Looking back, I sometimes wonder why a Jewish girl from Brooklyn would, year after year, take her grandkids to see Christmas dioramas. I think perhaps, like that Shalimar bottle, Grandma relished the glamour of it. She loved a good display.
Pierre Benard of Osmoarts perfumes, colors and sounds composes a multisensorial love poem to the Queen of the Night …Tuberose, which he studied for a year. Combining music, art, chemistry and poetry, “les parfums de niche” play the part of his lover,his tubereuse, in her many guises. She may act innocent; she is la belle dame sans merci.
As the transgressiveness of perfumery gives way to “celebuscents” to boost the multibillion dollar fragrance industry, contemporary visual artists are increasingly turning to it as an expressive medium. Shigenobu Twilight is the creation of artist Anicka Yi and architect Maggie Peng.
In perfume, marketing is perfume’s lifeblood. A fragrance not only needs to resonate, it needs people to know about it. Estee’s hands on approach to giving samples to everyone from Princess Grace on down . My grandfather was the gentleman who helped design, package and market it.
Every one of the six courses of chef Tessa Liebman’s “Methods and Madness” dinner inspired by MCMC Fragrances was just as insanely detailed and carefully created. Every course was inspired by a particular MCMC fragrance, created by Anne McClain, and reflecting McClain’s gift of mixing up elixirs that evoke the natural and invoke the emotional.
Ground Zero smelled of concrete, smoke, dust, glass and death. And then, all too suddenly, it didn’t smell of anything. Perfume, I realized, is the scent of life itself: an intermingling of different smells which, at any given time, combine and pass a threshold, entering our minds as a whole.
