Here are links to two interesting articles in today’s New York Times spring fashion magazine supplement:
Message in a Bottle, regarding the iconic Chanel No. 5 flacon;
and Chandler Burr’s article on the Reg Vardy Gallery’s recent show, If There Ever Was: An Exhibition of Extinct and Impossible Smells, — “as eerie, terrifying and enchanting as it was ingenious. The curator, Robert Blackson, an American then at the School of Arts, Design and Media at the University of Sunderland, had become interested in synthetic scent materials, which were first introduced in the late 1800s. A specialist in contemporary art, he came to understand that the modern perfumer´s appetite for the abstract and unexplainable, like a painter´s, is what binds the world of contemporary fragrances to contemporary art.´´ I’d be scared to smell several of the contributions like those by Christophe Laudameil and Mark Buxton, but I’d love to smell Bertrand Duchaufour’s.
