What does rock'n'roll smell like? Which shade of beige will French women like most? These questions, and more, are posed in the BBC's Perfume
Tommy Hilfiger perfumer Veronique has a bold new idea for a fragrance for Generation Y. Hilfiger needs to hone a new scent containing liquid rock'n'roll. This will tempt the youth market. "Can we push the collaboration of the boundaries between music and fragrance?" she muses.
Ah, the smell of music. The cramped eggy Transit van. Johnny from Razorlight's post-gig laundry pile. The acrid fug inside a Glastonbury tent the morning after a six pints of organic perry, chilli falafel and bottle of poppers dinner. To my mind, this is not une odeur sublime. But I don't make perfume. Tommy Hilfiger, the man himself, appears in Veronique's office flanked by a retinue of fragrance exec dandies, greeted by general genuflection and bustle. Everyone is warned that Hilfiger is already 11 minutes late to this meeting and must be somewhere else in 30 minutes; such, we must infer, is the need for his razor-sharp eye and creative awesomeness. The bottle will resemble a vinyl record. You know, like "Generation Y" can't get enough of these days. Vinyl. Swimming in it, they are.
"We all know what this is saying," muses Hilfiger, staring at the bottle. "But what is it saying?" The team nod wistfully, thinking about what Tommy thinks the fragrance is saying. It's difficult to say. Hilfiger's team choose the Ting Tings to represent music at its very coolest. Model Daisy Lowe is wheeled into the press day ? a meter running behind her eyes ? to burble about how profound a concept music and smelling good is to her existence. Hilfiger's PR team are obsessed with sourcing a patchouli plant to show journalists. The world must know the fragrance contains patchouli. Mmm, patchouli. The stench of the Saturday market bong and rubbish "The Pope Smokes Dope" poster stall. A Black Sabbath roadie having a stand-up wash in Southwaite service station sinks. Some tosser with a "didge" honking all over DJ Nut Nut's set at the Magic Loungeabout Club. Music smells so good ?
But there is another story to be told in Perfume (Tue, 9pm, BBC4), and it's in France. Jean-Paul Guerlain, 73, doesn't believe in silly focus-group pandering. Instead, he'll summon a group of the world's biggest fragrance writers to his mansion by helicopter. Once there, he will usher them in for tea and then subtly "mention" a new fragrance to them. It's a lot easier to mention things to people if you include flight tickets, goody bags, champagne and an audience with the grandfather of perfume (Guerlain's family have been making fragrance since 1828).
Jean-Paul's ideal customer is the fresh-faced teenage girl, on the cusp of adult life, escorted to the Paris flagship store by her doting, affluent mummy to have a lifelong fragrance selected for her by a team of haughty ladies quacking on about top notes of cedar and base notes of aardvark or artichoke. (I used to sell perfume in Debenhams in the 90s. I wasn't very good.) Guerlain fragrances, we are told, are the essence of France in a bottle.
Thierry Wasser, Jean-Paul Guerlain's second-in-command at the time of the documentary being made, speaks of Jean-Paul as "a father". Wasser dots about in a white lab coat, staring at bottles of beige liquid, obsessed by which shade will speak to French women. Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Guerlain appears on TV and says something off the cuff about "colour" so unimaginably awful, he's swiftly removed from talking about Guerlain publicly again. You can spray as much perfume as you want, some things are still going to stink.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/jun/25/perfume-grace-dent-tvod
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