Today, standing in the cavernous Sephora flagship store on the Champs-Élysées, buffeted by waddling bum-bagged tourists and fleet young black-clad sales assistants, I wonder how I’d go about choosing my first grown-up perfume. The wall of fragrances must cover the better part of a kilometre; atomizer-wielding demonstrators lie in ambush and avoiding their spritzes requires ninja-like skills. The conversation I had with that glamorous Parisian shop manager back in the late 70s I could never have here. And the fragrances I was offered then, opulent stuff with breasts and hips and a regal stride, gather dust on the bottom shelves, if they’ve survived at all (the original Chloé hasn’t). Teenage girls are the target demographic for practically every mainstream launch; brands fall all over themselves to cater to their tastes. The Max Factor Green Apple that felt like a slap in the face to me has now grown into a fruit basket the size of the Himalaya and spilled out into every shopping mall.
The cheery, unsophisticated berry had been bumping for decades at the door of perfumers’ labs before someone wondered what that squishy noise was, saw a lick of red juice trickle in, opened up and … Ker-plash! The whole crop spilled into the vats. Soon, even legendary perfume houses such as Guerlain were plonking the notes into the mix: perfume had suddenly gone pink. The berry binge introduced within the codes of fine fragrance a type of note that had come up from functional perfumery. It used to be the other way round: if a perfume was popular, functional fragrances copied it in a simpler, cheaper form. This is why many older brands of hairspray smell of Chanel N°5 or L’Air du Temps; why shampoos in the 70s had the green notes made popular by Chanel N°19 or Givenchy III. Why, at least five products in my bathroom smell of L’Eau d’Issey at this very minute. But in the 90s, the notes of functional fragrances started trickling up into fine fragrance with the synthetic musks used in detergents when the public started craving ‘clean’ in a reaction to the over-saturated scents of the 80s. Perhaps not so coincidentally, this happened at a time when detergent companies were busy buying up perfume houses, their executives smoothly segueing from washing powders to fine fragrance. Fruity notes were the second wave in the 90s, a trend for which the American consultant Ann Gottlieb claimed responsibility. When hired by Bath & Body Works, she said, she introduced ‘things that, up until then, women had found almost nauseating. These fruity notes then came into the public domain much more, and people started loving [them].’
OK, so now those of us who still find them nauseating know who to blame for the wall-o-fruit we crash into as soon as we step into the mall. While I can only congratulate Ms Gottlieb on her success and influence, I can’t quite find it in me to be grateful to her. Especially since her claim demonstrates that the trend sprung from massive clobbering rather than public demand. Granted, the public may have a yen for cheerfully regressive, synthetic scents that remind them of boiled sweets or shampoo – familiar and easy to understand in our sound-bite, mouse-click, twittering ADD world. In a way, Love’s Baby Soft is still what little-girl scents are made of; spayed smells for female eunuchs. If I were sixteen today, what would I do? Probably pick the latest from a brand I liked. Empty the bottle. Then switch to something else. Would it even be possible to feel the fierce commitment I felt for the first fragrance I truly made my own?
Of course, it helped that I’d fallen in love.
10
Onscreen, Fred MacMurray was ringing the doorbell of a Spanish-style Los Angeles house. In a minute, he’d be leering at Barbara Stanwyck’s anklet. In half an hour, they’d be plotting to bump off her husband. I’d seen Double Indemnity before. My eyes wandered from the screen to the silhouettes in the first row, bathed in silvery light. Since Concordia University’s film noir retrospective had begun, I’d been sitting behind them: the tall, quick, witty Michael, slim as a brushstroke of Indian ink in his sharp-shouldered Thierry Mugler suit; Jon, his scruffy friend in the scuffed aviator jacket, with his stubborn jaw, knobby wrists, light-brown curls tumbling on his forehead; Lise, a poised, slant-eyed blonde with a whispery voice, cinched waist and early-60s pumps; and Mimi, a petite, sarcastic brunette with scarlet lips and schoolteacher cat’s-eye glasses. I’d been breathing in the Waft. I couldn’t make out which one of them wore the bitter leather and ashtray fragrance that rose up from the first row they’d commandeered. They all seemed to trail that after-hours cloud. Once, I’d lingered in the auditorium after they’d left – we’d got as far as small nods and half-smiles – and leaned down on the scruffy one’s seat: the still-warm fabric had soaked up the scent. It felt as tough and dark and raspy as Barbara Stanwyck’s voice. I had a crush on all of those kids, but a little bit more on Jon.
‘I don’t need to use up my bottle of Van Cleef. I’ll just sit next to Denyse here.’
Michael plonked himself down on the couch next to me, comically fanning himself with his hands. He was the little gang’s charismatic leader, fuelling our discussion with esoteric references to the Bauhaus, Russian Constructivists, Beat poets and Tamla Motown … This was the first time I wore their Van Cleef and though I’d felt a little self-conscious about appropriating the Waft – they did all wear it, boys and girls, as it turned out – I’d pretty much spray-painted myself with it in Jon’s bathroom.
Danny had been the first to speak to me. After the film, he’d invited me back to his flat, where they all hung out before hitting a gay disco in downtown Montreal – they’d crash into the DJ’s booth to pester him into playing the selection they felt like dancing to that night. By then, I’d become sufficiently adept at manipulating style to impress even this bunch of sartorial semioticians: punk rock had been a liberating experience to which I’d applied my head-of-class analytical skills. Punk meant you could be a scowling mortadella trussed in dayglo fishnet stockings and still be light years cooler than any Farrah Fawcett blow-dried clone. It was all about playing with signs of the ugly, the shocking, the rejects of mainstream codes. Bathed in the Waft, I knew I was finally in with the in crowd, art-school post-punks who revived styles at such an accelerated pace we lurched from 60s bubblegum pop and Star Trek kitsch to Beatniks and free jazz within a single summer.
While I still lived at my parents’, my black bevelled bottle of Van Cleef stayed stashed in Jon’s bathroom to circumvent the paternal ban. The smell of it on my clothing was a way for me to linger in Jon’s aura after I’d gone back home to the suburbs, and then, after that summer, to my campus room. Being eighteen with a hopeless crush on my best friend was a dull, delectable pain I sharpened by wallowing in his smells. Every scrap of the Van Cleef carried a bit of him and of our time together. The bitter herbal aroma of the joints we’d puff on while discussing Adolf Loos’ Ornament and Crime before checking out the local bands. The whiff of soap on his neck when he shaved, as I was leaning next to him over his sink to paint my face on after he’d art-directed my evening’s get-up. The cigarette smoke that lingered in his clothes and hair. The weathered leather jacket I’d snuggle up against as we tottered out of a club at 3 a.m. to have potato latkes at Ben’s Deli. The funky, dark, animal waft of his sheets when I woke up on the box spring of his bed – he was crashing out on the mattress he’d pulled on to the floor. By that time I’d graduated from writing the music column for the college paper to freelancing with the two local rock magazines: the older editors were still into the likes of progressive rock, heavy metal or the local Quebec music scene, so I covered all the punk bands that came to Montreal. I sometimes spent the night with one of the musicians I’d interviewed, kids barely older than I on their first foreign tour sharing rooms with their roadies. Then Jon sulked, but not much.
Though it was meant for men and worn by all my friends,