Leather Series 8: The Garçonne Leathers of the 1920s (part 2)

by guest writer Denyse Beaulieu

Tabac Blond was the opening salve of the garçonnes’ raid on gentlemen’s dressing tables. Its name evokes the “blonde” tobacco women had just started smoking in public (interestingly, Marlboros were launched as a women’s brand in 1924 with a red filter to mask lipstick traces). The fragrance was purportedly meant to blend with, and cover up, the still-shocking smell of cigarettes: smoking was still thought to be a sign of loose morals.
Despite its name, Tabac Blond is predominantly a leather scent, the first of its family to be composed for women and as such, a small but significant revolution. Though perfumery had recently started to stray from the floral bouquets thought to be the only fragrances suitable for ladies (Coty Chypre was launched in 1917), it had never ventured so far into the non-floral. Granted, there are floral notes, but apart from ylang-ylang, the clove-y piquancy of carnation and the cool powdery metallic note of iris don’t stray much from masculine territory. Amber and musk smooth down the bitter smokiness of the leather/tobacco leaf duet, providing the opulent “roundness” characteristic of classic Carons. And it is this ambery-powdery base – redolent of powdered faces and lipstick traces on perfumed cigarettes – that pulls the gender-crossing Tabac Blond back into feminine territory to the contemporary nose, despite Luca Turin’s calling it “dykey and angular and dark and totally unpresentable” in Chandler Burr’s Emperor of Scent. Like its younger sister Habanita (1921), Tabac Blond’s rich, golden-honeyed, slightly louche sillage speaks of late, smoke-laden nights at the Bal Nègre in the arms of Cuban aristocrats or déclassé Russian émigrés, rather than exhilarating rides in fast cars driven by the new Eves…

Not so Knize Ten, the 1924 fragrance composed by Vincent Roubert (who worked with Coty on L’Or and L’Aimant) for the Viennese tailor Knize. The Knize boutique was famously designed in 1913 by architect Adolf Loos, whose anti-Art Nouveau essay, Ornament and Crime, helped define Modernist aesthetics with its smooth surfaces and pure play on volume. The scent itself was introduced to complement the clothier’s first ready-to-wear men’s line and in its opening notes, it clearly speaks in a masculine tone. The leather, paired with bergamot, petitgrain, orange, lemon and the slightly medicinal rosemary, is as dryly authoritative as a sharply-cut gabardine suit. As it eases into wear, rose, orris and carnation throw in a gender-bending curve ~Marlene Dietrich (herself a Knize patron) may have well slipped into that suit… The leather itself is of that of the wrist-watchband or fine shoe rather than the pungent “cuir de russie” boot. But despite the richly animalic base – musk, amber and castoreum – hinting at bridled desires, Knize Ten retains the buffered, well-bred smoothness of gentleman who never felt the need to set foot in the cigar-smoke laden cabinet of Herr Doktor Freud…

His twin sister Chanel Cuir de Russie (also 1924) clearly departs from the butch Cossack boot and its birch-tar roughness. In fact, in an anecdote told by the composer Ernest Beaux to Chanel’s second perfumer Henri Robert, and transmitted to the third perfumer of the house, Jacques Polge, this particular “cuir” was meant to reproduce the delicate smell of the fine leather pouches wrapping precious jewel – another type of loot, as it were, than what the Cossack bore away on their horses. Cuir de Russie is a tribute to the impact of the Russian émigrés on the intellectual and aesthetic life of 1920s Paris -- Beaux himself, of course, was a Russian exile of French descent and Mademoiselle’s fashion house was peopled with elegant Russian aristocrats hired as sales assistants and models – as well as a radically modernist reworking of a by-then decades-old theme.

But more later in Helg’s review…



Photo by Irving Penn courtesy of ArtPhotoGallery.com, painting by Jack Vettriano Fetish, courtesy of angelarthouse

Leather Series 7: The Garçonne Leathers of the 1920s

by guest writer Denyse Beaulieu

“She is a strong woman. Excuse – strength is not the word I am after. Women, pretty women at least, are never ‘strong”. I need a word that expresses energy, the quality that makes a man who speaks of ‘frail Eve’ – referring to the female sex – look like a fool!
Her neck is arched and tense. Tense also her features, her whole carriage indeed! Her demeanour is that of a duellist awaiting the attack!
Attack from whom!
From you, sir, and from me… from man, in general.”

“The Flapper – A New Type”, by Alfredo Panzini, Vanity Fair, September 1921
(from oldmagazinearticles.com)

As the “lost generation” returned from the trenches of World War I to civilian life, they faced a new kind of war: the war of the sexes.
It’s hard to realize nowadays the utter shock it must’ve been, for men who grew up alongside women in corsets and bustles, with huge flowered hats teetering on their long upswept tresses, to see them mutating into the cocktail-swigging, cigarette-smoking, car-driving, bob-haired, short-skirted breed Americans called “flappers” and the French, “garçonnes”. This second, much more telling designation (a feminization of the word for “boy” in French, “garcon”), was popularized by the eponymous 1922 best-seller (700 000 copies) by the French author Victor Margueritte. With its liberated heroine’s sexual escapades (including a lesbian affair), La Garçonne was deemed so scandalous that Margueritte was stripped of his Légion d’Honneur…

The Bohemian classes of the Belle Époque had already engaged in some gender-bending ~ the term “garçonne” was actually coined by the decadent late 19th century novelist Huysmans ~ but what occurred in the 1920s was an out-an-out, highly symbolic raid on masculine closets. Led on by Gabrielle Chanel, garçonnes shed the corset to adopt the more strict, practical and streamlined menswear styles, including the white shirt, suit and boater. Jean Patou provided them with sportswear to ski and play tennis; Dunhill and Hermès offered them leather motoring gear to match the luxurious interiors of their new, leather-upholstered cars; Hermès even produced flight suits for the fashion-conscious aviatrix.

And, of course, they began filching men’s eau de colognes – interestingly, Jean Patou’s 1929 Le Sien (“Hers”), shown at the Paris museum of fashion Palais Galliéra in the current “Années Folles” exhibition, is explicitly marketed as a fragrance men could wear, but produced for women. The same exhibition commissioned a (non-commercialized) perfume to embody the spirit of the Jazz Age, composed by IFF’s Antoine Maisondieu. It is, of course, a leather scent (for a review, click here).

The Cuir de Russie, as we’ve seen previously, had been around since the last quarter of the 19th century. But the 1920s and 30s would be the heyday of leathers from the spectacular 1924 double feature of Ernest Beaux’s Chanel Cuir de Russie and Vincent Roubert’s Knize Ten and Jacques Guerlain’s odd Djedi in 1927 to later renditions: Caron En Avion (1929), Lanvin Scandal by André Fraysse (1932), Lancôme Révolte by Armand Petitjean (1936) and Creed Cuir de Russie (1939), initially Errol Flynn’s bespoke fragrance, and LT Piver’s Cuir de Russie the same year. At least thirty houses launched their own versions of the Cuir de Russie from the late 19th century to the late 30s (the trend continued into the 50s), which bears witness to the enduring attraction of the note.

But the real turning point came about in 1919 with Ernest Daltroff’s epoch-making Caron Tabac Blond, the first leather scent to be directly marketed to women. Is it just by chance that the first perfumer to cross the gender boundaries of the “cuir de Russie” was himself a Russian?


To be continued.....


Pic of Marie Bell in Jean de Limur’s 1936 La Garçonne, courtesy of encyclocine.com