“Weren’t we all modern embodiments of Emma Bovary, I thought, seeking magic potions to transform our lives?”
That sentence leapt off the page of The Perfume Lover by Denyse Beaulieu. It felt like the book jumped out to me too, last month on a trip to The Strand bookstore in Union Square. The book is about a woman’s journey to recreating what she believes to be the best night of her life through scent. A famous French perfumer joins her mission and the book is equal parts a not boring lesson on perfume history, scent-mixing tutorial, and personal memoir.
The cover is pink, which grabbed my attention as I eyed the shelf. The title piqued my interest, but by the time I flipped open the cover and saw the ‘Shakespeare & Company’ stamp, I was sold. It felt a tiny bit like a sign, and you know how I feel about those.
So back to what I was saying, Beaulieu was talking about French author Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which I haven’t read but now feel like I must. The book was originally published in 1857 and apparently so scandalous that Flaubert was put on trial.
Madame Bovary chronicles Emma Bovary, a farmer’s daughter, who yearns for the glamorous life in the Paris she’s always reading about, and decides to go after it, raking up a ton of debt in the process, and then dies. She never made it to Paris.
Beaulieu wrote about Bovary in an academic essay, “I contended that the ink she had absorbed when reading romances had poisoned her every bit as much as the rat-killer.” Isn’t that a sad but beautifully poetic sentence?
Flaubert’s Bovary was irresponsibly frivolous but who can blame a girl for dreaming of a life she reads? He wasn’t especially sympathetic to women like her, writing to his lover in 1852:
‘What I blame [women] for especially is their need for poetization. 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.’
“Weren’t we all modern embodiments of Emma Bovary, I thought, seeking magic potions to transform our lives?”
Yes, and that’s definitely the basis of most perfumes and their advertisements. Right now, I’m especially curious about fashion houses revisiting perfumes of old, like Balenciaga’s Le Dix and Vivienne Westwood’s Boudoir.
What magic are we bringing back?
Le Dix is “a reverential reconstruction of M. Balenciaga’s 1947 icon, the House’s first perfume.” Balenciaga calls it an “olfactory time capsule,” its name a nod to 10 Avenue George V, the address of the original Balenciaga couture salon in Paris. The scent has notes of iris, violet leaf absolute and incense essential oils.
It took archivists 15 years to locate the bottle. The new version closely resembles the bottle dating back to 1947 when Cristóbal Balenciaga launched the brand’s very first fragrance with deliberate patina marks. A patina’d perfume! That’s so innovative.
Vivienne Westwood’s Boudoir isn’t quite as long in the tooth as Le Dix, archivally speaking, but it’s just as innovative.
The scent — with notes of vanilla, damask rose, carnation — is inspired by the perfumes from the Versailles Osmothèque, the world’s largest international archive of perfumes, the largest in the world. The bottle is curved glass with Westwood’s signature gold-tone orb on the lid.
When a friend of mine was in London earlier this year, I asked her to bring me back Vivienne Westwood’s relaunch of Boudoir. Coincidentally, I saved a bunch of the original bottles on eBay to see if I could get a whiff of the scent. So imagine my surprise when I found out that the brand was relaunching the only scent Vivienne Westwood worked on personally.
The original version was provocative, inspired by Westwood accidentally flashing photographers at the British Empire Order. It was intended to smell like skin hit with a perfumed powder puff on silk sheets, and apparently, there was a very animalistic note that isn’t present in the reformulation.
To my nose, my bottle of Boudoir smells like freshly bathed skin on silk sheets, it’s very powder-forward but not in an old-fashioned way. It smells clean, but your imagination makes it sensual. I love it. Reddit says it’s a good but modern version of the original.
Both Vivienne Westwood and Balenciaga fashion houses have tons of magic in the archives to capture. And while I do have mixed feelings about the fashion industry’s current obsession with archival references, perfume feels like an ideal way to capture the essence the designer carved in the brand’s DNA.
Now if Schiaparelli would do the same, the bottles alone would be worth it. The brand’s DNA is so surrealist, I can only imagine what the magic potions would claim to do.
What magic potion are you reaching for lately?
