Scent and Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume Author: Barbara Herman | Language: English | ISBN:
B00FLCK25U | Format: PDF
Scent and Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume Description
Let Scent and Subversion take you for a whiff on the wild side of 20th century perfume.
Perfume has been -- and continues to be -- subversive. By playing with gender conventions, highlighting the ripe smells of the human body, or celebrating queer and louche identities, 20th-century perfume broke free from the assumptions of the prior century, and became a largely unrecognized part of the social and style revolutions of the modern era.
In Scent and Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume, Barbara Herman continues her irreverent, poetic, and often humorous analysis of vintage perfumes and perfume ads that she began on her popular blog YesterdaysPerfume.com. The book features descriptions of over 300 perfumes, starting with Fougère Royale (1882) and ending with Demeter's Laundromat (2000).
Lavishly illustrated with more than 100 vintage perfume ads, it will also regale you with essays on scent appreciation, a glossary of important perfume terms and ingredients, and tips on how to begin your own foray into vintage and contemporary perfume. Herman also looks to the future through interviews with scent visionaries such as odor expert and "professional provocateur" Sissel Tolaas, punk perfumer Antoine Lie, and Martynka Wawrzyniak, the artist behind "Smell Me," the world's first olfactory self-portrait.
The perfect book for perfume aficionados (aka "perfumistas") as well as connoisseurs of modern fashion and design, feminist and LGBTQ historians, and fans of vintage advertising.
- File Size: 4624 KB
- Print Length: 288 pages
- Publisher: Lyons Press; First edition (November 26, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00FLCK25U
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #117,767 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #62
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Humor & Entertainment > Pop Culture
- #62
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Humor & Entertainment > Pop Culture
I am walking along the longest path of the world, searching for the book of my heart.
Vien Tuc
Đà Lạt
Imagine a whole world where everyone smells of CK One. You probably don't have to imagine; you have probably been there as has Barbara Herman from the website Yesterday's Perfume. One day Barbara rebelled against office-friendly scents and went searching for the rude, the loud, the odd, the weird and the impolite. What she mostly found was vintage perfume and then some cutting edge 21st century olfactive artists. This led her on a fragrant journey through the 20th century which became her book Scent and Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Fragrance.
Throughout the book are pictures like posters for a scent cinema or as Barbara writes...
"like movie posters to perfume's invisible cinema."
These posters have been collected by Barbara over many years and reveal a lot about perfume, society and marketing `art'.
This is not a picture book though there are many full colour pictures. Barbara starts off with the thoughts of Aristotle and Plato and continues through Fliess and Freud to Chandler Burr, Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. She quotes Olivia Giacobetti, Christophe Laudamiel, and Avery Gilbert. In Part 3 there are interviews with Étienne de Swardt, Antoine Lie, Sissal Tolaas, and Martynka Wawrzyniak as well as a profile on Christopher Brosius.
In Part 1 Barbara courses through the development of `Perfume: is it art? I like Barbara's conclusion that Perfume is a language.
Part 2 is a tour de force of 300+ vintage fragrances, including drugstore, all with back stories that you may have never heard before. I am not a vintage connoisseur so I learnt a lot from this book.
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