The 6 Craziest Things We Read in Dior's New Coffeetable Book
By Liana Schaffner
As a designer who celebrated form and understatement, the closest Christian Dior ever came to sublime exaggeration was a peplum. But Dior fragrances inspire outsize emotions in others. In his new book Dior, The Perfumes (Rizzoli), out this week, fragrance expert Chandler Burr delves deep into the fashion house’s archives to offer the most mind-blowingly extravagant history of scent (Dior’s, in this case) we’ve ever seen. Here, excerpts of a few of our favorite over-the-top passages and the fragrances that inspired them.
Poison: “A massive rush of hot Madagascar wind bearing the scent of a thousand tropical flowers on a base of dark green rainforest leaf…wrapped in a succulent neon-candy carapace.”
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Dolce Vita: “It is mouthwateringly sweet, a pastry with the crisp woodbark angle of cinnamon and the masculine scent of the young, muscular Italian pastry chef wiping from his eyes the sweat brought on by the fragrant oven.”
J’Adore: “The scent of the hue of a tan gotten on a sailboat in the Mediterranean, if Mediterranean tans had a scent. (They do, actually—the salicylates and orange blossom absolutes that in the darkest day of deadest winter make even a trace of the scent of sunscreen an instant vibrant hologram of summer and beach.)”
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Dior Eau Fraîche: “It is as if the olfactory effect has caused one’s body temperature to plunge—always slightly shocking no matter how many times you experience it—when breaking the still surface of a cool swimming pool.”
Diorling: “Leathers can be conceived as a nineteenth-century English library of bound leather books or as a woman bound tightly in raw leather straps and a rubber blindfold. Leathers can be and often are an instant—and generally politely unacknowledged—S&M thing. In other words, everything that was not Dior.”
Photo by David Cook
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