Commodities, the Visual and the Senses: Perfume Editorials in High-End Fashion Publications in the 1970s

Abstract

From the early 1970s until well into the 1980s, there was a dramatic increase in the attention granted to images of perfume in the editorial photographic production of two famous U.S. fashion magazines, Vogue and Harper's Bazaar—both mainstream, well-structured publications, having established leadership in their field. The momentum of these images—staging olfactory products and visually evoking the feelings, sensations, and memories conjured up by their smell—results from new formal photographic research led, in part, to negotiate socio-cultural flux deeply destabilizing society at large and these high-end magazines in particular. The outcome is a distinguishable aesthetic. Now considered representative of the period, it ultimately proved efficient in helping to ease changes into fashion magazines, and in feeding their powerful, long-standing system of references all the while announcing the turn to an ever-expanding consumerism blooming in the 1980s. In this process, the undeniable power of attraction, and seduction of images and smell, was once more commodified, making it emblematic of an editorial visual system that is still topical today.