How perfume became couture: the great French houses turn a bottle into a luxury with a designer's name on it.
For most of the nineteenth century, scent was sold like medicine, a single-note floral or an eau de cologne in an apothecary bottle. The 1920s made it couture. When Chanel bottled an abstract, aldehyde perfume under a dressmaker's name in 1921, she turned a fragrance into a designed object with a house behind it, and the great houses followed.
Guerlain's Shalimar, Lanvin's Arpege, Bourjois' Evening in Paris, and the older prestige of Houbigant advertised on the Deco pages of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, where the fan magazines' mass beauty never reached. This is why the fragrance record lives in the society titles, and why it is the vertical the free archive can only follow to 1930, the edge of the public domain.
Houbigant and Roger & Gallet sell single-note florals and eau de cologne, as much remedy as luxury.
Houbigant ›A couturier bottles an abstract perfume under her own name, and scent becomes couture.
Chanel ›Guerlain's Shalimar and Bourjois' Evening in Paris advertise on the Deco pages of Vogue.
Guerlain ›
Real public-domain advertisements the engine identified for these houses. Click any page to read it at the Internet Archive.
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