The Fragrances That Changed the Field

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/t-magazine/fragrance-perfume-orientalism.html

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Chapter 1

I REMEMBER AS IF it were yesterday that distant afternoon on which I first smelled oudh. I was in my grandmother’s house in Delhi. I was 13, maybe 14. We had a family perfumer, or attarwallah, a man of some refinement, who came to us from Lucknow — a city that is a metonym for high Indo-Islamic culture. We didn’t know the attarwallah’s name, or how he knew to follow us from address to change of address. But he came without fail two or three times a year. A slim, gliding figure, with a mouth reddened from paan, or betel leaf and areca nut, the attarwallah produced his wares from carved bottles of colored glass that he carried in a black leather doctor’s bag. He showed us scents according to which season we were in. So in winter, musk and patchouli; in summer, white-flowered varieties of jasmine — of which there are some 40 odd in India — as well as rose and vetiver. In the monsoon, he brought us mitti attar, which imitates the smell of parched earth exhaling after the first rain (“mitti” means “mud” in Hindi). The perfumes came from the medieval Indian town of Kannauj, which is a 75-mile drive west of Lucknow and which, like its French counterpart, Grasse, has a tradition of perfume manufacturing several centuries old. Once he had drawn his perfume out on white cotton buds at the tips of long, thin sticks, the attarwallah lingered over his customers, telling stories of the various scents and reciting the odd romantic couplet of Urdu poetry.

It was this attarwallah’s son who came one day to see us, bearing news of his father’s passing — and of oudh. It was immediately apparent that the attarwallah’s son was a man apart from his father. He had kohled eyes and wore drab beige trousers, and where his father had been full of Old World charm, the young attarwallah was oily, pushy and a tiny bit sleazy. Once the women of the house — my mother, my grandmother, my aunts — had commiserated with him over his father, they took an instant aversion to him.

It was winter. Orange-barred heaters glowed in the room where the attarwallah and the women sat. I was listening to them talk of quality and seasonability when the young perfumer, with all the indelicacy of a greenhorn, announced, “I have some oudh.”

A hush fell over the room.

“How much?” my mother whispered, as if the young perfumer had tried to sell her hashish and not perfume.

“What’s oudh?” I said, no doubt in response to the magical effect this word had had on the room. The young attarwallah, perhaps relieved to see a friendly face in this tough crowd, was upon me like a sprite. I was drinking masala tea and, before I could say another word, he let fall a single drop of oudh into the cup.

“Drink it now,” he said with a smile.

I took a sip and — my God! — my senses were scrambled. I was engulfed by a synesthesia as pure and overwhelming as any Baudelaire ever knew. It smelled — or did it taste? — like a deep, woody mustiness, a kind of fragranced shade, the tantalizing cool of a covered bazaar. It was familiar, almost banal, like the scent of sacks of grain and spice in an old godown, but also somehow glamorous — sensual, velvety. It was heavy, enchantingly in lock step with the smoky winter day outside, but not lugubrious. It drew me nearer — to smell a little was to want to smell more — but it never fully gave up its secret. It produced an illusion of comfort, like that of an old shahtoosh shawl, but it was arousing, too, stirring memories of places I had never been, sensations I had never known. No sooner had that first layer peeled away than I sought to possess it, like a man in a fever dream clutching at the air.

Part of what I was feeling had to do with the nature of smell itself. Of the senses, smell alone has a direct line to our limbic system, the part of our mind that deals with emotions and memory. The urgency we feel in the midst of a profound odor-related experience, of memory rushing ahead of words and reason, can be physiologically explained: The olfactory nerve sends signals directly to the emotion-memory part of our brain without going through the relay junction of the dorsal thalamus the way the other senses do.

I came out of my reverie to see an inert drop of oil colliding aimlessly against the porcelain edge of my teacup. I was hooked. I wanted some oudh, and I wanted it then and there. My mother shook her head. A vial of oudh, even in the early 1990s, in an India creeping out of socialism, cost several hundred dollars.

Of course, the reason it was so expensive only made me want it more. Oudh is an oleoresin, born out of a fungal attack upon the heartwood of a perfectly ordinary slim-limbed tree, native to South and Southeast Asia, known as Aquilaria malaccensis. Undiseased, the tree is a mere evergreen. But once the fungus has struck, gradually transforming the weight of the tree so that it can no longer float in water — “the Chinese name for the material is ch’en hsiang, ‘sinking fragrance,’ the Japanese jinko,” wrote Edwin T. Morris in 1984’s “Fragrance: The Story of Perfume From Cleopatra to Chanel” — the precious ooze, elixir of sickness and decay, appears, turning the woody innards of the tree to liquid gold. The fungus only strikes certain trees, and one must wait up to half a century for the highest quality yield. That is why oudh is so expensive, and why many years would go by before, thanks to the generosity of a family friend, I would acquire a few meager ounces of the precious resin — some oudh of one’s own.

To grow up in India in the wake of colonization, as a child of the 1980s, was to learn to balance multiple societies in one’s mind, without ever quite achieving resolution or overlap. “When you have a double culture,” Francis Kurkdjian, 52, a French perfumer with Armenian roots and the creator behind such evocative scents as Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male (1995), said to me recently, “you are more open, because as a child you experience something on the side, which allows you to have another window on the world.”

In terms of fragrance, what this meant for me was that I occupied two worlds that remained separate, unassimilable. There was traditional India, the world of the attarwallah, with all its smells: of the moist matting screens of vetiver in old houses in the summer; of cool sandalwood paste, or chandan, in the temple, smeared on one’s forehead after a ritual; or of the smoking brass vessel of frankincense, or luban, carried through the house in the evenings to purify the air. What I could not have known, as an “oriental” boy growing up among oriental smells, was that, from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, a movement was underway in Western perfumery, in which the scents of my childhood, known in fragrance as the “orientals” — ambers and aromatic woods, vetiver, patchouli, musk and sandalwood — were being repurposed. Their rise, culminating eventually in the popularization of oudh in our century, spoke of profound societal changes in the West, such as women’s liberation, sexual freedom and the global dominance of the United States.

Of these new strong scents that represented the arrival of the independent woman, not unlike my own mother — who was among the first female journalists in India to cover conflicts — none perhaps was as distinctive as one belonging to a particular bottle that sat on her dressing table. It had a strange burnt orange casing, shaped (I now know) like an inro, one of the small Japanese boxes, with tiny compartments containing medicinal herbs, seals, spices and opium, that the samurai wore on their belts. On the curvilinear face of the bottle, like that of a hip flask, was a glass oculus through which a rich, amber-colored liquid was visible. Dull gold letters on the front read “Opium Parfum Yves Saint Laurent.” I remember its heavy, intoxicating odor, all spice, patchouli and balsam. In its baroque suggestion of luxury, it was of a piece with the gold-bordered silk brocade saris my mother wore out on winter evenings in Delhi.

In 1978, the year after Opium was first released, a Palestinian-American academic named Edward Said published his seminal work, “Orientalism,” which posited the idea of a newly rapacious West, arising out of colonialism, taking ownership of Eastern culture and history as a means to have authority over it, to speak for it and, as a consequence, to better control it. “Indeed, my real argument,” Said wrote, “is that Orientalism is — and does not simply represent — a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world.” Said’s study concerned itself mostly with art, literature and history, but what was true of other aspects of culture was true of perfume, too: The rise of the orientals in the late 1970s, of which Opium was emblematic, marked one of many moments when the West was speaking through the East of things that had more to do with the West than with the East. There is something fascinating to me (though rarely benign) in the idea of another, more powerful culture, expressing itself through yours — cultivating, as Said writes, “one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.” In this way, the rise of the so-called orientals is not merely a story of a particular vogue within perfumery; it is the story of seduction, power, history and legacy. Above all, it is inextricably tied to the birth of modernity in Europe.

Chapter 2

A DECADE IN PERFUME, as in art, is never just a calendar decade. The 1980s heralded an era of bold, sensual perfumes, which decisively began a few years earlier with the arrival of Opium. This decade of license and promiscuity came abruptly to an end in the mid-1980s as the full horror of the AIDS epidemic became apparent. “People realized,” the perfumer Kilian Hennessy, 49, said, “that sex can kill.” Sex and death became inextricably and tragically linked, and the effect on perfume — which makes as much material use of decay as it does the fresh buds of spring, and thus has a deep connection to the cycle of creation and disintegration — was profound.

“Perfume is very sociological,” Hennessy continued. “It is always an emanation, a reflection, a mirror of the society.” Hennessy, who is arch and self-assured, and has the studied seriousness of someone who also has a naughtier side, is a marvelous perfumer, who I believe is the inspiration for the nose, or perfumer, on Netflix’s “Emily in Paris.” (“No comment,” he said when I asked him, though he will not deny it outright.) To him, the 1980s was defined by shoulder pads, pantsuits and ambitious women — such as Sigourney Weaver in “Working Girl” (1988) — who needed, he feels, “strong perfumes so that they could feel strong in a masculine environment.”

“We gave them Opium from Yves Saint Laurent,” he said, making me wonder who “we” were. “We gave them Coco from Chanel [1984]. We gave them Poison from Dior [1985].” To this list, Hennessy added Charlie by Revlon (1973), Oscar by Oscar de la Renta (1977) and Obsession by Calvin Klein (1985), saying, “If people ask you, ‘What were the 1980s?,’ it smelled like Poison in France and it smelled like Obsession in America.” The latter fragrance, in a smooth-contoured bottle, was a blend of pure musk and animality, primal as the fossilized DNA of our species preserved in amber. The former was so strong that there were signs in Michelin-starred restaurants in France banning women wearing the Dior fragrance. And that was Hennessy’s point: This was an era in which crude intensity stood in for real strength.

Chantal Roos, who was responsible for marketing Opium in the 1970s, agreed with this assessment. Roos rose to the heights of French cosmetics at a time when it was not easy for women to do so. “When we arrived with Opium,” Roos said over FaceTime from her apartment in Paris, “it was a hit, but it was a scandal.” Financially, the fragrance was a runaway success. “It was immediately attractive to women of all generations,” Roos said. “Very oriental, very sensual, very sexy.” Young girls lined up at shops to pay for it in advance.

Today, of course, a brand could never market a perfume like Opium the way Roos did. As much as Opium spoke of sexual freedom, women’s empowerment and a new American boldness, it had nothing at all to say to the culture of China, in which it had dressed itself. It was, if anything, actively offensive. The People’s Republic of China banned the fragrance. In the United States, Chinese-Americans protested the scent, objecting to the commodification of a narcotic that had caused China so much pain in the 19th century when, during the Opium Wars, Britain turned the powerful nation into one of addicts. “Opium,” Roos said, speaking somewhat nostalgically of the past of a country that was not hers, “was the dream of the empress of China.”

But while Yves Saint Laurent may have fetishized the East, making it say what he wanted it to say, he was working in what was already a rich tradition in France, going back at least as far as the 19th-century Orientalist paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme and Horace Vernet, and the exploits of Gustave Flaubert’s “Voyage en Orient” (1849-51). “We may as well recognize,” writes Said, in describing why Europe needed this idea of the “licentious” East, “that for 19th-century Europe, with its increasing embourgeoisement, sex had been institutionalized to a very considerable degree. On the one hand, there was no such thing as ‘free’ sex, and on the other, sex in society entailed a web of legal, moral, even political and economic obligations of a detailed and certainly encumbering sort.” The more constrained the West felt, the more it turned the East into “a place where one could look for sexual experience unobtainable in Europe.”

The harm in making another society the theater of one’s forbidden desires, however, is that one ends up robbing that place of agency. Flaubert created the stereotype of an “oriental woman” as sensual, submissive, the object of white male desire and dominance. In gesturing to the appeal of such a figure for Flaubert, Said stresses the loss of a right to speak: “What he especially liked about her was that she seemed to place no demands on him, while the ‘nauseating odor’ of her bedbugs mingled enchantingly with the ‘scent of her skin, which was dripping with sandalwood.’” To be clear, this is not the sacred chandan that was smeared on my forehead during Hindu ritual. This is something altogether more profane. And Said makes an important point: “There is very little consent to be found, for example, in the fact that Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence or history. He spoke for and represented her.”

At the same time, contra Said, one should be careful not to overstate the power of the West over the East. The East, after all, continues to have an autonomous relationship with its own scents. No one smelling sandalwood in the sanctum sanctorum of a temple in Varanasi is thinking of Flaubert’s “oriental woman”; nor, when the laundry comes back in the summer smelling of vetiver, does one self-orientalize, as it were. Just as the relationship of the women in my house to the attarwallah was direct, free of the West as a conduit, so, too, do any number of people living in India, Saudi Arabia and other parts of Asia engage with their own smells on their own terms, according to their own seasons and traditions, free of the Western gaze.

I’m not even entirely sure animality, with all its associations to sexuality, is a Western imposition. Consider the Sanskrit court poet Kalidasa, in whose verses we encounter a river scented with the fragrant ichor of wild elephants. In “The Birth of Kumara,” Kalidasa’s fourth- and fifth-century masterpiece (translated by David Smith in 2005), which dramatizes the love of Shiva, the great god, destroyer of worlds, and Parvati, a goddess of fertility and divine strength, Shiva wanders among cedar hills “sprayed by Gangetic cascades, whose waters are scented with musk from the navel of the musk deer.” In the last canto, an epic romp called Consummation, Shiva drinks in Parvati’s sweat-covered body, and they make love all night, leaving the “coverlet creased and uneven, streaked with red dye from their feet.” Here, still centuries away from the colonial gaze, one snatch of verse returns hauntingly, providing what may be the last word on sex, smell and perfumery: “What is pure and what is dirty?”

Chapter 3

YET HOW DID florals figure in this history? For early modern Europe, as in India today, perfume had many functions, from medical to religious, that went well beyond its use as an expression of an individual’s taste, personality and toilette. But toward the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, a change began to occur in European society that would forever alter the position of floral scents — violet, orange blossom, tuberose, acacia, jasmine and rose — in relation to their heavier oriental counterparts. To understand the privileged position florals would acquire in the 19th century, as well as their association with purity, cleanliness and femininity (or what the historian Alain Corbin describes in “The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination” [1982] as the “mysterious collusion between woman and flower”), one needs to recognize how intimately the change was connected to the collapse of premodern society itself. The rise of Corbin’s “deodorized bourgeoisie” in 19th-century Europe, along with the discovery of pneumatic chemistry, which discounted the therapeutic role of healing vapors (recall the plague doctor with his beaklike mask full of aromatics) led to a new world where the only good smell was no smell; or, at best, a light floral. “Among the elite,” writes Corbin, “changes in tastes and in fashion sanctioned the experts’ discrediting of heavy scents. The smells of private space became less strong and were enriched and varied by more delicate and subtle fragrances.” In a Europe emerging from the bubonic plague, from cramped cities prone to pestilence and fire, there was an increased “fascination with airy space.” The London of 1665 in Daniel Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year” (1722) is full of vapors, distempers and deadly odors. Defoe describes people as walking in the middle of the street, so as not to “mingle with anybody that came out of the houses, or meet with smells and scent from houses that might be infected.” These streets of mud, in which the dead were laid out, also swarmed with “a wicked generation of pretenders to magic, to the black art, as they called it.”

It is this premodern past that Europe by the 19th century was turning its back on. In this new world, florals became emblematic of public sanitation; the division between public and private; the rise of the individual, science and reason; and the loss of God, to whom — through incense, heavy woods and resins conveyed through a veil of blue smoke and mystery — our earliest notions of perfume itself are tied. In the new world, now free of liturgy and magic, “the balsamic effluvia of springtime meadows,” writes Corbin, “became an obsession.” In Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s paintings, with their emphasis on interiors, Corbin sees the “expression of a new sensitivity to smell,” of wanting to shut out the odoriferous world beyond.

To me, witnessing a similar change in the India of today — from the stress on individuality to the rise of smaller families in enclosed, apartment-like settings, representing a movement away from tradition to modernity, from rural to urban — is like being granted a view of what 19th-century Europe must have felt like, a new society where “personal toilette as an aspect of good manners” was “being codified in an increasingly strict and precise manner,” as Corbin writes. It was the scent of florals that became the breath of this new, disease-free Europe. As had happened so often in the past, the notion of physical cleanliness became synonymous with moral hygiene. Light fragrances were associated with chastity and purity, while heavier smells — balsams, musk, amber, heavy woods and leather — were banished to the brothel.

“When you put too much perfume on,” said Kurkdjian, making explicit the connection between strong perfume and depravity, “you smell like a cocotte. A whore, basically. Intense perfume for the 19th century was linked to having a bad life.” That attitude prevailed well into the 20th century, so much so that when Coco Chanel was on the eve of launching her Chanel No. 5 (1921), “she wanted a perfume,” writes Tilar J. Mazzeo in “The Secret of Chanel No. 5” (2010), “that would be sexy and provocative and utterly clean.” The fragrance — which, owing to its unparalleled success, is known in the industry simply as le monstre — was notable for its use of astringently fresh-smelling aldehydes that met the pared-down needs of 20th-century modernity. (Was it coincidence that Ernest Beaux, the French nose behind No. 5, was born in Russia in the 1880s, part of the same generation as the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and the painter Kazimir Malevich, who were remaking literature and art from the ground up?) “To Coco Chanel,” Mazzeo adds, “the scent of overpowering musk, with its hints of unwashed bodies, was simply dirty. She understood immediately that it was the odor of prostitution, and it was unbearable.”

Chapter 4

EVERY TIME A sea change of this kind between florals and orientals occurs, we have a tendency to believe that our tastes, our fashions, our palates and, indeed, our morality are completely new, unprecedented or final. In fact, the ebb and flow of florals and orientals is part of a dialectic over 400 years old. Orientals were once celebrated for harnessing a kind of raw, sensuous animality. Kurkdjian told me the story of how, in the 16th century, Henry IV of France had written to his mistress Gabrielle d’Estrées, instructing her, perhaps apocryphally, not to bathe when he came back from war because the smell of her unbathed body was arousing. (“It’s totally insane when you think about it now,” Kurkdjian added.) Whether it was Madame du Barry, the official mistress of Louis XV, who was rumored to have been dripping in ambergris, or the Empress Joséphine, who was described as “la folle du musc” (mad for musk), the animalics of that century spoke of the body, naked, unwashed — the locus of all our desires. At times the raw power of that smell produced arousal, at other times revulsion. “I obeyed respectfully,” writes Casanova in the 18th century of the elderly Duchess of Rufe, who demanded the seducer come sit next to her, “but a noxious smell of musk, which seemed to me almost corpselike, nearly upset me.” As Corbin writes, paraphrasing the English essayist and physician Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), “Women did not use perfume to mask their odor but to emphasize it. Musk had the same function as corsets that accentuated the contours of the body.”

“From a perfumer’s point of view, the fresher perfumes are all about being clean,” said Frédéric Malle, 58, the founder of Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle; his grandfather co-founded Christian Dior Perfumes in 1947, and his mother later became the head of product design there. “When you wear an eau de cologne, it’s an extension of your grooming routine. And you’re saying, ‘I’m clean. ...’ The deeper you go, the darker you go, the closer you are to the skin, the closer you are to animality, the closer you are, by wearing one of these perfumes, whether you’re wearing an evening dress or something very formal, you’re shouting to the room, ‘This is how I smell naked!’ You don’t even have to open your mouth.”

The “animality” Malle spoke of was historically derived from three principal sources: ambergris, which came from a secretion in the intestines of the sperm whale that it used to coat the sharp beaks of cephalopods, such as squid and cuttlefish, to make them digestible; civet, the glandular secretion of the titular cat, found in Africa and Asia, and which produced, Morris writes, “a revoltingly fecal odor” that “becomes both extremely agreeable and strongly fixative when blended with other essences”; and musk — the word “mushka” in Sanskrit literally means “scrotum” — which comes from a sac on the abdomen of the male musk deer, an animal predominant in Siberia and the Himalayas. It is significant that these scents did, for the most part, actually come from the Orient, as did pepper and silk. Yet the history of our associations does not match up exactly to the history of commerce. At any given moment, depending on our own sense of cultural confidence, we can, as societies, both enlarge or diminish the origin of a particular commodity.

Sex and smell. It feels basic, it feels primal. Who hasn’t left a dirty weekend wearing the unwashed T-shirt of the person you’ve been shacked up with? Who hasn’t known the role the evil, enticing smell of armpits can play in making the more painful aspects of sex — bottoming, for example — more bearable? Who hasn’t reveled in the looping playback of sexual imagery brought on by still being able to smell or taste someone on your lips? The perfumer on “Emily in Paris” adds indole, an aromatic compound, to the base notes “for some depth and richness,” to his new olfactory creation, describing it as possessing the same molecular shape as “merde.” And as Rodrigo Flores-Roux, a perfumer at Givaudan, a Swiss fragrance and cosmetics company, observed, that same molecule, which is indeed present in the smell of fecal matter, is also present in mother’s milk. “So you’re talking about decay and new life at the same time, ” he has said about indoles. “I always use them, even in very, very small amounts, because it’s important to remind us about the cycle of life and death.”

Chapter 5

IT WAS OUDH that gave me my first taste of the richness of Eastern perfumery, and not too long ago, in Malle’s shop on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue, I found myself reliving that childhood experience through an oudh fragrance — it’s called Dawn, and 100 milliliters costs $1,600 — that the nose Carlos Benaïm, responsible for perfumes such as Polo Ralph Lauren, had recently created for Malle. Growing up in Tangier, where his father was a pharmacist, Benaïm said, “I was not aware that oudh existed.” Not because it was hard to find but because it was ubiquitous. “It smells like oudh all over the place,” he added. “The markets smell like that. And that is part of your construction.” Here, again — and I think that is why he said it — we see a direct relationship between a perfumer like Benaïm, raised in the Islamic world, and a fragrance like oudh. Far from any connotation of sexuality, or even exoticism, it suggests a daily smell, the smell of the marketplace, which is exalted through the genius of perfume into something rare and special. It speaks of wealth and success, of course (oudh remains something a successful Saudi man might give his wife as a present), but it has deep organic roots and, like all true luxury, it takes what is familiar, almost banal — the smell of dry earth after the first rain, say — and elevates it to a cherished and coveted object.

The rise of oudh in the West, for Mathilde Laurent, Cartier’s in-house perfumer, was “associated with the fact that we are living in a society where there’s much more freedom as far as gender is concerned,” she said. Speaking to me from Paris, Laurent, with platinum blonde hair and a sideways-knotted neck scarf, was the picture of aquiline French elegance. “I think we went in search of a new smell abroad,” she said, “a smell that, because it comes from the Orient, doesn’t have a gender.” The East, Laurent felt — and she was right — did not have this “insane attitude” toward gendering perfume. In India and parts of the Middle East, men wore rose and women wore oudh (though it should be said that this genderless approach to scent did not translate into societies that were any less gendered). Laurent felt that this “reconquest of orientality” was an example of the West listening better to the East and not merely using it as an instrument to speak for itself. Money made people listen, too. By the ’90s, Gulf Arabs, now traveling more and more, were becoming a force at the perfume counters of Harrods, Selfridges and Bergdorf Goodman. “You realize,” Benaïm said, “that if you put an oudh perfume in Harrods, it will sell at crazy prices. Everyone started to develop their own oudh line.” For that reason, oudh’s success in the West is something apart from the orientalism of the 1980s. Here we see, after centuries of one region co-opting another’s right to speak for itself, cultural power beginning to flow the other way, East to West.

But throughout this olfactive journey, in which a new world of sensibility and history had opened up to me, one question remained paramount in my mind: What would perfume’s response to the pandemic be, especially as Covid-19 menaced our ability to experience smell itself?

Boarding an Air France flight at the beginning of the year, Hennessy entered into business class, as successful perfumers do, and noticed a large bottle of Clarins Eau Dynamisante in the bathroom cabin. Cologne is essentially a disinfectant, containing 96 to 98 percent alcohol. Bathing himself in Eau Dynamisante, and taking unusual satisfaction in its antiseptic quality, the perfumer was returned to childhood memories of his mother rubbing him down with cologne to shield him from a threatening, germ-filled world beyond. His need to feel physically protected sent Hennessy back to a project that he had shelved months earlier. It was finalized the day we spoke.

“My next scent will be a cologne,” Hennessy said. “And really, without the Covid, I probably would not have launched a cologne in my brand.” Reaching into the history of his art, where, as the dictionary says, “the action of perfuming” is linked, at the root, to that of fumigation, Hennessy said, “Historically, colognes were a way to protect against the miasma.” Then, pausing, perhaps afraid that I had not understood, he clarified: “Disease.”

Models: Emily Krause at Kollektiv Management and Sophia Parker. Hair: Lucas Wilson at Home Agency. Makeup: Yumi Lee using Dior Backstage Face & Body Foundation. Casting: Midland. Manicurist: Elina Ogawa at Bridge using Tom Ford Beauty. Set design: Jesse Kaufmann. Production: Hen’s Tooth Productions. Photo assistants: Jarrod Turner, Ari Sadok, Tre Cassetta. Set assistants: JP Huckins, Murrie Rosenfeld