![]() The culture is now less hospitable to perfume, and it has shown in declining sales over the last decade. So much for fragrance as a personal touch… 5 in its early years, thanks to the legions wearing it. There are many anecdotes of entire rooms filling nauseously with the smell of Chanel No. That can make one quite notorious if one fills a room with a potent perfume. ![]() Most of us live and commute in close quarters with a surfeit of synthetic chemicals and neuroses about them. That’s a hurdle in a slow economy.īut there are social hurdles, too. In the age of deodorants and hot showers, personal fragrances are now expressly a luxury good. More expediently, fragrances concealed unfortunate natural odors. I do not mean the smell of pies cooling on the window, lavendered sheets in French country inns and incense in temples and chapels. The sum total of these things is…a brand.įragrances can, indeed, enhance our well-being, and have been dearly valued for that reason. It’s a game of associations by which a fragrance is attached to: a state of mind a sense of well-being a character. “Smell is a potent wizard,” wrote Helen Keller, “that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.” It’s also the most rarefied of senses, so perfume ads attempt to moor their product to something more immediately sensible. So what are these fantasies and why have they come about? The formula for a perfume ad Spike Jonze obviously had A LOT of fun with “KENZO WORLD,” but he also used it to comment on the perfume ad genre itself and the fantasies it projects, and how frustrated they are in the world around us. A perfume ad campaign is often incredibly expensive (and it shows), so one should hope people are having a little fun with it. Meanwhile, the directors (from Scorsese, to Lynch to Jonze) get to do something off-kilter and fun for themselves. ![]() They know that the scenarios are exaggerated fantasies, approaching absurdity, even when it all looks dead serious. In truth, fashion world insiders know that perfume ads are ridiculous most of the time. It mashes the fantasies of the perfume ad genre with hallucinatory rage into something that is nearly parody. “KENZO WORLD” is pure spectacle, but it’s a very smart one. I think of it as a sequel to his music video for “Weapon of Choice,” 16 years later. It seems to take stale perfume ad tropes in a new direction, but more accurately it just gleefully veers off the rails while fitting neatly in his oeuvre. I’ve seen much ado about Spike Jonze’s new perfume ad for Kenzo, and with good reason. ![]()
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