When is the last time you smelled perfume - not from a bottle in a store, but just out and about in the world? One day at work last week, I walked down a corridor and into some perfume, just hanging there, lingering in the air. It hit me like a physical force. It had been years since I had smelled perfume - real, old-fashioned, lady-with-a-spritzer-at-department-store perfume - and it took me all the way back. I think I understand Proust and his madeleine now.
The scent was maddeningly familiar; heavy on the Oriental notes, and a little bit floral but not rosy floral. Something like Opium but not Opium. Maybe I should just Google a list of popular perfumes of the 1970s and 80s and then match a name with a scent.
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Of course you understand that I actually did this, and I promptly ended up in a rabbit hole of mid-20th century beauty culture nostalgia, from which I emerged only days later.
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When I was growing up, lots of women - maybe even most women - wore perfume. The women in my working-class Philadelphia neighborhood wore Tabu or Charlie or popular Avon scents (if you’re young, then you might not know that Avon used to be known mostly for perfume - the cosmetics came later). When I was in high school and college and then a young person in the working world, I learned about expensive perfumes, classics like Chanel No. 5 and Joy and Arpege. Perfume was very popular among young women in the 80s - we favored overwhelming heavy scents like Opium and Lauren and Chloe, suitable for the aspirational luxury ethos of that decade. Every city still had fancy downtown department stores, marble floors and high vaulted ceilings and full-service restaurants and dressed-up salespeople and elaborate Christmas displays that families made special trips to visit. You couldn’t walk into one of those stores without being chased by a young woman wielding a spritzer of perfume. Just thinking about those department stores makes me miss my grandmother.
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I read Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties early in 2022, and I started writing about it, but I never finished. Here’s a preview - if you were a young person in the 80s and 90s then you might remember that right around 1991, there was a very abrupt popular fashion 180, from glamor and high heels and big hair to hippie revival and grunge. In 1987, young women dressed up to go out - full hair and makeup, high-heeled shoes with designer jeans and dressy tops, and of course, perfume. In 1992, the aesthetic abruptly changed. This is not to say that young women no longer cared how they looked - they very much did care. But it was no longer acceptable to act or look as if you cared. It really took just as much time and effort trying to appear as if you didn’t make any effort at all as it did to look flawlessly put together. Perfume did not survive this fashion transition, perhaps because it was an obvious olfactory clue that a woman cared about being conventionally attractive.
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When I was very young, age 5 or so, we lived with my grandparents for a time. I think we were there for about a year, more or less. My grandparents went out most Saturday nights and my grandmother would usually let us sit on her bed and watch her get dressed and fix her hair and put the finishing touches on her hair and makeup. Perfume was always the last step.
Eventually, I realized that my grandparents’ nights out were not particularly glamorous - they went to movies sometimes, or to VFW or American Legion events, or mostly to friends’ houses to play cards. Perhaps it was that perfume, lingering in the air long after my grandmother left the room, that made grown-up life seem very exciting and romantic.
I never did figure out what last week’s perfume was, even after my internet rabbit hole research. It reminded me of Opium or Chloe, not because of how it smelled but because of how it felt. It was like John Wanamaker or Strawbridge and Clothier, circa 1980. It was like midnight Mass at St. John the Baptist, circa 1975. It was like my Nana’s bedroom on a Saturday night in 1971. It was like my childhood in the middle of the American century.
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