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Fragrance 101: The relationship between perfume and fashion
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In the book Perfumes: The Guide, writer Tania Sanchez recounted how a man who was learning some basics about fragrance with her partner and co-author, perfume expert Luca Turin, asked him how a smell could be in fashion, which was a very good question. After all, you can’t see it, unlike other artifacts of fashion, you can’t touch it once it’s being worn, and a few hours later it’s gone. General trends in perfumery are mostly insider information shared among those who create and market it, and the public knows nothing about the process until a perfume is released for sale; there is no fragrance equivalent of the runway fashion show with celebrity audiences, only trade shows for the industry, and the art of perfumery gets very little press until a new fragrance appears fully formed on the shelves of department stores, accompanied by print and television advertisements if it’s from a house with plenty of money.
If you doubt for a moment that there are such things as fashion and style trends in the world of fragrance, let me ask just one question: when is the last time you noticed anyone wearing Giorgio Beverly Hills? This fragrance appeared on the scene over twenty years ago, and there was a time when it was simply unavoidable. Its legendary “throw” or sillage and tenacious strength created universal dread in elevators around the world and spawned workplace perfume bans. The men’s equivalent was 1982’s Drakkar Noir by Guy Laroche, the biggest, boldest treatment of patchouli on steroids the world had yet seen. It is still fairly popular today, though it has been relegated to the discount shelves, as has the Giorgio perfume. What happened?
Well, throughout the history of fashion and popular culture, perfumes have been just as important in how its wearers define themselves as clothing, jewelry and other signifiers of wealth, status, and one’s role in society. The origin of much of European perfumery was with glove makers who sold leather gloves permeated with scents for their wealthy clientele, who held them over their faces as they passed through the poorer areas of the city. When modern inventions of the industrial age ushered in an era of improved public sanitation and the cities no longer reeked of filth, these same glove makers turned to producing perfumes for the growing middle classes as well as the aristocrats, and an industry was born. (This is a great over-simplification of perfume history, of course!) Even today, one’s economic lot in life determines the choice of both fashion and fragrance; women in silk evening gowns can afford to wear Chanel No. 5 in its pure Parfum form, rich and heady with the world’s finest Grasse jasmine, while a working class woman in jeans may choose a drugstore scent like Coty’s Sand & Sable if she likes jasmine in her perfume. Most of us will never experience the former, but such luxury items do drive the rest of the market where taste and trends are concerned, much as expensive sports cars act as a “halo” model that the automaker hopes will enhance the prestige of their more practical offerings.
As the Belle Epoque climbed toward its apex late in the 19th century and into the early years of the 20th, French couturiers hired some of the best perfumers to create fragrances that enhanced the prestige of their fine fashions, and the two great perfume houses of Caron and Guerlain were also putting out some of the great classic scents that still endure today, such as Shalimar and Jicky for Guerlain and Narcisse Noir and Bellodgia for Caron. American women of the era were still wearing simple, delicate floral waters, but soon their habits were changed forever when the good French perfumes came to town. The real revolution in perfume came in the Jazz Age, when perfumers and fashion designers turned their attention to women newly liberated from corsets and long skirts. Caron’s magnificent 1919 creation Tabac Blond was something altogether new, a scent aimed at women for whom smoking was a new freedom, and Molinard’s Habanita in 1921 carried this theme even further, as it was a smoldering, heavy Oriental style perfume with dark tobacco underneath. To us it may smell “perfumey” and old-fashioned right out of the bottle, and it really needs to be on the skin for a while before it reveals its complex character, like a fine wine that has to "breathe" before it can be enjoyed.
The proliferation of new and innovative perfumes continued unabated throughout the Thirties, and was only slowed by the advent of World War II. As the world emerged from the war years, women who had taken men’s jobs when their husbands and brothers went off to war liked their newfound independence, and the perfumes of the day reflected this, with an influx of fierce, powerful perfumes in the chypre style such as Pierre Balmain’s Bandit and Jolie Madame and Carven’s Ma Griffe. These were not sweet and girly, but were somewhat austere and haughty at the first impression, until the passage of time on the skin revealed sensuous hearts of leather, musk civet and other animalic elements. Unfortunately, these fragrances have been reformulated over the years and are no longer what they once were, and Ma Griffe has even trickled down to the deep discount level, but they are still arrestingly different from the stereotypical “feminine” scents of the floral type.
Cue a traditionalist backlash during the Fifties and you get more traditionally floral feminine scents including Jungle Gardenia (1950) as American women aspired to be more like Donna Reed than Bette Davis. Perfume was still perfume though, and it was strong and decisive. It was not until the Sixties when the counterculture gave rise to the idea of more “natural” fragrances (as well as bad, cheap patchouli oil) and such products as Love’s Fresh Lemon and Love’s Baby Soft flooded the market. The concept of casual, sporty scents came into being as well, and Aliage by Estée Lauder was billed as “the first sport fragrance” for women in 1972. Revlon’s Charlie created a stir with its magazine ads featuring women in trousers, which was a first, as unbelievable as that may seem now.
After the casual Seventies, the prosperous Eighties ushered in such heavy perfumes as Giorgio Beverly Hills and its co-conspirators, Dior’s Poison and Paloma Picasso’s Mon Parfum. Perhaps as an antidote to these scents that seemed to be wearing their own shoulder pads, this was followed in the latter years of the decade by the “non-perfumes” such as Calvin Klein’s all synthetic, all the time Eternity in 1988 and its endless proliferation of flankers and clones after that. All of a sudden smelling like nothing was in fashion, and you could even buy perfume that filled that need. Scents that imitated clean laundry, ozone and (fake) ocean air were all the rage as the decade of the Nineties was ushered in. Venerable perfume houses were bought out by conglomerates and their products were altered beyond recognition, and it seems that every celebrity on Earth had their own perfume by the time the new millennium rolled around. These were almost always fruity-florals for women and ozonic/woody/marine scents for men, and they were hard to tell apart.
Some of these trends continue today, but the world has changed yet again. Tiring of the corporate scents and smell-alikes at the department stores, many customers have turned to artisan, or niche perfumers, to fulfill their desires for something different, something they could relate to on a personal level. Existing “macro-niche” companies such as L’Artisan and Annick Goutal continue to do well, but a virtual explosion of tiny companies changed the perfume landscape beyond recognition unless you were still stuck at the mall. Some of the companies had been around for a long time and were being rediscovered by consumers in search of a more natural perfume experience, such as Carthusia and Antica Farmacista, and others cater to the upper echelons of the market with ultra-exclusive and expensive fragrances. The latter include such companies as Parfums d’Empire, By Kilian and Editions de Parfum Frederic Malle.
What has changed the most, however, is the availability of information. The power of the Internet has allowed fragrance lovers to find each other and talk about perfume and other beauty products on discussion boards, online magazines and blogs. Merchants sell discounted perfume online all over the world, and obscure rarities and collectible perfumes of the past are offered at auction on the Web, sometimes at stratospheric prices. There are now legions of perfume critics and bloggers talking about the latest scents and comparing notes, an unthinkable state of affairs in the past and one that the fragrance industry as a whole is not very happy with; for some reason they seem to think that perfume, unlike fashion and films, should be immune to criticism. However, they don’t seem to understand that when everything is fair game it can only result in improved products if only they would listen to the customers and find out what they really want.
For perfume is fashion in the sense that it says a lot about the one who wears it, and today’s fashion consumer wants access to a broad range of choices. With such a huge amount of information available, it’s harder for any one fragrance to rise to the top, but there have been many influential ones, such as Thierry Mugler’s gigantic and oft-copied Angel, that have influenced and inspired followers and imitators. “Clean laundry” scents are back but so are perfumes based on some of the most ancient of perfume materials, such as aoud and incense. It’s an exciting time for the world of perfume, and it’s hard to keep up; there are now hundreds of new releases each year, most of them forgettable, and sifting through all of them is an impossible task. Through it all the classics endure, as sales of Shalimar and Chanel No. 5 remain steady. After all, fashion is fleeting, but real style is eternal.
Acknowledgements: Some facts and details for this article were confirmed by or obtained from the following sources: 1. Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez (first edition). 2. The online Perfume Museum at perfumeprojects.com. 3. The Perfume Intelligence online library. 4. Perfume: The Art and Science of Scent by Cathy Newman, National Geographic books 1998.
Image credit: Vintage Edwardian beaded gown circa 1910 from vintagetextile.com via fashion-era.com
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