Why Vintage?
Imagine if a first edition of your favorite book slowly disintegrated each time you read it. You might be able to buy another copy at a yard sale or online, but sooner or later, there wouldn’t be a single copy left. And let’s say, because of a quirk in paper and ink, there was no way to copy its words. What imaginary worlds that reflect back and teach us about our own would be lost forever?
Sadly, this is the fate of many major and minor classic perfumes of the twentieth century, perfumes that have revealed through their liquid language how women and men lived, what they aspired to, and what was forbidden to them. Because perfumes go out of style, change formulas, or get discontinued, most of these mini novels written in liquid will simply disappear.
The threats to perfume come from multiple directions. Sometimes, brands decide to discontinue a fragrance because it doesn’t do well initially. This was the fate of two recent masterpieces: Jacques Cavallier’s Le Feu d’Issey for Issey Miyake (1998) and Isabelle Doyen’s Eau du Fier for Annick Goutal (2000). Reformulations of classic fragrances happen all the time, and because of industry secrecy, consumers simply discover on their own that the new bottle of their favorite perfume smells different. Sometimes the reformulations are by necessity. For example, birch tar was banned by IFRA (The International Fragrance Association), so Guerlain had to eliminate it from their formula for Shalimar. Perfumes are often reformulated to cut costs, using less expensive ingredients than in the original. In other cases, some perfumes are tweaked to conform to prevailing styles.
Whatever the case, Givaudan perfumer Jean Guichard recently made a confession that the perfume industry has never owned up to before: Perfumes do in fact get reformulated. He confirmed what every perfume lover who has ever picked up a new bottle of an old favorite and failed to recognize it already knows. “Consumers know their perfume better than any expert,” Guichard said. “We say nothing to consumers, but they notice when their fragrance has been changed.”
By January 2010, IFRA had instituted a ban on a long list of perfume ingredients crucial to iconic perfumes such as Chanel No. 5, Joy, and Mitsouko. This prompted Paris-based perfume historian Octavian Coifan to declare that “twentieth-century perfumery will become history.” The situation is looking even more dire now. At the time of this writing, in 2013, the EU is proposing severer restrictions on even more natural ingredients used in perfumery, to which perfumer Frédéric Malle of Éditions de Parfums de Frédéric Malle has responded, “If this law goes ahead I am finished, as my perfumes are all filled with these ingredients.” He speaks for most perfume lovers, for whom perfume is more than an accessory—it is personal memory, cultural history, and art.
Perfume is inherently fragile and evanescent, but these regulations that were affecting the very DNA of perfume made seeking out vintage perfume even more urgent for me: Time was running out to discover their disappearing styles and stories. I wanted to smell as many vintage perfumes as I could before they were gone forever. Thanks to eBay, estate sales, Ye Olde Junque Shoppes, online purveyors, and decanted samples from readers of my blog, Yesterday’s Perfume, many of these originals became mine. As I was collecting vintage, I was still seeking out contemporary perfume, but I felt there was time to learn about the new.
My obsession started off small—a decant of vintage perfume here, a bid on a full bottle of perfume on eBay there. But the flame soon grew into a conflagration, if not a full-scale, five-alarm fire, stoked by perfume books, blogs and forums, and conversations with other perfume lovers. Ironically, I would come to learn a great deal from most of my scent interlocutors through the pale light of my computer screen, my love for something so visceral facilitated through the virtual. Soon enough, my romance with what Octavian Coifan calls the “Eighth Art” was in full bloom.
Take a Whiff on the Wild Side
It was a few years ago when I was the editor of a women’s pop-culture website that I started writing about perfume on my blog, Yesterday’s Perfume. The office manager would bring me packages of perfume I’d ordered online, and during breaks from blogging about celebrity hookups or the latest birth-control method, I’d rip them open at my desk. Trying to be discreet in the middle of an open office, I’d pop open a tiny one-milliliter vial of the decanted perfume du jour and dab it on my wrist with its plastic wand. Then, in a ritual that has become as common as having a meal or reading a book, I’d lift my wrist to my nose, close my eyes, and sniff, like a deranged junkie getting her fix.
In that work environment, it would have been appropriate for me to wear perfume in a style that has been popular since the 1990s: the office scent. Usually with citrus notes or oceanic accords that stay close to the skin—notes that project little more than “clean”—an office scent’s raison d’être is to avoid being offensive. It plays well with others. By definition, it is institutional and conformist. CK One, Calvin Klein’s 1994 unisex hit, is the perfect example of an office scent. “CK One,” writes one commenter on Basenotes.net, “prolongs that feeling of being washed and clean.” Another fan says, “This is the ONE true fragrance that could just be worn by practically anyone on earth, including newborn babies.”
As I became bored with office life, my rebellion took an invisible—but odoriferous—turn. I didn’t want to smell clean, I didn’t want to blend in, and I certainly didn’t want to smell like a newborn baby. My perfume tastes began to wander over to the wrong side of the tracks, looking for the rude, the louche, and the difficult. I wanted an anti-office scent, a perfume that would flip office culture the bird and throw a smelly Molotov cocktail through the window for good measure.
I found myself drawn to Difficult-Smelling Perfumes that subverted the clean perfume trend. Among them were vintage perfumes that took me to distant lands and told me stories about fur-clad, misbehaving women who smoked; “animalic,” erotic perfumes that smelled like unwashed bodies and deliberately overturned trite and outdated gender conventions in perfume.
In my honeymoon period with perfume, I fell in love many times. Take Bandit, Robert Piguet’s 1944 perfume for women. Its composer, Germaine Cellier—former model, reputed lesbian, and legendary iconoclast of scent—was the rare female perfumer, celebrated for her daring overdoses of extreme perfume notes. Her masterpiece, Bandit, a green leather perfume for women, was said to have been inspired by the scent of female models changing their undergarments backstage at fashion shows. Whether in fact “odor di femina” was its inspirational referent, Bandit offered a subversive olfactory ideal of femininity: It smelled like the unholy union of a bitter, snapped green flower stem, an overturned ashtray, and a leather whip freshly smacked against someone’s skin. Bandit wasn’t a demure, come-hither scent; it was a masked dominatrix lashing you with her crop. Bandit was introduced to the public during a Robert Piguet fashion show. In a fitting debut for this extreme, provocative scent, models dressed as pirates brandished weapons, and the show ended as a model smashed a bottle of Bandit on the runway, turning on her heels as this gorgeous, bitter, butch perfume filled the air.
Chanel No. 19 (1971) was gentler in its seductions. Rather than slap me with a new and shocking scent, it lulled me into an opiate-like dream state. It unfolded before me, smelling of wet earth and vegetal freshness, inducing visions of a dim, damp forest. Its magical forest intimated—now stay with me on this one—that it was populated with fairy-tale witches casting spells both good and bad. Chanel No. 19 made me realize that a well-made perfume is a Mute Invisible Cinema, with its own mise-en-scène, characters, atmosphere, and even narrative. How it conjured these poetic scenes and moods through perfume notes is a testament both to the limbic system—the part of the brain that processes memory and emotion—and to perfumer Henri Robert’s ability to manipulate it with scent molecules.
A great perfume also invites us to shore up all of our senses…
As the oldest part of the brain, the limbic system connects the brain’s higher and lower functions, and it has a privileged relationship to scent. The amygdala, one organ of that multipart limbic system, is responsible not only for helping to produce emotional responses to sensory stimuli like odors or sounds, but also for making connections between the senses. (Only two synapses separate the olfactory nerve from the amygdala.)
One drop of interesting perfume can prompt the amygdala to flood us with an emotional response. A great perfume also invites us to shore up all of our senses, to borrow their metaphors to make perfume’s story more legible, its cinema more visible. These metaphors help to translate the dizzying complexities of emotional, cognitive, and aesthetic responses that perfume can prompt.
One could argue that that the visions and moods Chanel No. 19 induced were courtesy of the limbic system’s synesthesia-simulating influence. In synesthesia, the neurological condition that produces cross-sensory perception, the synesthete may taste shapes, hear colors, or see sounds. Although only about 5 percent of the population has this intriguing “disorder,” perfume could be said to be an inherently synesthesia-prompting—or at least, simulating—object. The almost druglike, hallucinatory quality of a particularly intense perfume can inspire feelings and visions in even the most buttoned up among us. Every perfume lover has, at one point, experienced and then translated a scent synesthetically, via color (“It smells green”), sound (“It’s high-pitched”), shapes (“It seems round”), taste (“It smells sweet”), and even touch (“This scent has texture.”). Even the oft-heard critique that perfume reviewers write “purple prose” is a synesthetic metaphor!
Unlike Chanel No. 19’s Mute Invisible Cinema, Christian Dior’s 1972 perfume Diorella was an impassioned philosophical argument in perfume form. Its disquieting, overripe melon note reminded me (just momentarily) of an overheated dumpster during a New York City summer, with its sweet, sweaty smell of flowers, fruit rinds, and meat scraps mingling in their first, fetid blush of decay. Of course Diorella didn’t smell like this right away, and some people might not smell anything unusual at all. But that overripe, almost rotting smell, like a microexpression—the fleeting expression on someone’s face that reveals an unconscious, near-imperceptible, and perhaps unsavory truth—gave the perfume character. Perfumer Edmond Roudnitska, in the form of perfume rather than a philosophical treatise, teaches us that ripe smells connote death as much as they do life, and that in fact it’s the mortality of bright and alive things that makes them—and Diorella—beautiful.
Not all of the subversive scents that took me to the Wild Side were vintage. Some contemporary perfumers were pushing their creations into more daring olfactory and cultural directions than the prevailing cult of clean perfumes. Serge Lutens’s Muscs Koublaï Khän (1998), composed by Christopher Sheldrake, emerged repeatedly in online perfume forums as the bad boy of niche perfumes, gossiped about like a dude with a bad reputation. Like all bad boys, there was the good (“Perfection!” “My favorite olfactory pet”) mixed in with the bad (“The way your crotch would smell after dumping talcum powder down your shorts and running the Phoenix marathon”). In the case of Muscs Koublaï Khän, I came to discover that both of these descriptions were true, and both were compliments.
The dirty animal to CK One’s freshly washed baby, Muscs Koublaï Khän smelled like wet fur and unwashed hair and bodies, combined with the faintest, softest hint of sweet wild honey and powdery pollen. Its combination of conventional floral notes with animalic notes also evoked the smell of a man who had just taken a shower and decided to exercise without deodorant, the metallic twang of his body odor, ripe with olfactory facets of cumin, fecal civet, and hamster cage radiating through the fresh, powdery soap he’d just used.
This elegant brute of a perfume, like a pungent bohunk from a Harlequin Romance novel, had truly swept me off my feet. Its atavistic embrace of animalic base notes (albeit in synthetic form) hearkened back to vintage perfume styles, and even to the nineteenth-century dandy’s love of the animal-derived perfume ingredients musk, civet, castoreum, and ambergris. Muscs Koublaï Khän was released by the exclusive brand Les Salons du Palais Royal Shiseido in 1998, a few years after the crystalline transparency of Bulgari’s Au Thé Vert Au Parfumée (1992) and the unisex clarity of Calvin Klein’s CK One (1994). A true dissident in the House of Clean, Muscs Koublaï Khän signaled a return of impolite bodily smells in perfume, smells that had flourished up until the late 1970s, when their popularity began to wane.
In this 1955 ad for Ambush, a well-dressed woman wearing Ambush—and a tiny smirk—awaits her prey like a spider on a web.
Once I was done sniffing Muscs Koublaï Khän, I did what any perfumista worth her salt would do next. I went deeper, and got hazed at the queer, punk Parisian frat house État Libre d’Orange (“Free State of Orange”) via its truly outrageous perfume, Sécrétions Magnifiques, a perfume whose original bottle announced its contents with a charming cartoon rendition of an ejaculating penis.
Sécrétions Magnifiques starts off innocuously enough with a soft, floral note. But things get weird very quickly, as the scent of blood, sweat, and semen—shocking biological accords never before used in perfume—arrive like an assault to the senses. This “olfactory coitus,” according to Sécrétions Magnifiques’s original website copy, smells like “like blood, sweat, sperm, and saliva … when masculine tenseness frees a rush of adrenaline in a cascade of high-pitched aldehydic notes.” If animal notes are the erotica of vintage perfumes, Sécrétions Magnifiques’s biological accords are the new millennium’s first olfactory pornography, exposing body parts where they were earlier merely suggested and using olfaction to turn the body inside out.
SM (note the abbreviation, referencing sadomasochism) smells like fresh spunk, and, as many traumatized sniffers have remarked, also like a car accident or a hospital emergency room. Lest you still aren’t quite getting the gist of how impolite this scent is, even Perfumes: The Guide writer Luca Turin, who found the scent inoffensive and even pretty, remarked on its “bilge” note, a word that describes stagnant water that gathers at the base of a ship.
Civet. Musk. Rotten fruit. Women’s underpants. Dirty ashtrays. Blood. This catalog of smells might seem out of place in a positive discussion of perfume, but all of these scents became metaphors for everything my modern, sterile office life lacked. In the virtual, deodorized, homogenized, and antiseptic world I felt myself dissolving into, these Things That Stink felt alive. As my journey through twentieth-century perfume continued, I began to see that even though perfume is thought of in the popular imagination as something to cover up our bad smells, in many ways, it can also be a meditation on the human body, if not an outright celebration of its riotous odors. A strange little book from the 1930s, Odoratus Sexualis, confirmed my suspicion. Its author Iwan Bloch claims that the animal notes in perfume were often used to highlight the body’s ripe and erotic odors rather than to cover them up.
The popularity of certain smells is cyclical, like hemlines and silhouettes in fashion. The nineteenth century’s popular “soliflore”—or single-note floral scent—was replaced by a new “abstract” perfume style. These abstract perfumes that didn’t attempt to mimic nature were made possible thanks to newly available synthetic perfume ingredients. Dirty, erotic animal notes that were popular in the mid-nineteenth century came back in the early part of the twentieth century and stuck around until even the 1980s, only to give way to the so-called “clean” fragrances of the 1990s. In the virtual Internet Age, perfume became disembodied, and the “baseness” of these base notes was repressed.
These cycles of taste mirror the arbitrary and ever shifting role of gender in perfume—the idea that certain scents are either masculine or feminine. If men wore violet perfumes in the nineteenth century and women wore tobacco and leather perfumes in the 1930s—styles whose “gender” has since been reversed—this seems like more proof in perfume form that gender, like perfume, is fluid, culturally constructed, and wearable in multiple forms on variable bodies.
Smell Bent: The Subculture of Perfume Lovers and the Resurgence of Scent
It’s a strange time for perfume. Laws are being created to ban fragrance in the workplace and in public spaces. The International Fragrance Association (IFRA), the regulatory body that is financed by scent makers such as Givaudan, IFF (International Flavors and Fragrances), and Symrise, is creating increasingly tighter restrictions and banning outright the use of important natural perfume ingredients for fear of their allergenic properties. But perfume is also experiencing a rebirth in the twenty-first century. Books like Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez’s Perfumes: The Guide and Chandler Burr’s The Perfect Scent have created a new audience of informed perfume lovers. A burgeoning group of niche perfumers is providing alternatives to mass-market scents. And the Internet is awash with perfume blogs written by amateur and expert perfume lovers from all over the world. With names like I Smell Therefore I Am, Perfume Posse, Now Smell This, and Australian Perfume Junkies, these blogs indicate an interest in the olfactory that seems to belie the idea that we live in scent-hostile times.
These perfume-centric online spaces—predominantly feminine and queer—represent a veritable subculture of women and men bonding over scent by discussing the aesthetics of perfume, and by reminiscing about scents they and their loved ones wore. People have always been interested in perfume, but an aesthetic and almost academic interest in perfume, a fascination with noncommercial brands, and the desire to talk about perfume seems to be something new altogether. In the past, you might have been encouraged to have a signature scent, or to buy the latest from Chanel, but you wouldn’t have been encouraged to know, as many perfume lovers do now, what aldehydes are, what the first perfume to have a synthetic ingredient in it was, or which “nose” created Chanel No. 5.
It’s a strange time for perfume
While the more conventional want to snatch up the ever-growing number of pseudo-celebrity scents (Paris Hilton’s Heiress, anyone, or Jersey Shore alum Snooki’s latest perfume?), a thriving group of olfactory rebels is seeking out vintage perfumes like Guerlain’s 1919 Mitsouko, or niche perfumes like CB I Hate Perfume’s Old Fur Coat, perfumes that challenge the idea of fragrance as mere ornament. These rebels exist alongside the perfume devotees intent on securing a place for classic twentieth-century perfumes in the pantheon, educating nascent perfume lovers, disseminating esoteric perfume history, and assuring perfume’s neglected cultural status as high art.
The Internet largely accounts for this burgeoning scent subculture by providing perfume education via blogs and forums; online marketplaces for full bottles and decants (milliliter-sized samples), so that perfume lovers can get a whiff of obscure and even vintage scents; perfume swaps on perfume forums between participants; and a community with whom they can discuss perfume. An introduction to the twentieth century’s greatest perfumes is often just a computer click away.
Smelling has become a serious hobby for some, and they’re championing our least-understood and oft-maligned sense. An interest in unconventional perfumes, in our virtual, computer-addicted, celeb-obsessed, and deodorized age, can be read as an act of cultural subversion. I have engaged in dialogue with these scent subversives over the past few years, and I proudly count myself among them.
Scent Is Subversive
Smell is an anarchist among our more socially reputable and mediated senses of vision, hearing, touch, and even taste. It is direct, instantaneous, and nonrational, and it provides data that can elicit in us the primal and the mysterious: sexual desire, appetite, emotion, fear, and memory. Smell bypasses the thalamus and penetrates into the oldest, most primitive part of the brain—the rhinencephalon, also known as the “nose brain” or the “olfactory brain.” The limbic system, the seat of our emotions and memories, resides in this “nose brain,” implicitly challenging the notion that there should be a hierarchy of senses, with smell at the bottom.
Since antiquity, our sense of smell has been both denigrated and exalted, viewed by philosophers with disdain yet also deemed sacred, incorporated for centuries into religious ceremonies and rituals connected to prayer and burial. Aristotle considered smell to be our least distinguished sense, dismissing it as fleeting, hard to analyze, and subordinate to emotion. For Plato, smells have no names and can only be defined relatively, in terms of other smells. Scent’s association with animal instinct and sexuality compounds its unsavory reputation.
Psychologist Wilhelm Fliess (1858–1928) believed that there was a close relationship between the nose and the genitals. Sigmund Freud saw a connection between sexual repression and evolved human beings’ diminished sense of smell, concluding that an atrophied olfactory ability was a precondition of civilization. Scent can be the invisible demarcation line that divides classes, ethnicities, and races. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell argued that there are many prejudices we can get over, but smell repulsion is one of the most difficult.
“A bold fragrance? Perhaps, but why not let your perfume say the things you would not dare to?”
—PRIMITIF PERFUME AD BY MAX FACTOR (1956)
“There is something carnal about scent,” perfumer Christophe Laudamiel says. “When you look at a picture, you don’t feel the picture is inside you … Scent goes inside you because you have to breathe and because it’s made of molecules. So if I smell melon, there is a little bit of melon that comes inside of me so that I can detect it … If I look at La Joconde (Mona Lisa), I don’t feel like I’m swallowing La Joconde. So there is this extra feeling that makes scent maybe even more sexual, cannibalistic, or engaging.” The intensity and immediacy of smells can become, then, both the source of our fear and the source of their magic.
As a medium that addresses our often-maligned sense of smell, perfume is an inherently subversive art that has a rare opportunity to “speak” to us in its visceral language of aromatic notes. Yet sexism clearly contributes to perfume’s low status in our culture. In spite of the growing market for men’s scents, perfume is still considered a feminine art, a woman’s accessory, and, sadly, we still live in a culture in which that audience alone discredits it.
With their seminal books on perfume, Luca Turin, Tania Sanchez, and Chandler Burr have worked hard to turn around perfume’s status as cultural detritus and to give scent its due as an art just as complex, constructed, or deliberate as painting, music, or architecture. Calling perfumes “chemical poems” and emphasizing their aesthetics, Turin perhaps went in an extreme direction away from the usual discourse about perfume’s relation to memory, sex, and emotion in order to make a case for perfume as art. As if pleading with Aristotle and Plato on their terms, he claims in The Secret of Scent that perfume is not about memory or sex, but rather beauty and intelligence. And Chandler Burr has gone one step further in attempting to raise perfume’s cultural status by literally getting perfume its own museum wing. Thanks to his efforts, in the fall of 2012, NYC’s Museum of Art and Design devoted a portion of its space to an olfactory art exhibit that explored the aesthetics of 12 pivotal twentieth-century perfumes. But are memory, sex, and emotion separate from perfume’s aesthetics? Does perfume need this cultural elevation to be taken seriously?
The paradox and beauty of perfume is that it operates on multiple levels: the rational and the irrational; the visceral, the cognitive, and the aesthetic. Perfume’s power is that it has one foot in the elevated world of language, and one foot in the primal, emotional, and dreamlike. Perfumer Olivia Giacobetti celebrates perfume’s liminal status when she says that “Perfume is the language closest to the unconscious.”
We get cognitive pleasure from perfume. The pleasures of scent are not simply derived from emotions, sex, and gut reactions; they also comes from the satisfaction we get from decoding the meaning of fragrance. Perfume, as a synesthetic object, invites us to process it in a variety of languages, to indulge in synesthesia by translating perfume into shapes, colors, musical pitches, moods, visions, textures, personae, and even narratives. Yet for some, scent cannot enter the hallowed halls of Art. In The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton argues that smell cannot be art because it doesn’t inspire cognition; all it can do, he says, is to provoke nostalgia or memories. But smell scientist and author Avery Gilbert, and any other serious perfume lover, would beg to differ. “Contrary to conventional wisdom,” Gilbert argues on his blog FirstNerve.com, “especially among psychologists who should know better, olfaction is very cognitive. It requires attention, memory, comparison, naming and judgment. There is, after all, a thinking brain behind the smelling nose.”
It seems to me that efforts to elevate perfume to the level of art, worthy of recognition by arbiters of culture, ignore the fact that perfume doesn’t need their imprimatur. The way that scents are loved, disseminated, and analyzed on the wild, wild web nowadays suits its anarchic, nonhierarchical, and antiauthoritarian form. If the medium is the message, perfume’s message is subversive. It doesn’t need validation or ratification; its power is in the underground.
Perfume’s resurgence reflects a profound pendulum swing in our culture that marketers and branders might describe as a desire for authenticity. Perfume offers materiality in the Internet age of disembodied virtuality, an economy of touch, interactivity, and sensuality. In a pornified culture that has raised the visual to the apex of importance in sexuality, perfume shifts the focus of the erotic to the suggestive, the poetic, and the invisible.
There is no denying that perfume is a discourse aimed largely at women, providing a space in which they can express their erotic selves invisibly, autoerotically, and homosocially. Online perfume forums and blogs become occasions for women to talk to other women about their desires, appetites, and histories. It doesn’t take long for a discussion of perfume to wander into a memory of what one person wore in high school, or the scent of their mother or father or first lover.
Some perfumes are subversive because they threaten the American regime of clean and its corollary, scentphobia, by elevating dirty, animal, and bodily smells. “Americans,” Luca Turin has said, “are dedicated to the proposition that shit shouldn’t stink.” He’s not exaggerating by much. If you’re like most people in the United States, you’ve been encouraged to neglect your sense of smell. Like children who have retained a childish fear of foreignness, who associate smell with things dirty and unclean, and who think that everyone else’s home smells like cooked cabbage, you might have been taught to avoid smells. Perhaps you fear the smell of strange neighborhoods or cities, unfamiliar cooking smells, body odor (sadly, even your own!), and maybe, unless it’s antibacterial soap or shampoo, you fear anything that smells. A foray into the wild, wondrous world of perfume can help change that, as it did for me.
In our celebrity-obsessed, perfection-seeking, conventionally aspirational society, perfume invites us to embrace alternative values: the louche, the queer, and the decadent. Subversive perfumes in an already subversive medium posit an indie aesthetic that values art over commerce, niche over blockbuster, and individualism over conformity.
Smell is our underground sense and links us to sex, emotion, memory, and those messy things our allegedly logical culture tries to repress. In other words, scent is subversive, and Scent and Subversion is both a record and a reflection of my journey through twentieth-century perfume.
I view perfume as an aesthetic object of pop culture that is worthy of analysis, shaped by and shaping the culture in which it is embedded. Perfume is a language whose speech is worth learning and unpacking as one would a poem, book, or film. Scent is a path to getting closer to our senses, to instinct, and to our bodies and the earth at a time when those attachments are threatened. As I write this, Google Glasses are promising—or threatening, depending on your position on the ever-increasing encroachment of technology into our lives—to “bring information closer to your senses” by mediating our experience in the most extreme way to date, filling our sight lines with virtual information. As if we need to be even more divorced from our senses!
In Part I of Scent and Subversion, I discuss the path that led me to perfume and the exciting rise in scent-centric culture, including the online communities that continue to facilitate it.
Part II includes descriptions and histories of more than three hundred vintage perfumes, decade by decade, from Jicky to Demeter’s Laundromat (2000), covering drugstore as well as haute perfumes. (A perfume can be considered vintage if it’s been discontinued, if its style is no longer “in,” or if it’s at least twenty years old.) Over the years, I’ve collected more than a hundred vintage perfume ads. Some of my favorites are sprinkled throughout the text, like movie posters to perfume’s invisible cinema.
Part III looks to the future through conversations with perfumers and scent provocateurs who are thinking about perfume in a profound way, some who are even rethinking its importance and purpose in society. Part III’s “A Brief History of Animal Notes in Perfume” explains the aesthetic, historical, and cultural importance of animal-derived ingredients that are no longer used in nonsynthetic form in perfumes, even as it acknowledges both the theoretical and real problems with sourcing animal notes from actual animals.
Finally, a Perfume Glossary helps elucidate terms used in this book, and will arm you with a vocabulary to begin your journey through scent.
I hope that Scent and Subversion inspires you to explore both vintage and contemporary perfume, to pay attention to the smells that surround us, and to see perfume as instructive, a bridge between the world and our oft-neglected sense of smell. Like reading poetry to understand the lyricism possible in demotic, everyday speech, smelling perfume connects us to the olfactory wonderland that is around us.
This 1938 perfume gets the ’60s treatment.