Scentzilla!

Tom Ford’s advertising campaigns have moved in a slow slimy crawl from titillation to approximations of hate fucks. First he gave us a nude in his Yves Saint Laurent M7 ads, which conveyed little about the fragrance, but at least some remnant of sensuality clung like the last sip of evening wine to those images. Later, he carved out a Gucci-font G into a female model’s pubic hair. The faux shock of that image tried so very hard to communicate sexuality. I think it achieved that goal, but by focusing on a rhetorical exhibition of sex, the models failed to radiate any sort of enjoyment about Gucci products. At least it reinforced the brand logo.

The old marketing chestnut reminds us, like a hangover or an outdated political bumper sticker, that “sex sells.” Yet what he’s selling now isn’t sex, and I’m not sure it’s fragrance either. He’s hoping you’ll buy into the insecure hostility surrounding male sexuality that has seemingly become fashionable, rather than remain just a meatheaded side effect of adolescence. This photo has all the creative juice and subtlety of a Limp Bizkit song. The Tom Ford for Men ads effectively communicate… that it smells good? That it makes you feel good? No. It only coveys Tom Ford did it all for the nookie. And then he branded and bottled it.

With his slow escalation using sex to demonstrate dominance rather than pleasure, I fully expect and dread the next campaign: perfume bukkake.

I presume the ad campaign was devised to attract attention by looking provocative. But perfume is not about being provocative. Perfume, like effective advertising, is about seduction. Jean Baudrillard once said, “Take provocation, for instance, which is the opposite and the caricature of seduction. It says: ‘I know that you want to be seduced, and I will seduce you.’ Nothing could be worse than betraying this secret rule. Nothing could be less seductive than a provocative smile or inciteful behavior, since both presuppose that one cannot be seduced naturally and that one needs to be blackmailed into it, or through a declaration of intent: ‘Let me seduce you.’”

Has much thought been given to what the audience has been provoked to do beyond getting turned on? I’ve never heard a guy announce “I have a hard-on, let’s go fragrance shopping!” Perhaps Tom Ford has deep insight into a side of the male psyche which I can’t possibly hope to understand. With that in mind, I decided to seek an opinion on the ad from a man. He asked to remain anonymous, so we’ll call him Deep Scrote:

What is there to say about this? Is it supposed to capture the essence of cleavage? [Ed. Note: And we should be concerned about it smelling like cleavage. If it’s anything like my great-grandma’s, who used to hug me into her bosom when I was little, then it’s gonna smell like boiled meat and mentholated cough drops.] Where will she place the bottle next? How does this stuff taste? She seems to want some . . . Did Tom Ford titty-fuck a blow up doll and put his jizz in a bottle? Will that smell good? Who exactly is the target audience here?

Ooh, look… a bottle getting squeezed between two breastseses. That looks exciting. Look at her mouth… expectant! Gosh, I wish that was me between those oily blobs of silicone. What is it about gay old Tom Ford that gets the ladies so hot? Maybe it’s his scent. If I smelled that greasy perhaps I could get a good titty-fuck, too. Maybe I should buy whatever is in that bottle and slather myself in it. Then none of the blow-up dolls could resist me.

This is an advertisement, isn’t it? ‘Cause an advertisement is supposed to sell something and I’m not sure that whatever niche audience this is targeted at is worth the trouble. If Tom Ford wants to sell this stuff he needs to rethink his strategy. Selling stuff to guys is easy: You take a guy or small group of guys and surround them with a bunch of hot women to fawn all over them. Axe Body Spray figured it out! Hell! The tobacco and alcohol industry have been doing it for years. Whether consciously or subconsciously men get the message and buy the product. People want to be sexy, not creepy . . . unless that IS the target audience. Tom Ford’s Perfume for Pervs. Buy it TODAY! Tom Ford is weird . . . I’m gonna go watch Zoolander now.

Images via WWD via Jezebel

“You know, Bijou, I would love you more if you did not bathe so often. I love the smell of your body, but it is faint. It vanishes with so much washing. […] I like the strong female smell. Please wash a little less.”

~ the Basque to his lover Bijou in the story The Basque and Bijou (from Anais Nin’s collection of stories, Delta of Venus.)

It’s a peculiar habit of modern life that we wash away all our natural smells only to slap on new ones. Weirder still is the popularity of “clean” scents aimed to further obfuscate the aroma of actual cleansed skin. The social bias against the unwashed masses has resulted in a cultural predilection to remove the stink of humanity from the human body.

We pluck and remove hair that nature put there. We obsessively freshen breath when our mouths exist in a golden age of dentistry that prescribes frequent brushing anyhow. We wash inside orifices which by design already evacuate themselves. We paint new faces on old ones - intending to merely enhance what we already like, but sometimes it looks more like trying to subvert what we were born with.

We were born to decay; decay has a stink; we are made to stink.¹

However, one can’t discredit the benefits of hygiene for humanity. Nor can one exist in a creative vacuum where, out of all the senses, smell alone remains artistically unexplored. Perhaps the best perfumes, like the best applications of makeup or fashion, serve to highlight what we like best about the natural through cunning use of utter artifice.

Caron’s Yatagan revels in the feral innocence of the Nature Child. Yatagan is not an attempt to imitate the smell of traipsing through the forest without access to indoor plumbing and hot showers, it is an impression of it. Just as in comedy, it is impression rather than imitation that startles and delights us. Impressions investigate minutiae, amplifying details that don’t ordinarily stand out. Imitations, on the other hand, leave us unsatisfied, appearing like wan ghosts of diluted reality with nothing novel to say.

Yatagan shows off dirty pine needles littering the forest floor in a sticky relief map of hidden smells. The spicy little voices of herbs (lavender, fennel, basil) and grass strain under the shade of bellicose trees, singing with a more delicate tenor than the woody baritone shadows they grow in. Its armpit funk from patchouli accompanies a dark whiff off Pan’s sun-leathered skin, and brings us back to the realization that we are all Nature’s Children wandering through the world, whether our forests are wooded or urban.

We cannot deny nature. We cannot invent it. We can, however, share impressions of it. The delight found in Yatagan’s impression lies in a rejection of the hypervigilant scrubbing away of nature, while paradoxically being a product of the basic hygiene ritual.

If you’re wearing perfume, you’re not feral. But you can remind yourself and the rest the world you could be.

As one version of a highly apocryphal story goes, Dr. Samuel Johnson had been traveling for weeks without access to a bath. As he waited on a rail platform for his train to arrive, a fellow passenger complained about his disheveled state with an admonishment that he smelled. The annoyed Dr. Johnson responded, “No, madam. You smell, I stink.”

¹Maybe this is why fragrances geared towards a youth demographic always smell so insipidly fresh and fruity, while heavier animalic ones are frequently derided as “old lady perfumes.” Perhaps fragrance characteristics represent an evolving comfort level (or lack thereof) with aging and our own organic rot, rather than being strictly a matter of taste. Or perhaps perfume as an artistic manifestation of the fear of dying is such an imaginative stretch that it’s just too silly an idea to entertain. Either way, it’s a tangent that’s too long for a little ol’ footnote to contain, so I’ll leave it there.