17 Monday Jun 2019
Posted in Advertising and Scent
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Gloria Vanderbilt, photographed by Horst P. Horst, 1966
Today we heard that Gloria Vanderbilt has died at the age of 95.
The headlines are interesting — since Vanderbilt lived such a long and kaleidescopic life, every one begins with a different signifier.
Socialite. Heiress. Fashion Icon. Artist. Actress. Anderson Cooper’s Mother. Writer. Designer. Jeans Queen…
13 Thursday Jun 2019
Posted in Books and Scent
Thanks to my friend A., who always makes excellent book recommendations, I’ve been reading Ali Smith’s cycle of seasonal novels—Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), and Spring (2019). (I just finished Winter and I’m waiting for a copy of Spring to become available at the public library!)
In Autumn, the character Daniel Gluck, a 101-year-old former songwriter who’s nearing death, drifts into a reverie or dream populated by loved ones from his century-plus on earth. His imagined company includes:
“…the painter, the one that turned him copiously down, well, that’s life, he can even smell the scent the painter wore, Oh! de London, bright, sweet, woody, when he first knew her, then she got older and more serious and it was Rive Gauche, he can smell it too.”
28 Tuesday May 2019
Posted in Books and Scent
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Joan Didion (undated)
“I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.”
I just finished reading Joan Didion’s classic essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), which I’ve been meaning to read for ages and recently received in a Boxwalla subscription.
I noticed a few few smell-related references in one essay—“Goodbye to All That,” her 1968 reflection on loving and leaving New York City. Didion lived in New York from 1955, when she won a guest editorship at Mademoiselle, to 1963, at which point she moved back to her home state of California with her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne.
Here are those references, with added commentary of my own…
16 Thursday May 2019
Posted in Perfume Reviews
My latest post on Now Smell This is a review of Boxwalla’s new Perfumer Series project, featuring fragrances by Sigil Scents.
You can read it here.
Image via Boxwalla’s instagram.
10 Friday May 2019
Posted in Perfume Bottles
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PRADA PINK FLAMINGOS
Style/art/fashion news from earlier this week:
“The Costume Institute’s spring 2019 exhibition [CAMP: Notes on Fashion] explores the origins of camp’s exuberant aesthetic. Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay ‘Notes on “Camp”‘ provides the framework for the exhibition, which examines how the elements of irony, humor, parody, pastiche, artifice, theatricality, and exaggeration are expressed in fashion.”
Could we also look for camp (both intentional and intentional) in the visual presentation of perfume? I think we can.
Here are a few examples, paired with quotes from Sontag’s landmark essay…
29 Monday Apr 2019
Posted in Advertising and Scent
It’s amazing how many different fragrance brands exist or have existed, even in the not-so-distant past. For example, this ad caught my eye when I was browsing the results of some random image search, but I’m not familiar with the name “Marta Harff.” I looked her up and learned that she’s an Argentinian entrepreneur who has run several fragrance/toiletry brands, including a namesake line of “Aguas Florales” (“flower waters”). This one is “Manzanilla.” (Chamomile?)
What really interested me in this ad (which seems to date to the 1990s) was the image it used on the bottle label and in the background…
09 Tuesday Apr 2019
Posted in Perfume Reviews
Tags
aroma m, dawn spencer hurwitz, fragrance, frederic malle, gucci, ineke, lilac, perfume, yves saint laurent
Mary Cassatt, Lilacs in a Window, 1880-1883. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Partial and Promised Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Dillon, 1997. 1997.207
— T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland (I. The Burial of the Dead)
If you asked me to name my favorite flower, or my favorite floral note in perfume, lilac wouldn’t be the first one I’d name. It might not even appear in my “top five.” Yet every April there’s a day when I have the opportunity to visit the blooming lilac trees in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and I suddenly want to spray myself with a lilac fragrance.
Here are a few recommendations, including three from independent female perfumers and one from a preeminent female “nose.”
07 Sunday Apr 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
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Portrait of Billie Holiday and her dog Mister, New York, N.Y., ca. June 1946, William P. Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress)
April 7th is Billie Holiday’s birthday! “Lady Day” was born on this day in 1915 (and died in 1959, far too young).
I’ve been listening to her music since my early twenties but I never thought to wonder, until today: what was her favorite perfume?
11 Monday Mar 2019
Posted in Advertising and Scent
One of the major mainstream fragrance releases for autumn 2013 was Estée Lauder’s Modern Muse, with the tagline “Be An Inspiration” and an advertising campaign featuring the model Arizona Muse.
In the initial advertising for this fragrance, Muse (the person, with the perfume!) made an appearance at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In the print ads, including the one above, she poses inside the Guggenheim, which is immediately identifiable by its spiral ramp and its circular skylight…
