One of these men was Jacques Guerlain, who authored a series of shimmering, impressionistic masterpieces still produced and adored to this day: Après l’Ondée, L’Heure Bleue, Mitsouko and Shalimar. But an upstart was hot on his heels, a self-taught perfumer untrammelled by tradition and therefore willing to use the new, more brutal synthetic materials to conjure vibrant Fauvist compositions in tune with the scandalous Ballets Russes. It was the Corsican François Coty, known as the Napoleon of perfumery, who democratized fine fragrances by launching cheaper ancillary lines, whereas Guerlain perfumes were still sold to a very select clientele. Soon, he was selling 16 million boxes of talcum scented with L’Origan in France alone. Guerlain had reinvented the heritage of traditional perfumery: Coty turned it into a worldwide industry and took it into the 20th century.
But it was haute couture that truly transmogrified Paris perfumes into the stuff dreams were made of for millions of women around the planet – the stuff that would make a young girl in the suburbs of Montreal decide she would be Parisian one day because of a spritz of Rive Gauche. ‘As long as you’re in a one-to-one relationship with your customer, like Jean-Louis Fargeon was with Marie-Antoinette, or Jacques Guerlain with the clients who came to his salon, you can explain your perfume, make it loved,’ Elisabeth tells me. ‘But when fragrance becomes an industry, how do you sell it as a luxury item? Perfume needs to be supported by image. And who but world-famous Paris couturiers could provide a better one?’
The first couturier to launch a perfume house was Paul Poiret, in 1911. The Pasha of Paris, as he was dubbed, was practically the first to turn fragrance into a concept, with a dedicated bottle and box for each product. But he made the marketing mistake of not giving it his own name. The first to do that, in 1919, was Maurice Babani, who specialized in Oriental-style fashions and whose perfumes bore such exotic names as Ambre de Delhi, Afghani or Saigon. Gabrielle Chanel followed suit in 1921, but her N°5 only went into wider production in 1925, when she partnered up with the Wertheimers who owned Bourjois cosmetics. By that time, other couturiers like Jeanne Lanvin and Jean Patou had realized perfume was a juicy source of profit and got in on the game. Thus it was that in the first decades of the 20th century, French couture and perfumery began an association from which the prestige of the most portable of luxury goods – a few drops on a wrist or behind the ear – would durably benefit.
But it wasn’t all a canny exploitation of the Parisian myth. French perfumery truly was the best and the most innovative; French perfumers did create most of the templates from which modern perfumery arose. Why? Perhaps because, ever since Colbert’s day, Paris had been a laboratory of taste, not only in fashion or perfume, but also in cuisine and decoration. A discerning clientele of early adopters, eager to discover new styles and new fashions, spurred the purveyors of luxury goods into devising ever more refined, more surprising, more delightful products, thus bringing their craft to an incomparable degree of perfection. Function, as it were, created the organ. In this case: the best noses in the world.
5
However, my very first perfume was not French, but American. Its frosted apple-shaped bottle has managed to survive the decades without getting carried off in my mother’s garage sales. It followed my parents when they sold the house where I grew up. It still taunts me whenever I go home to visit …
Geneviève certainly meant well when she picked Max Factor’s Green Apple for me as a parting gift before she followed her husband to Saskatchewan. She must have been told it was suitable for young girls. I hated it. Unlike Rive Gauche, which had given me a glimpse of the woman I aspired to become, Green Apple didn’t tell a story. Or if it did, it was a story I didn’t want to hear in my first year in high school; a story that contradicted my training bra and the white elastic band that had already cut twice into my budding hips, holding up Kotex Soft Impression (‘Be a question. Be an answer. Be a beautiful story. But be sure.’) What it said was: ‘Don’t grow up.’
Wear Green Apple: He’ll bite, insinuated the Max Factor ad. Never mind that apple candy has never registered as a powerful male attractant and that I’d never been kissed by a ‘he’, much less bitten. I’d attended Sister Aline’s catechism class and I got the Garden of Eden reference behind that slogan, thank you. But to me, that bottle wasn’t the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. It was Snow White’s poison apple. And an unripe one at that, just like me. The only apple-shaped things I wanted to own were starting to fill my A-cups.
When the good people at Max Factor put out their apple-shaped bottle, conjuring memories of Original Sin and of the Brother Grimms’ oedipal coming-of-age tale, they tapped into a symbolic association which Dior would later fully exploit with another potion in an apple. But that one would be called Poison: the myth of the femme fatale poured into amethyst glass and wrapped in a moiré emerald box – purple and green themselves hinting at venom and witchcraft …
When it was launched in 1985, I’d long grown out of my Green Apple trauma and into the twin addictions of ink (usually purple) and perfume. I hoped to become a writer, and a fragrant one at that. I’d just finished writing my Masters dissertation on 18th century literature and I was struggling through my first academic publication in France, an essay on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, when I stumbled on an article about Poison, ‘a spicy perfume blending Malaysian pepper, ambergris, orange blossom honey and wild berries’. This was particularly serendipitous: the whole point of my essay was that the adulterous Emma Bovary’s aspiration to become a romantic heroine despite the mediocrity of her provincial surroundings was the result of her mind being poisoned by cheap romantic novels. A farmer’s daughter married off to a small-town doctor, she grew so frustrated at not being able to live out her girlhood fantasies that ‘she wanted to die. And she wanted to live in Paris.’ Emma never got closer to Paris than Rouen but she managed to run up such a debt with the local frippery pedlar that her house and belongings had to be auctioned off, whereupon she poisoned herself with arsenic. In my essay, I contended that the ink she had absorbed when reading romances had poisoned her every bit as much as the rat-killer.
‘What I blame [women] for especially is their need for poetization,’ Flaubert wrote in 1852 to his lover Louise Colet. ‘Their common disease is to ask oranges from apple trees … They mistake their ass for their heart and think the moon was made to light their boudoir.’ As neat a forecast as ever was of what would drive perfume advertising one century hence. Weren’t we all modern embodiments of Emma Bovary, I thought, seeking magic potions to transform our lives? To die or live in Paris … And now, a legendary couture house where a latter-day Bovary could well burn through her husband’s earnings was selling an intoxicating – and perhaps toxic – dream of romance and glamour under the slogan ‘Poison is my Potion.’
When the CEO of Christian Dior Parfums, Maurice Roger, first decided, in 1982, to launch Poison, the industry had been undergoing deep mutations. Perfume houses were being bought up by multinational companies, and their new products had to have global appeal. With the blockbusting, take-no-prisoners Giorgio Beverly Hills, America was starting to bite into a market that had hitherto been dominated by France. To make itself heard around the world in the brash, loud, money-driven 80s, the house of Dior had to create a shock. This, Maurice Roger knew, meant renouncing the variations on the name ‘Dior’ which had been used to christen all their feminine fragrances from the 1947 Miss Dior to the 1979 Dioressence; it meant foregoing Parisian ‘good taste’ and striking with an unprecedentedly powerful scent and concept. It meant re-injecting magic, mystery and a touch of evil into something that was no longer for ‘special moments’ (think of that fragrance your grandmother kept on her dressing table and only dabbed on when she pulled out the mink and pearls), no longer a scent to which women were wedded for life, but a consumer product. The magic, this time, would be entirely marketing-driven, though the fragrance itself, selected out of eight hundred initial proposals, required over seven hundred modifications before reaching its final form.
The promotional campaign kicked off with a ‘Poison Ball’ for 800 guests at the castle of Vaux-le-Vicomte hosted by the French film star Isabelle Adjani. And, if the bottle was reminiscent of the story of Snow White,