Perfume, like fashion, changes in style from decade to decade. We’re not encouraged to think of perfume this way, but our noses, like our eyes, need novelty. Perfumers, like fashion designers but working in an invisible medium, can decide to use perfume ingredients (that's “notes,” in perfume lingo) not only to create something beautiful, but also to convey meaning and reflect a culture’s zeitgeist.
In the 1920s, when flappers’ loose silhouettes reflected a freer, more liberated view of femininity, tobacco and leather perfumes like Caron’s Tabac Blond and Chanel’s Cuir de Russie (Russian Leather) — scents that even today are considered more more masculine than feminine — were all the rage.
In the 1950s, bullet bras combined with flouncy skirts and rounded shoulders, and the good girl/bad girl dichotomy was represented by stars like squeaky-clean Sandra Dee and va-va-va voom Marilyn Monroe. All this reflected a conflicted view of women’s liberation, and perfumes participated, too. For each Givenchy L’Interdit, the perfume Hubert de Givenchy created for the ladylike gamine of the day, Audrey Hepburn, there was a Max Factor Primitif, which offered to express what was still not entirely socially acceptable for women to express publically: their sexuality. “Why not let your perfume say the things you would not dare to?” a sultry Primitif ad cheekily asks. Why not, indeed?
By the 1980s, post-Women’s Movement, as more women were in the boardroom as well as the bedroom, perfumes got as big as the shoulder pads, jackets, and hair of that era. (So much so that restaurant owners were forced to put up signs saying, “Please. No wearers of Passion, Giorgio, Poison,” the most popular — and nose-and room-clearing — scents of that decade.)
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