Coco persona ("a one-shot deal" for the moment, she says), with a healthy private life (her boyfriend is also a rock singer in France) and a rich recording career: her first English-language album debuts in North America this month. There's no identity crisis here. When the interviews and photo sessions have subsided, Paradis will return to "what I was before -- the girl who interested Chanel in the first place."

So, the Alaia minis and motorcycle boots will remain in Paradis' closet. Yet, she confesses to owning a few new Chanel outfits -- and of course she's wearing a new scent.