The Untitled Series
A specific fragrance, chosen by author and critic Chandler Burr and presented anonymously, allowing you an uninfluenced opportunity to smell, guess, and discuss, before the name is ultimately revealed.
The ongoing saga is documented on Luckyscent where you can purchase decants in unlabelled vials from.
For S02E08 Burr writes:
"There is a damp cold that England seems to specialize in, but this cold doesn’t lower the level of scent, and the air was filled with brackish water, wet green grass, damp cement, a few traces of car exhaust and ozone. The wind shifted, and I smelled her perfume...Suddenly there was a completely different green: a spring-twig green, filled with sunlight and mixed with freshly cut grass. A handful of fructose was tossed into the scent along with a few peonies. Then pieces of cool pink fruit. I felt exhilarated. During that moment—maybe five or six seconds—the Newcastle clouds were gone.
I asked her what it was. It’s in these bottles. I imagine most of you will be as surprised as I was to hear her answer."
Reveal date is set for 16/2. Good luck in the guessing game!
Readers recall how I had requested input in what to offer you next. Personal preferences came high on the list of requests and I have catered to this demand by sharing a List of my Favorite Less Celebrated Fragrances, as well as Oohing and Aahing Together on my Favorite Chypre Fragrances. (Both subject to edits/updates as they're not carved in marble).
The time has come to share those particular nuggets of Orient-via-European-Aesthetics that make me tick. Please feel free to share yours in the comments below!
Please note I'm excluding straight-forward musks (of which I love many), predominantly woody fragrances, and florientals, which I consider a bit like baklava-light; there's a time and place for that too, but not today.
In alphabetical order Ambre 114(Histoires de Parfums)
Resinous goodness in the classic style of great French perfumes. It's substantial enough to really get the amber through, but light enough not to smother you like your angora-sweater-wearing obese great-aunt. Sounds funny, but really is high praise.
Angelique Encens (Creed)
It helped that a legend apparently wore it, Marlen Dietrich. But it was the name that lured me personally. Incense and angelica, a source of vegetal musk. The effect is mystical.
Antaeus (Chanel)
Among my favorite men's perfumes. A girl friend smelling it actually purred...Men, you now know this.
Arabie (Serge Lutens)
I seem to be alone in the blogosphere in actually enjoying this dried fruit orgy that recalls the souk like few things can. More for me, I guess!
Black (Bulgari) the original unisex edition
Is there any perfumephile worth their salt who doesn't like Black? Anick Menardo's brain child has a genius IQ. Half rubber, half vanilla. Half BDSM, half, well, vanilla. What a riot!
Cinema (Yves Saint Laurent)
Seems simple and middle of the road, but it stays on hair and clothes (and pillows...) for days on end, making you wonder "just what is it that smells so good?". It's a great script.
Douce Amere (Serge Lutens)
Bittersweet symphony of melancholy and comfort. Like love, like an old wound, like life.
Feminite du Bois (Shiseido)
There's something about this spicy mix with dried fruits and cedarwood in the drydown that makes the head spin. If Cleopatra wore a dress made of carved wood dripping of honey this would be it.
Myrrh Ardente (Annick Goutal)
I have a great affinity for the bittersweet facet of myrrh resin and I like almost all scents where it's prominently featured, something that I'm not sure labels me as entirely sane in my greater entourage. But no bother. This oriental Goutal fragrance is for endoscopists anyway.
(I also LOVE La Myrrhe by Lutens, but do not consider it a true oriental. Rather an aldehydic one.)
L de Lolita Lempicka
Every perfume lover craves a pomander scent from time to time and this combo of vanilla, clove and cinnamon is especially good. Nothing marine about it despite the advertising images of mermaids and fishnets.
Nu (Yves Saint Laurent)
Another one of the Tom Ford sanctioned scents that wrote history, it was ahead of its time. Sadly discontinued it marries spice with incense and feels like angels and demons are dancing on your skin.
Opium (Yves Saint Laurent) vintage of course!
This used to be my companion, my self, my id for many many years. They have eclipsed it and spat on its grave. I'm livid.
Rykiel woman (Sonia Rykiel)
Very under the radar. Powdery suede-like and rich on dates, of all things. It manages to be very softly beckoning but not submissive in the least.
Tolu (Ormonde Jayne)
This is how proper night-time perfume for a rendez-vous should smell like. Comforting and luxurious like a mink coat, balsamic in scent. Minus the cruelty. Priceless.
Tonka Imperial (Guerlain)
Tonka beans are rich in coumarin and coumarin is among my most favorite smells. Enough said. Satisfying and sinful like a full meal on a diet day.
Vol de Nuit (Guerlain)
This great classic has a smoldering quality about it with its green touch on top and its jonquil floralcy later on. Still the base is unmistakably Guerlain; calorific, dressy, soft to the touch, very French-smelling.
Please let me know which oriental perfumes adorn your previous selves the most!
Ziggy Stardust and the White Duke, rolled into one, have irrevocably gone where the white horses go. But their voice will keep on ringing in our ears. We are absolute beginners and we will always need our daydreams.
Donning Minotaure by Paloma Picasso, his favorite fragrance, according to his official website, in his honor today. (Bowie also allegedly wore Silver Mountain Water by Creed and fragrances from Floris, according to the two companies.)
I'm feeling a bit like commissario Salvo Montalbano in cracking one of the toughest nuts in TV fragrance sleuthing ever since the fragrance discussing community came online. You know, that exasperating freeze-frame practice, us nerds do to capture a few significant views of TV and/or cinema heroes' vanities to determine their assigned fragrance and think whatever that might mean for their character.
Mad Men has been one of the most complex and detail-oriented drama TV shows in television for as far as I can remember, sparking a hot fashion moment, and its byzantine character delineation and intricacies of decor, dress and decorum has been admirably analyzed in more than one venue. Surely one more would be redundant? After all I already composed a piece on the fragrances worn by the characters and have mentioned tidbits again and again.
But deciding to re-watch the whole series, season to season, I stumbled upon a fragrance reference that really cracks the door open to a pivotal feminine character, Margaret "Peggy" Olson, in a light that has yet not been glimpsed.
If one fragrance has been mentioned categorically and early on on the show it was the classic amber oriental perfume Shalimar by Guerlain, as worn by office sex-bomb Joan Holloway, on her way out to town. This was in Season 1 Episode 10 "Long Weekend". Her roommate leans to ask, "Shalimar"? We can also see the characteristic acqua-shade bottles of the Guerlain Shalimar body products (deo spray?) on Joan's vanity throughout the show.
The choice clicked in a "perfect prop" sort of way in that it perfectly embodied the character of Joan; voluptuous and generous with an aspiring tinge (Joan can play the accordion while singing in French as we find out in Season 3).
still via bornunicorn.com who searches for products in films/TV and compiles an impressive compendium
Image my surprise upon seeing another Mad Men character using Shalimar and not just the body products but the costly extrait de parfum...to go to work: innocent, prim little Peggy Olson! Nothing is as it seems indeed.
For the longest time I had trouble figuring out just what that mysterious dab-on bottle had been in Peggy's hand during the first episode of Season 2. It seemed like a pretty decadent use of perfume... dabbing behind ears and on wrists for a day in the office; unless one stops to recall that spray atomizers in a non pulverising manner were non existent back in the 1960s and that pulverising perfume containers risked putting on too much too easily.
Faintly I thought I could discern the fan-shaped blue cap of Shalimar. "No, that can't be" my inner little voice was saying. Lo and behold, in Season 3 Episode 2 ("Love among the ruins") there's Peggy singing Bye Bye Birdie in front of her mirror imitating Ann Margret, the episode's running theme. And right there on her right, we can clearly see this time an emptied little flacon of Guerlain's Shalimar. (This is around the 25th minute of the episode from those watching on DVD). I guess we hadn't noticed before because we never looked for it.
Showing up twice in a show that has been as meticulous with its historical details and character descriptions as Mad Men couldn't be a coincidence. It had to mean something. Betty's fragrance tray in her Draper residence bedroom fittingly includes a pink-capped bottle of Coty's Muguet de Bois; a touch of the icy queen with her prim facade and her sexy undercurrent.
I was caught in a vortex of sought-for-clues for Peggy's fragrances. The game was afoot! What did Shalimar mean in this context?
Shalimar for a night out on the town in 1960 as worn by Joan Holloway would leave no one in any surprise. An established French perfume with a reputation, if a rather out there. Joan's professional decorum has never intervened with her femininity, even if the latter has on occasion intervened with the former. And her rich lovers (including Roger Sterling) could have been the generous gifters all right; after all that's how she got a fur coat in a flashback episode!
via telegraph.co.uk
But Peggy Olson is far from the curvaceous sexpot that Joan is and never attracted the attention of rich lovers. In fact, back in the start of Season 2 when she dabs it on herself, she is still a budding junior copywriter, surely not making much with the 1960s wage gap. Cut as she is from a totally different cloth than either Joan or Betty, her sexuality seemed like it would be completely independent from her image. For that reason, and because as a woman it's far easier to sympathize and root for Peggy who tries to stick to her guns and earns her badge of professional status with her brains alone rather than exploiting her sex, the perfume community had long accepted that Peggy must have been wearing a chypre fragrance.
Peggy Olson is far from a dominatrix but her sexual identity is far more complex than generally given credit for. Possibly because seen through a patriarchal lens she is deemed less "desirable" (or trophy-like) than either Joan or Betty (or Megan Draper or Jane Siegel...) and as women we have been guilty of often looking through that lens too. We had been definitely seeing Peggy through the eyes of the men around her.
Even in the pilot, when Peggy arrives at Sterling Cooper ad agency as the new secretary to Don Draper, she is exasperated by the overt sexism of the early 1960s office environment. She questions "why is it that everytime anyone asks you [girls] to lunch around here you're dessert". Office manager and guide Joan tells her to relax and take it within her stride: "You're the new girl. And you're not much to look at. So you might as well enjoy it."
For all her effectiveness Joan Holloway is still a woman impressed by patriarchy. Very much so. Her self worth is still defined by how men view her. Betty Draper is too. ("As long as men look at me that way, I'm worth my keep", Betty intimates to her friend Francine)
Peggy nevertheless is different.
Despite her strict Catholic upbringing, she is no prude. In sexual matters she takes things into her own hands and asserts her sexual persona pretty directly and determinedly. She opts for contraception even though she has "no steady, just playing the field". She has a one-night-stand with a drunken Pete Campell who only a few hours ago offended her with his sexist comments. She determinedly gives her unwanted baby for adoption. She hangs out with the guys upon becoming a junior copywriter and even shows herself all dolled up in a strip joint if need be. Sure, she ends up sitting on the lap of the client, but we feel that she could have just as easily declined. We see her reject guys too. She challenges her colleague Stan Rizzo into nudism. She is in control. Later in the show she even jerks off a stranger at a public cinema!
To all this, there is nevertheless a fascinating angle that had been missing till this very discovery I just made. Peggy for all her strong-headed, autonomous thinking is consciously molding her sexual semiotics partly after Joan. She doesn't dress like her, of course, but in Love Among The Ruins there is a very crafty, and well crafted, analogy between the ad pitch that Don and the guys work on for Patio, a new diet drink by Pepsi, and the way Peggy views herself as a sexual being. Throughout the Patio project Peggy's point of missing the target audience (i.e. catering to men's ogling of the commercial's heroine rather than to women who would buy the product) is dismissed. There's a disparaging line from creative director Don telling her "he's sorry if it makes her uncomfortable". The scene is subtle, but we're led to believe it would be because she can't compete with the sexiness quota, that she's just jealous. When the Pepsi people shoot down the pitch, even though they were the ones to ask for the copy of the Bye Bye Birdie sequence in the first place, Peggy can't help smiling to herself.
It is in the same episode (S03E02) that we see her bottle of Shalimar, she actually copies a line of Joan's to make men interested in her when venturing out in a bar. Once there, she picks a young college guy, still socially awkward, and they go to his house for the night. In the lack of a Trojan, which she markedly demands amidst heavy petting, self-assured and very much a sexual being, Peggy suggests "we can do other things". In later seasons and later episodes we understand that this involves practices that back then were probably not deemed "sex per se". Again the patriarchal lens colors our definition of sex as only vaginal intercourse. But Peggy takes things to hand. Literally.
This "emulation" of a sexual persona in order to turn sexual expectations on their head takes further nuance with another memorable scene in Mad Men involving perfume and a sexpot. A different one.
It's in the Season 6 finale.
Peggy in a tiny black dress with a pink bow (and bright lipstick) is heading out for the evening. The office hasn't cleared yet.
-"Is that Chanel No.5?" , asks Frank Gleason smiling the air.
-"It's all I wear...", Peggy quips with a knowing smirk and leaves.
photo still AMC via NYMag.com
The brilliant line directly reflects Marilyn Monroe's memorable one regarding her exclusive use of Chanel No.5 in bed. Not only does Peggy's line then assert her status as a classy customer of Chanel's (remember, the French house is mentioned in the pilot as the epitome of class), but it stresses her emulation of a sexually uninhibited and desirable woman. Contrary to Marilyn though, Peggy can have her cake and eat it too.
One might think that a sex symbol like Marilyn would hardly be a model for a woman of the determination and proto-feminism that Peggy exhibits. But the brilliance of the show and the depth of the characters is the interweaving of lines and ideas throughout the seasons. Back in Season 2 Episode 6 ("Maidenform") an imaginative bra pitch involving "two sides of a woman" implied that every woman is either a Jackie [Kennedy] or a Marilyn [Monroe]. " A line and a curve". Peggy is doubtful; and left out by the guys who see her as neither. Copywriter Paul Kinsley presented showing women working the floor at Sterling Cooper as either one or the other archetype. "Marilyn...[he says, pointing Joan to the other guys] Of course Marilyn is really a Joan, not the other way around."
And suddenly it all makes sense.
We are also reminded of the advice of another emancipated and sexually liberal woman to Peggy. That of Bobbie Barrett, the sex interest of Don Draper during Season 2: "Don't be a man. Be a woman. It's powerful business when done right."
So... Guerlain's Shalimar and Chanel No.5. A full on "oriental" perfume and an aldehydic floral fragrance. Not at all what we expected of Peggy. The fragrant moments of Peggy Olson's evolution arc in Mad Men prove that the semiotics of perfume are both powerful and evocative of women's issues throughout the 20th century and beyond.
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