10 Iconic Perfume Bottles: Culture and Design - ONLINE CLASS

By shakko (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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Taught by Jessica Murphy

Jessica Murphy is an art historian and educator who works in visitor engagement at the Brooklyn Museum. She’s also a freelance writer and she happens to be obsessed with perfume, so she’s been contributing fragrance reviews to the leading perfume blog Now Smell This since 2007 and teaching at the Brainery and other venues since 2015. She’s always looking for new ways to connect her passions for art, fragrance, history, and popular culture. Jessica blogs at Perfume Professor.

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Perfume bottles can be much more than eye-catching containers. The best ones are small works of art, and their designs evoke their cultural eras as well as the fragrances inside.

This illustrated presentation is an introduction to ten iconic perfume bottles from the twentieth century. Whether elaborate or minimalist, elegant or playful, these bottles demonstrate how modern perfumery joined forces with modern design to produce objects of lasting value. We’ll consider the history of each one, including its visual style, its creators, and its fragrance. And, in reading these “messages in bottles,” we’ll look beyond perfume to the ways that these seemingly frivolous items captured something about their wider social contexts.


Take this class and get a free gift from Cinch Market, which delivers all sorts of goods from your favorite Brooklyn neighborhood shops. All enrolled students will received a code for a free bottle of Lorina Lavender Soda, which may as well be drinkable perfume. We'll send the code when we send the Zoom link for class.

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