Eugénie Briot
8 bis rue Campagne Première
75014 Paris
01 43 21 10 34
PhD student – History of Technology
Centre d’Histoire des Techniques / Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris
Economic History Society Annual Conference
30 March - 1 April 2007
University of Exeter
Fashion Sprayed and Displayed:
The Market for Perfumery in Nineteenth-Century Paris
Studying fashion facts allows us to assess problems at the intersection where social and economic history meet. From an economic point of view the nineteenth century was a crucial time in the evolution of the perfumery market. It was an age of transition that turned perfumery products[1] from luxury items to a broadly distributed and more widely diffused commodities. In 1810, the perfumery trade in France represent a little less than 2 million francs.[2] By 1900 production of these assorted products had risen in value to 80 million francs.[3] New hygienic practices were, if not yet global, becoming a more regular and routine part of daily life. However, even though the shift of sensibilities and the progress of hygiene in the development of the perfume industry were critically important, these were not sufficient to account for the widespread consumption of scented products. Like clothing indeed, perfumes were part of a cultural communication. Thus, perfume offers an excellent opportunity to position the person who wears it into the normalised social field of his/her time. On this account, like any other element of women’s costume, perfume consumption was a fashion fact and its uses reflect on the priorities of the time and the ethoses of its consumers.
In the case of perfumery, how can this fashion phenomenon be related to the economic development of the industry in the nineteenth century? Focusing on the Parisian market ― then the largest in Europe ― this study will examine the way fashion and industrial concerns interacted to shape the social olfactory landscape of a time. Beneath the great history of representations established by Alain Corbin in Le Miasme et la jonquille[4] (The Foul and the Fragrant), a history of olfactory tastes appears feasible, whose apraoch consists in challenging the olfactory choices the perfumery of a time offered to its consumers to the reception these scents received. It is at this intersecting point ― the act of production and of its reception ― at the meeting of creative processes and of consumptive choices that the olfactory fashions of a time arise. This study was based on the perusal of about twenty perfumers’ catalogues, edited between 1827 and the beginning of the 1900’s. Together with the advertisements published in the women’s press, they give a better account of the products effectively offered to consumers than perfumers’ hanbooks of formulae. Manuals of manners and the women’s press being both powerful prescriptive agents whose published forms grew considerably over the century, with wider and wider distribution, I confronted these catalogues and advertisements to about twenty-five manuals of manners published between 1804 and 1909, and the articles of the women’s press published by Le bon ton between 1836 and 1879 and Le petit messager des modes between 1842 and 1896. A corpus of about thirty novels also figures among the sources of this work.
What I intend to do here is not to redraw the history of the fashions of nineteenth-century perfumery, but to highlight its main processes and to emphasise its links to the economic vitality of this sector. I will explore these problems through three main trajectories. The first deals with the specificities of perfumery with regard to fashion in nineteenth-century Parisian society; the second analyses different cases of raw materials and their relation to fashion phenomena; and the last tackles the subject of the fashioning and marketing of perfume products in the general context of industrialisation and the decrease in production costs.
I. A problematic diffusion of olfactory fashions
As a first point, obvious though it may seem, I would like to insist on the specificities of perfumery with respect to the fashion context of nineteenth-century Parisian society. Specific processes indeed distinguished olfactory styles from vogues in dress. As a first and fundamentally distinctive feature, the business of perfumery had to compensate for the absence of visual imagery in its products. As such, perfume offers a problematic case for the theory of conspicuous consumption put forward by Thornstein Veblen[5], since there are no visible signposts in the selection of perfume. Utterly superfluous and notoriously frivolous, perfume remains intrinsically fleeting, evanescent ― elusive. To spread, olfactory fashions cannot rely on the direct visual observation, or distant ocular demonstrations of consumption. An elegant woman will always remain olfactorily silent to the vast majority of people removed from her immediate path.
This material ambiguity was all the more significant in the nineteenth century since a strong emphasis on discretion governed the rules of the etiquette. Even if the argument of hygiene helped diffuse the practice of perfume use, there were also powerful advocates for moderation and discernment in the choice and amount of fragrance employed. These injunctions to observe an olfactory discretion tended to grow over the course of the century, going so far as to exclude heavier perfumes, if not all scents. Authors of these rules were unequivocal in their warnings: “A good-mannered woman does not wear any perfume. She leaves them to women of easy virtue, for whom they are the exclusive prerogative[6]”. Moral arguments were marshalled to justify the banishing of heady perfumes, particularly a use of scent likely to contravene the approved reserve prescribed for women in polite society.
II. Nineteenth-century olfactory fashions
Olfactory volume figured as one of the principal elements in the social olfactory field of nineteenth-century Paris; the fragrance milieu was further structured by a classification of socially permitted odours, subdivided between fashionable perfumes and more common or even vulgar ones. The olfactory norm of the time accepted only a relatively small range of aromas. Eau de Cologne and lavender water held an unquestionable supremacy as the two main olfactory constants of the time; they reflected an ideal discretion and their hygienic authority was never in dispute. Only within the strict limits of this norm, defined by good taste, could fashions flourish every now and then. Throughout the century fashionable variations arose exclusively among floral essences, shaped in part by the gendered logic of floral symbolism; the choice of the principal raw material determined the distinction of the product.
Violet scents had thus an extraordinary vogue thoughout the second half of the nineteenth century, a phenomenon for which there is no other explanation but the strength of the symbolism this flower engenders, synonymous with the ideals of modesty expressed in the language of flowers ― an idiom women of the time mastered perfectly. The manuals of manners raised then a unanimous cry: “Iris, violet are to be recommended”.[7] Both economic and social factors interacted to sustain the longevity of the vogue for violet : the end of the century was consecrated to its reign when, in 1893, Tiemann and Kruger, at the end of lengthy research on this subject, succeeded in synthesizing ionon, which smells of both violet and iris. In 1910, there were six lines of violet-perfumed products that co-exist in the catalogues of Roger & Gallet. In 1905 the Vera Violetta range included thirty-one references to sixteen different products, testimony to the continuing power of this scent.[8] This huge success must not mask however the gradual loss of prestige linked to its social diffusion.
On 2 October 1861, Prince Charles Egon of Furstenberg orders three little jars of Pommade de l’Impératrice scented with Violette de Parme from Pierre-François-Pascal Guerlain.[9] But this scent did not remain an élite commodity for every long. In February 1869 Octave Mouret put a silver fountain of violet water in the middle of his department store, Au Bonheur des dames, on the day of the linen sale he organised ― this scent was now synonymous with bourgeoisie.[10] By 1880, violet had become Nana’s perfume, in Zola’s classic tale of a prostitute’s reign in the fashionable demi-monde.[11] Thus violet perfume went through various cultural associations over time, as well as permeating various social ranks. Its diffusion was facilitated by both the drop in production costs and in price, its fashion kept alive by the tendency to imitation described by Georg Simmel, its reception among consumers sustained by the complexities within the cultural matrix through which it diffused.
Other fashions, more or less lasting, more or less powerful, remained through a decade or two of the century, mostly due to the discoveries of chemically synthetic substances, such as heliotrope in the 1880s : synthesized in 1869 by Fittig and Mielk, heliotrope is produced industrially from 1874 and reached a significant output by 1886. Entirely new in perfumery, this scent appeared in Guerlain’s catalogue at the very beginning of the 1880s; at the end of the century, every perfumer’s catalogue mentioned it. Between 1879 and 1899 indeed, the price of one kilogram of piperonal fell dramatically, from 3790 francs to 37.5 francs. Other fashionable fragrances included ylang-ylang in the 1870s[12], lily-of-the-valley and lilac in the 1890s[13], carnation in the very last years of the century.[14]
However, I must emphasize the fact that the success of a scent was first conditioned by its inscription within the social olfactory field of toleratable smells. The synthesis of musk by Baur in 1888, should it have been the result of an effective quest, did not result in a fashion for musk-based perfumes, despite the drop in its production costs. Musk was used widely, for it was necessary to compound perfumes; but musk under no circumstances became a fashionable scent. This powerful scent was antithetical to good taste, the very incarnations of vulgarity and impropriety, whatever the rank of the person who wore it, however elevated the social position. Though of irreproachable stature, the perfume chosen by Queen Victoria at the time of her official visit to Paris in 1855 contained a “distasteful hint of musk”[15] that Le Messager des modes did not hesitate to denounce.
What counted in the final analysis was what was said about perfume and its content, as perfumers themselves concurred : “It is fashionable today to say that you do not like musk. My great experience allows me to say that the taste of the public for this scent is as big as perfumers can wish. Any perfume that will contain some musk will always be the one that the public prefers, as long as the merchant is sure to tell the buyer that there isn’t any”.[16] Of course the ingredients were not unimportance. But their symbolic power, the distinction they conveyed, whether it was because they were different or because they were new, eclipsed the olfactory criteria or even the argument of effectiveness.
III. Marketing perfumes, fashioning scents
Thus, paradoxical as it may seem, because of perfume’s intrinsic fleetingness, because of the taste of nineteenth-century Parisian society for the most delicate perfumes and its demand for the utmost discretion in their use, the fashioning process remained somewhat removed from the fragrance itself. Indeed, most properties of the perfume were accounted for, and even constructed, by the discourse of which it was a part, whether this was expressed by consumers themselves or by the prescriptions of the women’s press or of the manuals of manners. This reputation was also expressed by the very system of signs that directly surrounded the perfume itself: its name, its bottle, its label, its advertisements, the boutiques in which it was sold ― all contributed to embody the product, to convey an image to which the product was linked. This commercial rhetoric was the only way to associate perfume to elements of a visible and expressible nature. Here was the real arena where a fashioning process was consciously employed. Here was the real field in which nineteenth-century perfumers displayed their marketing skills and their struggle for sales. Whether symbolic or formulated, the discourse surrounding this fashioned product came first, aimed to construct its symbolic value and its desirability in the consumers’ eyes. In a general context, with the drop in production costs due to the fall of the price of raw materials and to the industrialization of the sector, it was all the more essential to associate perfumery with the concept of luxury. What the product lost in intrinsic value had to be gained in symbolic value.
Despite the growth in the production of perfumery indeed and the drop in the cost of raw materials and in labour costs, prices seem to be sustained at the high end of the trade over the second half of the century. A perusal of the catalogues of the Coudray perfumery, between 1850 and 1876, shows for instance a remarkable stability in the prices during this period. In a general context of rising salaries, perfumery became a relatively more accessible product. Considering, however, that the average daily wage of a man in the department of the Seine rose to 6.15 francs in 1893,[17] it was still an expensive product. In this respect, perfumery products show a social diffusion more than a real democratization. And, as production costs fell, the sector strengthened its margins even further, thanks to the image of a luxury product it has patiently crafted.
Conclusion:
In this respect, the end of the nineteenth century appears to be a crucial time in the evolution of the perfumery market, an age of transition combining unique conditions within the industry and the marketplace favourable, as I demonstrate, to the emergence of a distinct fashion process for perfumery. Emphasis shifted from the fragrance itself, which remained difficult to diffuse in the cultural context of the nineteenth century, to the display of the discourse that surrounded it. The very beginning of the twenthieth century, however, soon found a way to resolve this intrinsic lack of image by linking perfumes to couture houses. This alliance, which was to emerge in the 1910s, strengthened after the World War I and throughout the interwar years, with perfumes launched by such couturiers as Paul Poiret, Gabrielle Chanel, Jean Patou or Jeanne Lanvin. In their hands, under their names and among their models, perfume then became, in the full sense of the term, a modern fashion accessory.