Ask fragrance experts about perfume packaging and they will start explaining you how perfume became one of the first artistically packaged goods a long time ago, around the early decades of the 19th century.
While the richness of the scent and the colour of a fragrance are the most important elements for a perfumer, from a commercial point of view there are four main vital components, the name, label, bottle and box.
In the last twenty years it became also extremely important for fragrances to be promoted through cinematic adverts.
Links between perfumes, fashion and cinema actually strengthened four years ago when perfumer Christophe Laudamiel created a series of fragrances for Thierry Mugler that interpreted different scenes from Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of A Murderer to accompany the film taken from this novel directed by Tom Tykwer.
Yet it’s difficult not to admit that the art of perfumery has radically changed in the last few years.
In the early 1900s fashion designers teamed up with artists creating iconic products: Baccarat designed a black cat-shaped flacon for the Jovoy perfume “Gardez-moi” (Keep Me); René Lalique’s bottle for the Rallet perfume “Soir Antique” had a sort of Art Deco inspiration about it; Julien Viard created a three-sided flacon for the Charles Fay perfume “Parfum Les Trois Muses, La Danse” (Perfume the Three Muses, The Dance), while Paul Iribe went for a flacon that called to mind Pierrot’s costume for Paul Poiret.
The list of unique and extremely original perfumes could go on forever and includes Elsa Schiaparelli’s “Shocking”, “Le Roy Soleil”, “Seeping” and “Snuff”, Elizabeth Arden’s hand-shaped “It’s You” and Lancome’s “Magie” in its iconic moon-shaped “Spoutnik” bottle.
In fact you could easily write entire books about some of the perfumes from the 1900s – many of them characterised by extremely exotic names such as “Le Minaret”, “Aladin”, “Veldor”, “Voltigy”, “Garden of Kama”, “Ambre de Nubie” or “Bleu de Chine” – and their bottles, designed in many cases by famous artists and illustrators.
It’s interesting to see that, despite fragrances can be considered as the engines that make the fashion industry move, the poetry behind perfume names seems to be almost completely forgotten in our times in favour of a certain unimaginative vulgarity.
Shock value is indeed more important than anything else as proved by a few advertising campaigns for specific fragrances.
Louis Vuitton recently released the onomatopoeic "Bang", a men’s scent advertised with a campaign portraying a naked and oiled Marc Jacobs holding a huge bottle of fragrance in a strategic place, a trick reminiscent of Tom Ford's adverts for his "M7" fragrance.
Advertising experts usually say that men react to the packaging and women to the emotional connections of a particular scents. But I often wonder who chooses the name for a perfume and what kind of reaction do such people expect from their consumers.
I must admit that the names of some recently (or soon to be) released fragrances provoked my curiosity.
Ferrari is planning to launch soon a new men’s scent, called "Scuderia". Now “Scuderia Ferrari” usually refers to the Ferrari team and équipe, but, unfortunately the name literally means in Italian “stable”.
We will have to wait until September to see if “Scuderia” is an undesirable mix of burnt rubber and, well, horses, while bets are open for the name that Belstaff will choose for its 2011 fragrance and skin care product line inspired by bikers and the outdoors.
The prize for the best fragrance faux pas this summer goes to Gucci, though, that recently released “Guilty”.
Since the first press release about this fragrance came out I’ve been laughing my heart out and trying to imagine the meeting to name this perfume, wondering why nobody whacked on the head the person who came up with such a name.
For some aspects the Gucci family looks like a modern version of the Borgias, with enough boardroom quarrels, fights and even one murder to inspire at least a couple of films.
A while back a quarrel involving Paolo Gucci ended with him reporting his father Aldo for tax evasion to the United States revenue. Paolo himself was later on imprisoned for failing to pay child support; but also his daughters and ex wife ended up in court for trademark infringement.
In 1998 Patrizia Reggiani was jailed instead for 26 years for arranging the murder of her estranged husband, Maurizio Gucci, Paolo's cousin.
Dubbed "The Black Widow" by the Italian press, Patrizia left quite inspiring notes for all murders out there by writing in her diary ''There is no crime that money cannot buy", while on the day her husband was shot, the diary entry read, ''Paradeisos'', Greek for ''Paradise”. No wonder Ridley Scott wants to shoot a Gucci biopic (well, if it’s true that Patrizia Reggiani once stated "I'd rather cry in a Rolls-Royce than be happy on a bicycle", she should be hired as screenwriter…).
If fragrances are so important in the fashion industry because they reflect the design philosophy of a fashion house, well, Gucci perfectly managed to reflect not just its philosophy, but the ethics and dubious morality of the entire family thanks to an unfortunate Freudian slip masqueraded behind the semantics of sex and "guilty" relationships (you can read House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed by Sara Gay Forden to discover more about fashion, money, leather good empires, revenge and, well, blood).
In the meantime, to find back that lost poetry in perfume names and bottle, prepare for the exhibition "The Perfume Diaries" (from 2nd September), that, hosted at London's Harrods and curated by fragrance expert Roja Dove in collaboration with Givaudan, will follow the story of fragrances from ancient to modern times.
The Georgian Restaurant on the fourth floor of Harrods is preparing to celebrate with an afternoon tea menu inspired by perfumes that includes pastries and cakes with actually less ridicule names than some fragrances currently on the market and one cake dedicated to Grasse, in Provence, universally considered the "perfume capital" of the world.
As for future ideas for perfumes, well, a long time ago Avon came up the "Wild Country Cologne" sold in a Derringer gun-shaped bottle. Guess that would sit nicely next to "Bang" and "Guilty". In fact I never thought it would have been possible to symbolically recreate an entire murder scene or the different phases of a trial through a series of fragrance bottles.
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