ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on French interwar perfumes in order to explore what scent might reveal about the significance of Deco’s glittering decorative surfaces. It addresses the design and marketing of interwar French scents as forms of representation, arguing that perfume formed a crucial aspect of Deco’s engagement with the period’s social imagination. Original perfume bottles and advertising posters have formed part of a thriving collectors’ market for “Deco” vintage design. Perfume’s potential as representation, its ability to produce meanings, was not restricted of course to scenarios of literal staging, as with the loge d’artiste. Perfume narratives were indeed more often created through the interaction of a scent’s formulation, naming, and packaging. Both in their names and through their packaging, quite a few Deco-era perfumes involve nocturnal imagery, reinforcing the rich imaginative synergy between scent and night time. Like Deco design more generally, there are antecedents earlier in the century, during the pre-War years.
