AGENT PROVOCATEUR // EAU DYNAMISANTE
Summer Tribble discusses perfume advertising, celebrity cosigns, a favorite scent she initially hated and her ideal rave fragrance
Welcome to the second edition of Scent + Song, an interview series by Vivian Medithi about perfume and music. Smell and sound are intimately tied to memory, and to each other; fragrances have "notes" and scentmakers work at perfume organs. A great perfume is like music you love: not something you know, but something you feel -- and we all feel a little differently. Today we’re speaking with Summer Tribble, a Chicago-based artist and fragrance enthusiast whose instagram @orrisrootpowder documents vintage perfume ads, unique bottles and other fragrance ephemera.
How did you first get into perfumes?
I used to be a fan of this K-pop girl group called GFRIEND and they did an ad for an Anna Sui perfume called Romantica Exotica. I was like, “Oh I wonder what it smells like,” so then I looked up “What is this perfume smell?” because I didn't know Fragrantica existed. And then it took me to Fragrantica and I was like, “What?! You can look at all this stuff on here?”
Then I started looking up the perfumes that I already had, which wasn’t many. Tommy Girl by Tommy Hilfiger, which I wore through all of high school, I still wear it quite a lot. And also Skin by Clean, the original one in the purple bottle, not the ones that they sell at Sephora. Then I was like, “Oh, now I know what these things smell like,” so I started blind buying.
I started reading more and seeking out information about it and looking at ad campaigns, which is what made me more interested too, because the visuals of perfume are really key and really iconic to the marketing. It's always this question of “how do we convey how this smells?” or like, “how do we convey to the customer that this perfume will make you desirable or happy or sexy?”
Speak a bit more on the visual language, or the way that perfume ads function in that kind of synesthesia fashion, to communicate via a completely different sense. The only perfume or fragrance ads that I can even remember off the top of my head are Old Spice and Axe.
A lot of people when they smell perfume, they don't even really know exactly what notes they're smelling unless it's something that they're already very familiar with, like vanilla or rose. If you say, "Oh this has cedar in it,” a lot of people don't really know what cedar smells like by itself. Or they don't know what yuzu or pink pepper or blue tansy and all these other really specific notes, unless they've actually smelled it before. And so the visual marketing aspect, it's usually not even a synesthesia thing. It doesn't matter what this perfume smells like. All you need to know is that it'll smell good enough to make you attractive or make you feel a certain kind of way.
The first perfume that stood out to me was Calvin Klein Euphoria. I remember seeing it in magazine catalogs when I was younger and advertisements for it at Kohl's, [but] it doesn't tell you how it's gonna smell. There's no indication of the natural notes or the materials in it. It's just two hot people and a dark, kind of lit area and a woman wearing a beautiful gown. It looks very sensual. And then you think of a lot of other iconic perfume ads and there's really no indication of what it actually smells like, like the J'Adore ad with Charlize Theron. Or like Lancome with Julia Roberts, it's just her smiling holding the perfume.
But now there's a different direction a lot of brands are going in. Jo Malone is one of the ones I've noticed that wasn’t really using people in their ads, but they were focusing more on the product photography of the bottles and putting [the scent] next to the ingredients. Issey Miyake did that too, so that makes sense to me, but at the end of the day, even if you see the perfume bottle next to an orchid bloom or a gardenia, if you don't already know what that smells like, that picture means nothing to you, except that it looks nice and it's well put together.
It's this idea of “What are you trying to communicate through an ad,” right? And you're not necessarily trying to communicate what a product is necessarily, you're just trying to convey the type of person who would buy a product like this.
The ads are really indicative of the consumer audience. If you're trying to sell something that's young and hip and sexy, you're gonna position your ad that way and have young, hip, sexy people in it, it's just marketing 101.
I really started gravitating towards ads from the 90s and 2000s mostly from a design perspective, and also because a lot of them are really difficult to find. There isn’t really a place where they’re archived. There's like people who will scan and upload them online, but I wish there was a library of images, easily accessed, without having to pay or something.
There's some that I try and I try and I search and I search and I can only find a really fuzzy image of it that someone is selling on eBay, especially ones that are pre-Internet. Getting into ads from the 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s, those are really hard to find in low quality too. So the search is part of it that makes it exciting to me too.
Speaking on some of the older ads that you’ve seen or been interested in procuring but unable to, from these pre-90s, maybe even pre-80s eras, are there specific ones you think are really notable?
One that I was looking for for a really long time, I really want to find a high-quality version of the ads for Angel Innocent by Mugler. There's some that are decent quality out there but that was like one of the first ones where I was like, “I really want to find a high quality version of this,” because I was looking at all the Angel ads throughout the years and all the Alien ads throughout the years and I had a little decant of Innocent. I was like, “Why can't I find the ad for this one?” So that one's like a white whale for me.
Another one is Charlie Naturals. The only time I've been able to find it is on eBay, but Revlon had this line of natural perfumes, and the way that the ad is laid out is a bunch of the natural ingredients that are supposed to be in the perfume, [counter to the ads] we were just talking about, focusing on the the ingredients in the perfume rather than like the vibe. A lot of the ads around that time were more like “Be the kind of woman who wears this perfume” or like you know, “the perfume is this kind of woman.” I don't know why this one is so alluring to me. Something about the illustration reminds me of a wildlife handbook, and the tagline is “a whole new species of fragrance.”
This one reminds me of those children's books to teach them the names of animals and fruits. You brought up this idea of perfumes being advertised with the ingredients of the scents they actually contain being kind of new, almost Instagram era, where you see it in the grid but you don't necessarily see it in print. And it's kind of interesting to think about that visual language actually being really old or not a new idea, even if it's a trendy or more commonplace idea now.
It's the whole clean beauty thing too. People are like, “I want to know what's in these fragrances,” even if there's no real, actual sandalwood in it because it's overharvested. Most of the sandalwood in modern fragrances is synthesized, it’s a natural isolate molecule. But if you put sandalwood in your product photography shot next to the bottle: “there's sandalwood in this, I know what's going in this.” It’s an attempt at transparency, or making the customer feel like they know what's going in [the product].
I hear all the time, people being like, “this perfume smells so synthetic, I don't like it,” but unless you're purchasing something from a perfumer who only does natural perfumery like Hiram Green, there's synthetics in everything. And synthetic doesn't naturally mean bad either. A lot of synthetics, like I was saying before with sandalwood, they're necessary to slow down the depletion of natural resources.
It’s interesting, this era of greenwashing and false transparency that we're in. With perfume, it's literally alcohol that you spray on your skin. It's not amazing for you. But I get it. People want to do the least amount of harm to their body nowadays because it seems like everything else out there is doing harm to us and we have no control over it.
Dialing back, you said you were most interested in 90s and 2000s ads because of their design language. Would you like to speak a little bit more about what's interesting about that era?
The main reason why I was interested in a lot of these is the photography of it. A lot of these really iconic fashion photographers are the ones who photographed these ads during the 90s and early 2000s. Like Nick Knight and Mario Testino, David Lachapelle, people like that because they were the big fashion photographers at the time. And so a lot of really beautiful imagery came out of this era, and concepts that feel more exciting than a lot of the mainstream advertisements we see nowadays. Not to be like, “all things were better back in the day,” or whatever, but it is true people were pushing the envelope a little bit more. And now it seems very obvious when you see ads for Lancome or YSL Black Opium, they're like, “pick the prettiest celebrity who's well-liked and very popular and then just photograph them holding the bottle.” That's it.
Even like Mugler, they'll get Willow Smith and do 3D modeling around her but it's still not as weird as like, the Mugler Cologne ad. Like this ad would not be released by Mugler today.
That one definitely caught my eye. It reminds me of both the Island Boys and also the DaVinki Twins.
The landscape is very alien. They're kind of like the twins from The Matrix. Also. But their hair is also kind of like the aliens from Alien. They have this weird, kind of goat-ish facial features going on. This is probably one of my favorite ads of all time just because of how strange it is.
And you're not really gonna see that nowadays. I wasn't around when [this ad] came out, or I wasn't sentient, so I don't know what the reception was. But I feel like if you release that now, a bunch of people [would] get mad at it.
One thing that interested me in that thread was the idea of celebrity endorsement in perfume and what that means now. Even just looking back at this are.na board or at your Instagram, with the Taylor Monson [John Galliano shoot], and then thinking about, Givenchy L’Interdit and Audrey Hepburn, or like Chanel No. 5 [and] Marilyn Monroe. Where do you see that distinction or evolution? I think most people would agree that celebrity cosigns or placements now feel very contrived, even when it's largely organic.
We're just also more aware now that everything is an ad. Everything is an #ad, everything is a brand endorsement. Even if there's rules where people are like, “Oh we have to be transparent about whether or not this is an ad,” sometimes they're not anyways, and us being more exposed to the fact that people do get paid to promote things, it's hard not to be cynical about it, because you're aware that it's a very transactional thing.
Sometimes I feel like Kanye when he was like, “I like Lady Gaga songs. What the fuck does she know about cameras?” I'm like does Lady Gaga even wear Valentino Donna Born in Roma,? Probably not. If she does good for her.
Kilian Love Don't Be Shy, that's what Rihanna wears, so it got super popular, or one of my favorite perfumes, Diptyque Orpheon, I went on Fragrantica recently, read some reviews about it and people are like, “This is the perfume that Phoebe Bridgers wears so I got it.” So there is still value in celebrity endorsements when they actually seem more organic and real.
But once we as consumers know that there was a monetary exchange to have this person as the figurehead... I'm biased because I'm critical of perfume and the beauty industry in general, so I don't know if younger girls are like, “I'm gonna buy this perfume because Natalie Portman is on it,” but even now the younger generation is becoming more and more aware of signaling and things like that
On your Instagram sometimes you'll do, “Here's Kasey Musgraves perfumes from her AD shoot.” I was curious about the impulse to identify, in this kind of context where it's like, the goal of an AD video is somebody selling their house or putting it on the market.
A lot of people have probably said, “Oh, if this famous beautiful person wears this perfume that means if I wear this perfume, part of me is like them.” From my perspective though, it's more just an insight into their taste. Celebrities lie all the time and you know PR, manufacturing stories. It's to be expected, so if you see a candid shot of someone's perfume tray in the background of their instagram story and you zoom in and can identify which ones… It gives me a rush, “Oh my God, I'm getting an insight into this person.”
Like Courtney Love wears Fracas, or there's some celebrities when they post their vanity and I see some like rare perfumes, I'm like, “Okay, she's a woman of taste.”
It's basically because I'm nosy, that's why it's interesting to me. We're in this age where celebrities are not as enigmatic as they used to be, but in a way that feels very fake as well. Everyone's constantly livestreaming and posting on Instagram like, “I love all my fans, I talk to my fans all the time,” but at the same time it's like “you're still a celebrity.” So I think parsing the mystery of intimate details of their life for real little things, like the cosmetics they use and their perfume tastes, that's what interests me. I wish it didn't, I wish I did not play into the cult of celebrity. But there's some people where I'm just so curious about what they wear, not because I want to buy it and wear it myself, but just because I'm like, “what does this say about them?” I want to know what cologne Mads Mikkelsen wears because he's weird and I'm curious about his taste.
What are some celeb perfume choices that surprised you?
When Amber Rose said she wore Moschino Cheap and Chic, that kind of surprised me. To be fair, I think the interview was in [2017]. But that one kind of surprised me because it's a lot of celebrity interviews, they'll be like, “Oh yeah, I wear Creed” or Clive Christian or Tom Ford, things that are more expensive. Things that, when you go to the Nordstrom counter or Neiman Marcus or Saks, the perfume people are going to try to sell it to you. But Moschino’s not any of those things. Like I think they sell some Moschino perfumes at Walmart. So I love that. Like I love when celebrities reveal these kinds of unexpected choices for their tax bracket.
[Rose] says she's worn [Cheap and Chic] since seventh grade and I love that too. I'm not the kind of person with a signature scent, I wear a different scent every day, sometimes three or four different scents every day. Again, it's a revealing fact, “Oh, this person has smelled the same for a really long time.” It's kind of endearing, you know.
Another fragrance choice that surprised me is allegedly Hillary Clinton wears Angel, which is classic, the first gourmand pretty much. It's sweet, kind of skanky patchouli. It smells really weird. They reformulated it a million times. It smells pretty good now still but just the thought of, powerful politician woman who's very polarizing wearing something that's like a mall perfume like Angel. But I don't really know what else you would wear. In a way, I think it's kind of perfect because like Hillary herself, Angel is a polarizing fragrance, you either love it or you hate it. So it's kind of fitting.
Also Lil Uzi [Vert] wearing Chance by Chanel, that's really cute. And I love that the Uzi fanboys went out to buy it and they were like, “Oh the lady at the counter said that it was a women's perfume.” It's like, “Yeah. It's okay to wear ‘women's’ perfume.” There's no such thing as women's or men's.
Agent Provocateur’s Agent Provocateur // “MEADOWS” by POiSON ANNA
In Summer’s words…
The Scent: Agent Provocateur is a hazy, retro-smelling rose chypre that is equal parts vintage boudoir and sticky bathroom floor. Powdery dried rose petals intertwined with a spicy, pissy animalic musk. Assertive yet elegant, intimidating yet enticing, and overall just slightly discordant enough to intrigue me and keep me coming back for more. It's rose-scented powder foundation that's been slept in and sweat through. It's expensive bathroom potpourri and dimly lit bedrooms. It’s sweet and sour and seductive.
I wore Agent Provocateur quite a bit during the start of 2021 when I had just started dating my boyfriend, which is also probably why this fragrance is heavily associated with seduction for me. Nowadays I still like to wear it on cold winter nights when I'm feeling particularly sultry. I like to pair it with black suede accessories and red satin lipstick.
This perfume is suitable for amorous grandmothers to dust off and wear once a year on Valentine's Day. It is also suitable for high-end escorts to spray on their undergarments prior to appointments. It is also suitable for glamorous older women who religiously watched Dynasty in the 80s and want to bring back shoulder pads.
The Song: Layers of a throbbing guitar riff and a repetitive, slightly off-kilter saxophone blur together to lure the listener into a trip-hop-esque trance. POiSON ANNA draws out her words in a captivating near-whisper, drowsily crooning "hold me" over and over. It's a hypnotic haze of pulsing sound that's easy to lose yourself in. Similarly, the spicy, sweaty rose of Agent Provocateur has a come-hither effect upon those who smell it. For me, it conjures up images of cloudy opium dens, plushy vintage car interiors, and lipstick-smudged bedsheets soaked with perspiration.
Angel makes a good segue to talk about Agent Provocateur. The thing I really liked about it, but I could also see being really polarizing, is just that powdery floral is so associated with grandmas. You even said it when you initially talked about it being like an “amorous grandmother;” I loved that. I definitely enjoy a powdery floral, but it feels a bit out of fashion or out of date with contemporary tastes.
I definitely agree with that. It's something that was in vogue for a really long time a few decades ago and now because so many people or so many women from that era wore it, it's become associated with grandmas. I see tweets that are like, “in 50 years, all the nursing homes are going to smell like Baccarat Rouge” and that will be the grandma perfume.
But yeah, something about a powdery floral. Things that smell like makeup are really interesting to me. I just love the smell of getting ready, like it's very luxurious, piling on a bunch of products that all have these different smells and it all mashes together and then you sweat a little bit through your makeup and go out dancing and smell’s kind of soaked into your clothes. I like when something smells a little bit lived in and Agent Provocateur is the smell equivalent of a full face of beautiful makeup that's been a bit worn down, by some scandalous activity maybe.
You mentioned you started wearing it more during the start of 2021?
I'm fairly sure I found it on Fragrantica, browsing the forums. Someone probably recommended it somewhere, I don't remember exactly. But immediately I was attracted to the bottle. It's so cute, this little pink thing with a black ribbon, and it's like a grenade, you pull the pin out to spray it. And looking at the notes I was like, “Okay I like roses.” This was still pretty early in my perfume journey, I had really only bought more modern perfumes or designer perfumes and perfume oils from Whole Foods, but I hadn't really done much exploring. I would say at that point most of the scents in my collection were pretty crowd-pleasing.
So when I got it during the pandemic, I sprayed it on my arm, and I smelled it and I was like, “This literally smells like piss.” Like when a bathroom has just been cleaned and there's a rose air freshener or like potpourri, but then someone has just pissed all over the toilet seat. I was like, “That's what this smells like,” didn't give any time to dry down, immediately washed it off, “I hate this.” Later I tried it again just to see because I was like, “What a shame to let this beautiful bottle go to waste,” and my perspective completely changed.
When I smelled it the second time I was like, “Wait.” I think [my initial disappointment was] because I was expecting a kind of green, fresh rose, like Jo Malone Red Roses or something from L’Occitane, but it's really unique. Kind of sweaty, kind of salty, kind of sweet rosy powdery. It’s a boudoir scent, and that's why I like to wear it a lot, it makes me feel sexy. It's not something that I wear out a lot but I wear it a lot at home, especially if I'm spending time with my boyfriend. A very amorous scent.
It's just a sultry perfume and it's not for everyone, it's not a clean girl perfume. It's definitely an acquired taste, especially if you're new to perfumes. But it's definitely one of my top perfumes of all time.
You paired it with this POiSON ANNA song. I really liked the way that it just takes its time [driving] towards something. And especially in the outro where it's breaking down and slowing down even further, [it] felt like that kind of powdery like makeup scent over top, over all of the moving floral and guitar and other things that are threading through. Tell me a bit about this song and what parallels you're drawing to the perfume.
I heard of her because she’s associated with Dean Blunt, they've collabed before. Her vocal styling is really interesting. She has this high-pitched whispering way of sing-speaking that is very sultry. And this perfume, when I smell it I think of hazy, powdery, like a powdery cloud of dried rose petal and animalic muskiness. It's a little bit hard to parse out the specific notes in it and I enjoy that in a perfume, when it's very well blended and it smells like a perfume, not just like five ingredients that you look through in a basket. That can be nice, too, but when a perfume is hard to pick out all the individual notes, I kind of enjoy that confusion. You're smelling it and you're like, “I can kind of smell what this wants to be,” but it's just itself.
[Agent Provocateur is] kind of sweet, sour, seductive, and it's layered and a little bit off kilter, and I feel the same way about the song “MEADOWS.” There's so many layers of instrumentation and [with] the repetition of the song, you'll keep listening to it and then just kind of forget that you're listening to it. It becomes like background noise, but then the dynamic changes throughout, it keeps drawing you in and pushing you in and out.
And the guitar riffs and the saxophone riffs are really sexy for lack of a better word. I don't know a ton about music theory or writing about music, but it has this pulsing feeling that's very hypnotic. And when I spray Agent Provocateur on, I can't stop smelling myself when I spray it and this song has the same kind of feeling to me. It’s something I could loop for hours and just keep listening to it. If you played that song and wore this perfume and got really drunk or like, did a bunch of drugs in like an opium den and just laid there, It would make sense.
Vivian’s Pairing: “MEADOWS” by POiSON ANNA & Louis Vuitton’s Ombre Nomade
The smoke in this perfume is intense, but the scent veers sweeter thanks to the rose and raspberry mixed in. Like Maison Francis Kurkdijan superstar BR540, Ombre Nomade also integrates saffron and amberwood, the former softening the perfume’s composition as a whole and the latter offering a warm base for the resinous smoke of oud, benzoin and incense. Its intense projection and long lasting sillage make wearing this perfume feel like wrapping yourself in a hoodie fresh out of the dryer while sipping a hot toddy; When I’m wearing it, I keep returning to sniff my wrist the way “MEADOWS” gently spirals in concentric loops.
Clarins’s Eau Dynamisante // “Power of Love” by Deee-lite
In Summer’s words…
The Scent: One of the most energizing fragrances in my collection, Eau Dynamisante opens with a bright burst of invigorating citrus, accompanied by an herbal bouquet of caraway and coriander. After a few hours, it dries down to transparent lemon, softly spicy carnation, and something that I can only describe as the smell of “clean coolness”. Underneath the sheer veil of natural fruits, flowers, and herbs, there’s a cold, slightly synthetic sensation to the drydown. It’s like an air conditioning unit installed in a lush greenhouse. The effect that this fragrance has upon me is like that of a cold shower on a stiflingly hot day- invigorating, stimulating, rejuvenating.
When I visited some friends in New York last summer, I wore Eau Dynamisante. It was the perfect antidote to the suffocating soup of muggy subway stations and congested sidewalks. I carried my bottle in my bag with me and refreshed myself with a cooling spritz every few hours. In my opinion, this is the ultimate heat-conquering fragrance.
You should wear this fragrance if you love to go dancing in sweaty warehouses, but still want to smell good without overwhelming the noses of your fellow ravers. You should also wear this fragrance if you hang eucalyptus in your shower and have Aesop hand soap in your bathroom, but could probably stand to clean your microwave a little more often. Eau Dynamisante will give you the energy you need to do your chores and also rave all night long.
The Song: Like Eau Dynamisante, “Power of Love” has an uplifting, invigorating effect upon me. On this upbeat house track, Lady Miss Kier’s reverberant voice rings out among bright piano chords, passionately declaring : “I believe in the power of love! Feel the power.” These optimistic lyrics come together with the lively beat of this song to create the sonic equivalent of pure flower power energy injected directly into my veins- truly, I don’t understand how anyone could resist dancing to this. I always listened to this song and pictured lots of beautiful people in colorful outfits dancing on a light-up LED dancefloor, flower petals raining down from the ceiling. Now just add the sparkling fresh scent of Eau Dynamisante and this joyous scene is complete.
One of the things that really stood out to me about Eau Dynamisante is just the caraway and the coriander herbal note to it.
This one is so good during the summer. I wore this in New York and it was 95% humidity. I was there for a couple weeks and all the sidewalks and the steel buildings are bouncing the sunlight off each other, baking all the tourists and crowds in this giant concrete oven. I was like “I need to take a scent with me that's going to counteract that,” and this is just like a shower in a bottle. It has that spicy caraway and some other more savory spicy notes, [cardamom and] I love coriander. But then it also has this underlying cool note to it as well. I smell it and think of when you walk past an open, very brightly lit fluorescent mall on a hot day and they open the doors and the air conditioner blasts out to the pavement.
The petitgrain and the rosemary plus the citrus remind me a lot of Sale Gosse by Frederic Malle. And then it's kind of funny just smelling … like it does feel like an air conditioner, I know exactly what you mean, that kind of stale, processed but still fresh, air.
Scents that have this kind of cooling note are really interesting. Like, a lot of them have Calone in them or like Cascalone in them. L’Eau d’Issey by Issey Miyake has that same plasticky water, air conditioning kind of vibe to it. A lot of people really hate that in perfume, but I really love it. I think a lot of people would smell [Eau Dynamisante] and be like, “Oh my God, that's so 90s.” It’s like you're wearing jelly sandals and you have a clear plastic backpack, very artificial but also very joyful and uplifting, and I feel like this is like the perfect balance of artificial but also natural quote, unquote.
Was this also a Fragrantica encounter?
I found this in the wild organically at a department store. We were looking at the Diptyque counter and the Byredo counter and I was like, “I don't want to spend a lot of money today.” We went to the section where they had some of the cheaper brands and more of the skincare brands that also sell fragrances like Fresh and Clarins and I just saw this sitting on one of those little fluorescent light shelves. [The bottle] stood out to me, “that looks so interesting.” So I just sprayed it on and I wore it around and kept thinking about it like, “I have to go back and get it.”
So I got it and it's pretty cheap, I love a cheap fragrance. Agent Provocateur also you can find on eBay for $20 or something. These are not expensive fragrances and that’s something that I enjoy, too. It's kind of strange how a lot of these Tik Tok famous fragrances like Baccarat Rouge cost 400 dollars, and all these Tom Ford fragrances like Lost Cherry. So fucking expensive and it's all these 16 year olds working their little minimum wage jobs trying to save up for these expensive perfumes.
And you know, since it is a luxury item, it can feel really nice to own something that costs that much, but a lot of these fragrances that cost that much don't even have the amount of raw material in them, and the quality of the ingredients does not merit that high price tag. And I love when I can find a really beautiful fragrance that really works for me for the low.
Power of Love by Deee-Lite. Great song, amazing song, I was dancing when I heard it. Then it was funny because after I listened to the song I went back and saw what you wrote about it in terms of rave culture and people dancing on an LED dance floor, and in my brain I was thinking of images of Studio 54 from back in the day immediately.
This scent is perfect for that too. I used to go to a lot of raves and it would always piss me off when people would wear super heavy perfumes. Super heavy, super sweet, everyone's packed in and sweating all over each other. Like you can barely breathe and then you have the smell of BO [body odor] and cigarettes mixing with this really heavy sweet perfume. There's a time and a place, and so wearing this on the dance floor, it's so fresh and clean and has this kind of sour, sparkling, uplifting like fizzy, it smells effervescent. That would be a good antidote to the stanky, heavy, cigarette, BO, spilled beer on the floor, kind of energy that happens at a lot of these raves. And when I listen to the song, it's when Deee-Lite was like, doing their whole flower power, “we can change the world,” love and light, “global warming is real guys but it's okay, we can beat it,” that era of new globalization and social awareness in the 90s. And so smelling this, even though it's not super floral, which a lot of Deee-lite has that flower power, groove revival aesthetic to it and this scent I don't think is necessarily totally in line with that, but I think it's definitely in line with this song. It's really bubbly and clean, sparkling and energizing. That's the big thing, is that it's revitalizing.
When we were talking about raves and you brought up people wearing very loud or very big scents in the club, that late 90s, early 2000s era of perfume and perfume ads, [I think of] Versace Eros [type] shit. In your ideal rave, what type of music are they playing? And what scents are people wearing?
Probably something club and vogue adjacent, something for the girls. I like industrial techno and stuff like that too, but it's not my favorite. My ideal rave they'd be playing music that is easy to dance to, music that's not too dark and grinding. Music where there's some words in it, like it's not all instrumental, maybe you can sing along to some stuff.
I've been listening to a lot of Deee-Lite lately, this entire past year. Lady Miss Kier [lead singer], she's one of the people I wonder what perfume she wears. Or what perfume she wore in the 90s. So I think just something fun and something feminine is probably my ideal rave music at this moment in time.
For scents, I know I just talked about how I don't want people to wear really heavy and sweet perfumes, but I don't want to dictate what people can and can't wear at the cute rave.
But maybe I would say they're all wearing some kind of citrus perfumes, something that is energizing like [Eau Dynamisante] but not restricted to just this fragrance. Something where if you're getting a little tired and you don't want to do drugs to keep your energy up, you can just spray a little bit and it’s beautiful, fresh, invigorating scent. “Now I can go back on the dance floor!” If people were wearing something that's the equivalent of a big glass of water, that would be nice for a rave.
Vivian’s Pairing: Clarins’s Eau Dynamisante & “Focus [Yaeji Remix] - Charli XCX
Easily the most underrated song in Charli’s discography, “Focus” has barrelling momentum, synths running fullspeed downhill. Yaeji’s remix sucks the oxygen out of the original, or perhaps submerges it in water, splitting the difference between chillwave and more dance-forward house music. The way the 808s roil and ripple under the surface of this track is like holding a dog back from chasing a squirrel: you can feel the muscles tensing, the latent power raring to go, just barely restrained.