Snuff

Author: Marijke Peyser

In the early 1930s, following the success of her knitted pullovers and sportswear, the Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli started to make haute couture. She was overrun with clients. Evening gowns and costumes for masked balls were produced and both her shop and workshops soon ran out of space. In early 1935 she moved to an elegant mansion with nigh on a hundred rooms at 21 Place Vendôme in Paris. The conversion of the rooms in which the clients were received was entrusted to the interior designer Jean-Michel Frank.^[1]

The first three perfumes Schiaparelli launched in 1934, Soucis, Salut and Schiap, were popular and sold so well that she created a separate perfume department in her company. A perfume boutique, designed by Frank as a gigantic birdcage made from black-painted bamboo, in which there were birds, was the reception room for clients who wanted to buy perfume.^[2] Shocking, Schiaparelli’s most successful perfume, was launched in this room in 1937. The artist Leonor Fini designed the bottle, shaped like a mannequin with the curves of the American actress Mae West.^[3] The fragrance Sleeping came on to the market in 1940. The bottle was the shape of a barley twist candle with a burning flame inspired by a design by the costume designer Marcel Vertès and possibly designed by Alberto Giacometti.^[4] The conical packaging resembled a candle snuffer.^[5] The advertising campaign for Sleeping used Surrealist techniques such as the photomontage with a column of the Place Vendôme replaced by a proud perfume bottle. The idea was that people would put on the perfume before going to sleep, so that the fragrance would stimulate the subconscious to produce ecstatic dreams.^[6]

The perfume Snuff, an innovative creation for men, was also launched in 1940. The glass bottle, packed in a cigar box, is shaped like a pipe. Schiaparelli had been inspired by the work of the Surrealist artist René Magritte for this presentation. His painting La Trahison des Images (1929) with the inscription ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ illustrated his statement ‘An object never performs the same function as its name or its image.’^[7] This perfume was a success, largely thanks to the James Bond film Thunderball (1965). Bond’s main antagonist Emilio Largo, played by Adolfo Celi, continually sprinkled Snuff on his handkerchief.