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Perfume and Fashion: love at first sight

Although both perfume and fashion have been around for thousands of years, their relationship did not become apparent until the early 20th century. Until then, the worlds of fashion and perfumery had existed as two separate entities.

The first designer to sign her name to a perfume was Chanel, with her legendary No. 5 a hundred years ago, but it was not her the first to create a perfume line. It was Paul Poiret who launched a collection of perfumes called "Les parfums de Rosine", but he didn't give them his name. So, it was Mademoiselle Chanel who went down in history as the first fashion designer with her own perfume, even if it was the creation of the perfumer Ernest Beaux.

Since then, this love story has grown stronger. After Chanel, the rest of the great designers, in some cases arbitrarily, created fragrances in line with their creative philosophy and brand spirit. Until today, when things work very differently. During the first decade of the 20th century, perfumes could be whatever their creator wanted them to be and were not born out of popular demand. It was the great creators who decided what women would wear and what they would smell like. But from the sixties onwards, with the importance of youth on the social scene, both perfumes and fashion began to change, to adapt to the new times.

The anti-establishment revolution also affected perfumery, and casual perfumes began to emerge, for the everyday life of working women or for more intimate and romantic moments (let's not forget that the revolution was also sexual). For example, Estée Lauder's Alliage was born as a sport fragrance, Revlon's Charlie was the fragrance for the urbanite and working woman, and for men, Musk scents were the most popular because of their sensuality.

During the first decade of the 20th century, perfumes could be whatever their creator wanted them to be and were not born out of popular demand. It was the great creators who decided what women would wear and what they would smell like.

In the 1970s, perfumes were created to attract, to seduce and to provoke, like the revolutionary Opium by Yves Saint Laurent. During the 1980s, perfumes had to be excessive, almost invasive, like Giorgio Beverly Hills, Poison by Christian Dior, Paloma Picasso or Obsession by Calvin Klein.

The 1990s were the calm after the storm of the excesses of the 1980s, and perfumes, like fashion, opted for minimalism. Fragrances were more osmotic, pure, antiseptic, hence perfumes such as Horizon by Guy Laroche, CK One, Paco by Paco Rabanne.

With the arrival of the new millennium, what was historically to be expected happened: there was a bit of chaos and a bit of trying everything that had gone before, but with a twist. This has been the century of multiple versions of the same fragrance, the reformulation of classic perfumes and the exploration of new olfactory terrains such as absolutely synthetic fragrances. This is the case with Comme des Garçons perfumes, "gourmand" fragrances that evoke the aromas of food, or the revival of classic scents with a modern twist, as in Oud perfumes.

While fragrances today reflect the creative spirit of the fashion house that creates them, they are no longer intended to be islands to which few people have access. Today, fragrances seek to please an audience that knows what they want, that expect novelties and sense them. Today, any person knows that there is a fragrance out there that will complement him or her.