As she preps a pasta dish, she shows me her stash of vintage perfumes, an array of small and beautiful glass bottles stored in the vegetable crisper of her fridge. Herman and I have become friends and she invites me over to her San Francisco apartment for dinner. When her mother picked her up, she’d scold her daughter for the scent overload and roll down every window in the car.įast forward to the mid-2000s. Worth, Texas, one of her favorite pastimes was to visit the perfume counters at the mall, and spray everything - whether intended for men or women - on herself. Like writers who have understood history through painting, architecture, and music, Barbara Herman has laid out the 20th century through one of the most fascinating, personal, and innovative of lenses, the evolution of its olfactory art.When Barbara Herman was a tween in 1980s Ft.
Journalist, broadcaster, and perfume writer A rip-snorting olfactory perspective on 20th century culture, Scent and Subversion is entertaining reading for fumeheads and casual sniffers alike, and destined to become a classic of perfume research. Scent and Subversion explores how in the space of a century, women went from smelling like animals while behaving like ladies–to smelling like detergent while pretending they weren’t animals. For Herman, perfume is a time machine that reveals each decade’s particular obsessions with gender roles and sex. It opens with a keen essay on the neurological impact of animalic, “unclean” odors, and ends with observations on the industry’s future horizons…a worthy flanker to Perfumes: The Guide, one that takes something of the original format in order to build its own point of view.īarbara Herman is an oracle of social history, and her sacred vapor is vintage perfume. Scent & Subversion is a guided tour of perfume history as seen through cuir-colored glasses. Author Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High HeelsĬo-creator of The Afternoon of a Faun perfume for État Libre d’Orange
0 kommentar(er)
