Regarding Pierre Cardin fragrances, his first officially documented release has been Pierre Cardin pour Monsieur in 1972 and Cardin for women (Cardin de Pierre Cardin) in 1976. However the official Pierre Cardin website does not mention them and begins the story from Choc de Cardin. Now that the great designer has passed, they will be the subject of speculation and furtive bidding wars on auction sites. Celebrated for his avant-garde style and Space Age designs which, alongside those of Courreges and Paco Rabanne, Cardin catapulted the fashions of the 1960s, and partly made that decade what it is.
Choc de Cardin in 1981 was indeed for many their first distinct memory of a Cardin-signed scent. The evolution of a citrus cologne given a shadowy chypre mantle in the way of Diorella and Le Parfum de Thérèse, Choc is neither shocking, nor chocolate-evoking; it's as French as it possibly gets, and in many ways "a forgotten masterpiece" worth hunting down. Seriously, if only warm weather fragrances were that nuanced and that balanced nowadays.
Rose Cardin from 1990 also has many fans. Indeed the latter is among the few rose-centric fragrances which has something to draw me in, maybe because it does what niche fragrances today do at tenfold the price. Created by the same perfumer who gave us Choc de Cardin, Françoise Caron, it's noted for its sureness of execution more than its innovation. The rose is fanned on coriander, which puts a fresh and rather soapy spin on the blossom's nectar, and on patchouli, which makes it seem like it's endlessly unfurling, but softly, not angularly, with a smidgen of incense and musk.
In the meantime, in 1983 Paradoxe by Cardin was launched. This was a sandwich of two main ideas by Raymond Chaillan, who also created Givenchy III: the fresh, sour and bitterish top note of galbanum and green gardenia, and the animalic-leather growl coming up from the base in between lovely florals, all womanly and plush. It's enough to make a (chypre loving) girl dream.
As my colleague Miguel put it, "Paradoxe is an assertive chypre and it's almost an academic example of that style. From the top we get a freshness that is aldehydic, green and citrusy. The galbanum note is very evident and grounds a certain fizziness from the aldehydes and bergamot.[...] This is not a powdery scent at all. It is crisp, transparent and angular. This angular aspect is worked mostly through the hardness of the somewhat ashy base notes."
These are fragrances that collective memory passed them by, but they need to be rediscovered.
Who could imagine a block-buster perfume today being promoted through porcelain-skined beauties in soft focus showing no inch of skin beyond their necks set to pre-classical music? And yet Anais Anais, the first perfume by Cacharel (1978), was advertised exactly like that and became THE reference scent for the early 1980s for droves of young women who still reminiscence fondly of it 30 years later. It's also one of the most influential perfumes in history, at least on what concerns marketing success ~a triumph of Annette Louit~ and top-to-bottom design, if not complexity, quality materials or classicism of composition. It didn't possess any of the latter.
Yet it's still featured on the Cacharel website prominently and is up front on perfume counters. For many, Anais Anais by Cacharel was the first fragrance they got as a gift; or even better the first they cashed out their pocket money for: Its image was youthful from the start. No doubt the deceptively innocent scent, coupled with the dreamy advertisements accounted for that, as did the opaline packaging with the pastel flowers on it and the slightly suggestive name. It was the debate of many, to this day: Was Anais Anais a reference to writer Anais Nin and her ~"forbidden" to the young~ erotic literature, such as Delta of Venus? Or was it a nod to the ancient Persian goddess Anaitis, goddess of fertility? And which was more provocative?
Cacharel was specializing in retro knits at the time and both references for the name were valid enough, although the company always officially went with the latter. The goddess was testament to a peculiar cultural phenomenon on what concerned the position of woman in the zeitgeist: On the one hand Anais Anais with its imagery disrupted the context of feminism in perfume; the complete antithesis of Charlie by Revlon (1973), if you will, where Shelley Hack was dressed in pants skipping off to work or grabbing the bum of a cute guy in the street as an outward manifestation of her desire to be divested of her traditional passive role. These were both youthful fragrances advertised to the young. So what had intervened in those 5 years elapsing to account for such a change? Nothing much. (If you exclude the rush of spicy orientals in the market in the wake of Opium's success). The French aesthetic was always more traditionally feminine than the American one, going for Venus over Diana, and the marketeers soon realized that the beauty industry can't disregard the changes of times, but deep down, it will always depend on the passivity of the consumer into buying "hope in a jar". Perfume is perhaps the most mysterious of all beauty products, ladden with hundreds associations and legion aspirations. It was deemed best to start bouncing the ball back right away... Plus the youth market hadn't been exploited sufficiently (this was back in the 1970s remember) and someone had perceived that the young regarded standard perfume imagery as bourgeois and old-fashioned: they needed their own. Cacharel was extra attentive to grow the market; they put basins in department stores where they encouraged young women to plunge their hands in basins of water, dry them, apply scented cream on them and then finishing off with a spritz of Anais Anais, extoling the virtues of "layering" for a lasting effect. A youth phenomenon was at work.
And Sarah Moon was called for the Anais Anais advertisements: To take shots of women as pale-limped and virginaly innocent as paintings, lily-like, exactly like the opaline bottle and the main core of the fragrance which was built on lilies of the fields. The long limps gained an almost Piero Della Francesca sanctity, the doe-eyed gazes were soft and narcotized, almost. Were they beckoning unto the males watching, inviting by their easy-to -prey-on-passivity and odalisque-style harem numbers? Or were they nuzzling on each other evoking lesbian fantasies? Perhaps the most provocative thing is that the ladies in question all appeared so very.. young; almost under-age! Whatever the intention, the imagery is still memorable: It marks a mental no-mands-land between the advent of feminism in advertising and the regression to conservative values of the 1990s, peppered with some of the issues that still concern those of us who immerse themselves in beauty advertising with a critical eye.
Four perfumers were credited with the creation of Anais Anais jus: Paul Leger, Raymond Chaillan, Roger Pellegrino and Robert Gonnon, working at Firmenich. A surprising fact as the formula isn't complicated or challenging really. The opening is fresh and a little "screechy", a touch of green galbanum resin felt all the way through the base (galbanum is in fact a base note but it's felt at the top), giving a herbaceous overture that segues into the main attraction: lily of the valley forms the core coupled with another "clean" note, that of orange blossom, sanctified through the wonders of analytical chemistry. White lilies melt as if gaining human form, tender, devoid of their customary spiciness and given a touch of woody dryness. There is a supporting accord of honeysuckle, jasmine and rose, played sourdine; it's not especially felt. The permeating cleanness continues for long before a hint of playful soft leather in the base surfaces alongside indeterminate, powdered woods to give an intriguing twist to the plot: is this an autumnal scent for more mature women, I wonder? Although I seem to recall the scent of Anais Anais as a little bit more "substantial" in all its softness, there is no major change in its formula last I compared batches, probably because there is not much of allergens-suspect ingredients necessitating restrictions and because hydrocitronellal (lotv note) has been successfuly substituted anyway. It's a pity the parfum concentration has been extinct for some years now, as it played up the autumnal basenotes beautifully.
Notes for Cacharel Anais Anais Top: Bergamot, galbanum, hyacinth, honeysuckle, orange blossom Middle: Lily, lily of the valley, rose, ylang-ylang, tuberose,carnation Base: Cedarwood, sandalwood, amber, oakmoss, incense, vetiver
Sarah Moon photography via weheartit.com and thefashionspot.com
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