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| Sarah Moon for the Pirelli calendar |
In case you haven't read it, there's a wonderful meditation over on Perfume Shrine about Anais Anais, the iconic perfume by Cacharel. Writing about Anais Anais several years ago, I appreciated its ad campaigns (old and new) but commented that the fragrance was pretty free of childhood associations for me. Reading the Shrine article, which features information on Sarah Moon, the photographer of the fragrance's original look, all sorts of impressions came surging back, and I realized Anais Anais made more of an impression than I'd allowed for. In concert with other social trends and currents of the time, it practically art-directed the era.
I was about ten years old when Anais Anais came out, and this very specific soft focus look was everywhere. It was a sort of 1970s re-imagining of erotica popular in the twenties, the kind of images you'd see on forbidden postcards. Women at their vanities, gauzy daylight filtering through lace curtains, eyelet-ridden blouses, crocheted shawls, long hair gathered in loose buns, off the shoulder lingerie, water basins and pitchers on antique wooden washstands, cascading ferns, heavy rouge and big doe eyes, canopy beds. Reading the article on Shrine synchronized all these images from my childhood in Texas, and I was reminded how pervasively a Trifecta like fashion, film and fragrance could take over culture back then, before the internet, the cell phone, and the Twitter account shifted and dispersed the information landscape.
