I’m not an overly masculine man. Still, when a delivery man dropped off a package for me from Elizabeth Arden at the Toronto Standard office the other day it gave both of us pause. Too bad he didn’t stay for me to open it. Out came a cardboard box decorated with swirly Pucci colours that housed a bottle of Taylor by Taylor Swift, the new fragrance from the popular singer songwriter. The bottle itself resembles a vase (or a juice glass, my cruel friends later joked), topped with a prismatic crystal stopper and a miniature pearl necklace. It smells citrusy and sweet, a little like flat elderflower cider. It was the single most girly gift I’d ever received, and I write about fashion.
So why am I writing about Taylor Swift perfume? Because celebrity fragrances are a big deal. Perhaps not for you or me–I use a combination of Old Spice deodorant and cologne swiped from my parents’ bathroom that my Mom bought for my Dad and he will never, ever wear. But for a sea of teenage girls, not yet ready for the heavy commitment of designer fragrances, pop stars like Swift, Katy Perry, and Nicki Minaj provide the entry into the world of perfumery. For the stars themselves, promoting fragrances is an insurance policy for when their musical careers start to hit the skids. For instance, Britney Spears is about to celebrate ten years of perfumes with Elizabeth Arden, a fact that makes me feel ancient.
The stars don’t even have to be female. Justin Bieber’s successful line is premised on what he’d like a girl to smell like. (They’re named ‘Girlfriend’, ‘Someday’, and ‘The Key’…presumably to Justin’s heart.) The boy band One Direction has just released a fragrance called ‘Our Moment.’ It apparently smells like grapefruit, patchouli, and musk, and not five young British men.
It all started with Elizabeth Taylor, according to Francine Gingras, Vice President of Global Public Relations, who handles celebrity perfumes for Elizabeth Arden. In the 1980’s, the violet-eyed starlet, more famous for her collection of jewelry and husbands than notable screen performances, parlayed her status as the most glamorous woman in the world into the perfume biz. ‘White Diamonds,’ her fragrance from 1987, is still a bestseller after more than twenty years. Interestingly, while today’s Hollywood actresses still turn up in ads for designer perfumes, all the namesake bottles are pop stars.
So how’d we get from Elizabeth Taylor to Taylor Swift?
“I think two things have happened,” Gingras says, on the phone from New York. “Celebrities are now looking at themselves as brands, and they’re able to have brand extension beyond their music…Fragrance was a natural evolution for some of them to express their brand, to give their fans one more of the senses to get to know them.”
Scent, Gingras adds, is a very personal experience. She claims Elizabeth Arden only works with stars who take an active role in creating the fragrances–picking their favourite scents, smell-tasting different options presented by the “nose scientists.” Music stars have an advantage over other kinds of celebrities in that they routinely try to connect with their fans in a personal way. Rather than up on a big screen like a movie star, pop stars are nestled in your pocket on your iPod, or whispering in your ear through ear buds. Actors excel by playing other people–singers strive for personal authenticity.
“If you’re Brad Pitt and you’re in a movie, you’re not Brad Pitt in that movie,” says Gingras. “You’re someone else. I love Sean Connery in all of his movies, but I’m not sure who Sean Connery the guy is. But with musicians, Taylor is always Taylor no matter where she goes. She’s not going to turn into…Cindy the Nurse.”
We talk about Swift’s ex-boyfriends the way people once talked about Elizabeth Taylor’s ex-husbands. The difference is, Swift gets to sing about them.
In a piece for New York magazine, Michael Hirschorn attempted to answer why pop stars have replaced movie stars as the most influential celebrities. His conclusion was social media. Movie actors, who are rarely on Twitter or Instagram, only sit down for confessional interviews with Vanity Fair when surmounting a scandal, or when they have a blockbuster about to open.
Pop stars, in contrast, “have become more and more adept at being themselves, or at least constructing pseudo-selves for social-media consumption; better at manipulating the levers of closeness and distance, openness and mystery, that social media requires.” With the help of social media (she has 70 million followers on Twitter), Taylor Swift “operates almost exclusively in an autobiographical realm, creating intriguing crosscurrents between her wounded-girl lyrics and her much-chronicled boy-bedeviled love life.” Her openness has allowed her to become “the generational spiritual amanuensis Alanis Morissette aspired to be but never quite achieved.”
That social media manipulation helps move fragrances.
“Look at Justin Bieber,” says Gingras. “He’s one of your own. This is a kid who created himself online. A lot of our musicians today have been early adapters to social media…They’re more in tuned with sharing themselves compared to actors who may not have experience connecting to consumers.” Pop stars with millions of followers on Twitter come with ready-made audience, but Gingras makes sure to point out that Elizabeth Arden doesn’t rely too heavily on personal Twitter accounts out of fear of damaging the celebrity’s social media authenticity.
Funnily enough, Elizabeth Taylor in 2009 turned to Twitter to help name her new fragrance. Her followers chose ‘Violet Eyes.’
“She’s no longer with us,” Gingras acknowledges, “but she’s still important. Her persona lingers.”
As stars and fans alike grow older, fragrances are a great medium for musicians to signal changes in their lives. Taylor Swift’s first perfume, called ‘Wonderstruck,’ had a purple bottle with a birdcage trinket. It was based on the décor of her very first apartment. When Swift switched to more-mature red lipstick, the bottle of Wonderstruck’s next incarnation became red as well. The packaging of the newest perfume represents the womanly, sure-of-herself stage of life Swift’s reached at age 23. The crystal stopper “represents the different dimensions of her life,” while the pearls are a nod to the pearl necklace Taylor’s father gave her when she was a teenager.
Because I’m a bit of a shit disturber, I wonder how Elizabeth Arden bottles the essence of celebrities with less-than-squeaky-clean reputations. Not everyone wears pearl necklaces from their fathers. I ask about Britney Spears.
“Britney has many different facets. If you’ve followed Britney over her career, you know she’s had blond hair, black hair, brown hair, red hair, long hair, no hair. She has many dimensions to her life, and has a strong following around the world. We leveraged her number one scent, which is called Fantasy, and created Fantasy Twist. One Fantasy is to wear in the day, and the other one is a nighttime fantasy. Britney can have those different personas and it makes sense.”
As it is, a company like Elizabeth Arden protects its stars, projecting the most glamorous and sophisticated image to their fans like the studios of Old Hollywood. I wonder if the perfume industry will ever catch up to our US Weekly culture, in which stars like Spears, Rihanna, and Amanda Bynes are known for their mistakes as much as their successes. Not every star is so sweet.
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Max Mosher writes about style for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @max_mosher_.
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