Perfume mania
Unique fragrances worth owning – but never spritzing
It has the uncanny ability to encapsulate a memory of how we were feeling at a particular moment in time. It can make us feel older or younger, wonderfully sophisticated or fantastically edgy. But, if the 20th century was defined by a just few traditional fragrances, such as Marilyn Monroe’s favourite Chanel No 5, Dior’s Eau Sauvage and Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium, the last two decades have seen a shift in the world of perfume with everything from a fragrance based on the smell of sweat and blood to one that smells like stagnant swimming pool water now in high demand.
And this is what a new exhibition at Somerset House wants to capture as it takes visitors on a heady journey
‘The last 20 years have seen a shift in perfume, with ones smelling like blood and sweat in high demand’
through the niche scents that have changed the face of the perfume industry over the past 20 years.
Collected like wine and treated like art, perfume is now being bought by true enthusiasts not just as something to wear – it is no longer fashionable to find your signature scent, I’m told
– but as something to sit among a collection. “It’s no longer enough for us simply to smell sophisticated, sexy or alluring,” says Claire Catterall, co-curator of Perfume, which opens today. “We want to be taken to new places or challenged.”
So what are the most important perfumes and key scents from the past 20 years? “The scents we’re looking at are the ones really making an impact,” says Catterall. “So we haven’t just gone for the most wonderful. We’ve gone for perfumes that have changed the way we think.”