Fragrance Appreciation: Perfumes of the 1990s
Taught by Jessica Murphy
Jessica Murphy is an art historian and museum professional with a longtime passion for perfume. She's been a contributor at the blog Now Smell This since 2007, and since 2015 she's been giving presentations about the cultural history of fragrance via the Institute for Art and Olfaction, the Brooklyn Museum, the Corning Museum of Glass, and other venues. Her writing about scent has appeared in Atlas Obscura and Viscose Journal and she's been interviewed by Vogue, The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Harper’s Bazaar, Decoder Ring, and other media outlets. She shares her thoughts on olfactory and visual topics at her Substack, Show & Smell.
Location: Prospect Heights Brainery (190 Underhill Ave in Prospect Heights, BK)
Grunge, gourmands, and globalization: the perfumes of the 1990s shaped the ways we continue to experience fragrance today. In that last decade of the twentieth century, best-selling designer perfumes dominated the mainstream market and print magazines were still shaping trends in beauty and style. At the same time, scent-shoppers were exploring new options. Chain stores in shopping malls offered a plethora of affordable scents, and some retailers began allowing people to try fragrance in-store without the mediation of sales staff. The emergent niche fragrance category found its own audience through a different approach to creating and circulating its fragrances. Even the development of new fragrance "families" shifted consumer tastes in ways that still resonate today.
In this session, we'll smell a selection of perfumes released in the 1990s. We'll learn their stories and consider them as cultural products of their era, that transitional time between the economic boom of the 1980s and the new digital age ahead.
