Big Time Sensuality
One could dine for weeks on the cheeky truisms of Coco Chanel, if Pinterest alone is any indication. There’s the one about wearing all black, the one about restraint, the one about good shoes, etc, etc, ad infinitum.
The one that’s stuck with me lately though, is this:
“A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.”
There’s a lot to unpack in that bold statement, not the least of which is the implication that perfume is the ultimate feminine power play. I like to think of it from another angle– that perfume, seen by many as an indulgence, a frivolity, is actually essential for our survival. To wear perfume is to assert oneself. It is demanding to be be noticed, to present an identity of our own construction. It is to arrive with confidence, and to leave behind a memorable trace.
Someone else (some useless twat, I think) said that it’s a sad woman who buys her own perfume, but I can’t think of a more worthy mode of self care. Even more intimate than the finest lingerie, perfume adapts to our skin, reshapes its molecules to play with ours, behaving like a pheromone– our most primal essence. A spritz of perfume every day is a gift to myself, a singular moment of unabashed beauty and delight that belongs only to me.
I don’t know when exactly I became such a perfume head, but my Libran nature makes me a natural born aesthete, drawn to beauty, sensuality, and luxury. Given my shopping habits and hedonic food and wine consumption, it’s hard to argue with the stars.
PERFUME: A SENSORY JOURNEY THROUGH CONTEMPORARY SCENT, AT SOMERSET HOUSE
Here in London, the show of the summer is a marvelous experiential exhibition at Somerset House, Perfume: A Sensory Journey Through Contemporary Scent. Following an extravagant lunch at Spring to celebrate a dear friend’s birthday presented the perfect moment to pay a visit to the galleries during opening week. Several of the perfumes so haunted me, I had to return for a second round (and, ahem, a purchase of one of the exhibition scents…) this Saturday afternoon.
Opening with a sort of history lesson, the show presents one perfume per decade of the twentieth century that recalls pivotal cultural moments as told by scent. Chanel No. 5, introduced in 1921 was, and remains as modern as it is timeless. Yves Saint Laurent’s heady and breathy oriental Opium was launched in 1977 with an unforgettable campaign featuring Jerry Hall, and an opening party that ended, obviously, at Studio 54. One sniff of CkOne and I was back in high school, wearing my Dad’s flannel over a vintage prom dress, pasting cutouts of those gorgeous freaks shot in black and white into collages.
Perfume’s curator Claire Catterall, collaborating with perfume writer Lizzie Ostrom, considers perfumery an art rooted in narrative, much more closely related to literature and film than to fashion:
“Perfume has everything: it’s about our art, and commerce. It’s about intimacy and relationships and our place in the world,” says Catterall. “It’s about hopes, aspirations, memories and emotion.”
This is the central thesis of the show, reinforced by presenting the ten featured contemporary scents in the context of designed vignettes–a tangle of cotton sheets on an unmade bed, linen curtains billowing from an open window, a nook of church confessionals. Perhaps these seem a bit, shall we say, ‘on the nose.’ While that may be true, we come to truly understand the powerful sensual connections to places and moments. We are transported through time and space, perhaps to places we’ve never been; the scent is both journey and destination.
Perfume, then, is much more than an accessory. It's a way to explore many different worlds, indeed many different selves. Perfumes are more evocation than simulation. We learn that perfumer Mark Buxton’s brief for Comme des Garçons 2 was, obliquely, to create an impression of a “swimming pool full of ink.” Contemporary perfumery can often challenge the boundaries of wearability, constructed increasingly with synthetic building blocks meant to express concepts like ‘washing drying in the wind,’ ‘mother’s milk,’ or even, in the case of Killian Wells’s scent Dark Ride, a water theme park.
Now, as Catterall and Ostrom muse in the show’s remarks, “…we ask more of our perfume. We want to be told a story, to be taken to new places, or challenged in the way we think or behave.”
Perfume is our emotional zeitgeist, conjuring moments and memories so essential to who we are that the map of our lives is made by following our nose.