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RSS : osMoz.com, a new look at perfume > News & Trends > Magazines
Modern & Contemporary Collections
Modern Art appeared around 1905, and with it came a new vision of the beautiful. Although it was sometimes off-beat, it did inspire fragrance designers. Let’s visit the second floor of the Museum of the BEAUTIFUL.
Art Deco Department
We can see an Art Deco influence in several recent fragrances: the bottles for l’Instant pour Homme, Perles de Lalique and Gucci BY GUCCI, for instance. Industrial design and the Bauhaus movement (1919-1933) were Yves Saint Laurent’s inspiration for the woody-floral fragrance L’HOMME, and Jil Sander’s for the monolithic bottle of her perfume STYLE. In addition to architecture and painting, the Art Deco movement also influenced glass and crystal design, particularly with creators like Daum… a house that took a step into the world of perfumery recently with a stunning ‘pâte de cristal’ bottle for the 10th anniversary of Lolita Lempicka’s first perfume.
Pop Art Influences
Contemporary American painting has been a source of creative inspiration for several fragrances. Fahrenheit came to Dior’s director in a flash of inspiration in front of James Rosenquist’s Fahrenheit 1982. Another encounter between pop art and perfume: Campbell's Soup Cans and Flowers are two works by Andy Warhol that have inspired two fragrances by Bond N°9, created in collaboration with the Warhol Foundation. Silver Factory, a unisex, incense-like scent, and Union Square, a green floral with a series of 10 collectible bottles. In the logo of Etat Libre d’Orange’s floral fragrance Don’t get me wrong… we see a different pop-art influence: a work by Roy Lichtenstein, a cross between painting and comic books.
Black Monochromes
The hot trend of the moment: black. Midnight, ebony, oriental, dark or gourmand… there are a multitude of olfactory monochromes out there right now. Perhaps they were inspired by Soulages, the ‘black-light’ and ‘beyond-black’ painter. People either love his work or hate it – they’re either subjugated or aggravated. But it doesn’t leave anyone indifferent. Aside from the monochromatic side, the material seems tactile, textured. You get a similar feeling when you run your fingers over Tom Ford’s fluted Black Orchid bottle. But also when you breathe in the fragrance, which is dark, but has its light touches too. The idea of textured black also comes up in the stunning visual for the ad campaign photo for Jil Sander’s Scent 79 Man.
Architecture
The last room in our museum is devoted to architecture. While architects usually design museums, they are also being shown in them more and more often. Jean Nouvel, for example, who designed the The Arab World Institute, the Parisian museum where the ad for Yves Saint Laurent’s latest perfume, elle, was shot. But the partnership between the brand and the architect went further than that, because Nouvel recently designed a special-edition bottle for YSL’s men’s scent, L’Homme. A modern sculpture, with (il manque le maj en vo, car c’est un nom propre) Cassandre’s famous YSL logo floating inside the fragrance. Other designs have been flirting with architecture lately, like Kenzo’s latest two fragrances. Both the bottle and the packaging for TOKYO by Kenzo evoke the Japanese megalopolis that never sleeps. And more poetically, above and beyond the sweet, musky fragrance of Kenzo Amour, Karim Rashid’s bottles are veritable objets of contemporary design in their own right.
