The Disruptive - Barbara Herman

Barbara Herman, Author of Scent & Subversion, Founder and Creative Director of Eris Parfums

Our meeting Barbara Herman, critic, author of Scent & Subversion and creator of the niche-perfume house Eris Parfums had almost everything of a third millenium romance -except the romance of course- and turned to a beautiful amity. Put on our path thanks to a mutual friend, we lunched in Paris in the midst of summer and discovered there her soon-to-be-launched Mxxx. We met her again in New York, a few days prior to Thanksgiving and the official launch of Mxxx. to talk about her personal vision of perfumery.

Alexandre HELWANI - Thank you Barbara for agreeing to meet. You have many talents so let’s cut to the chase. Founder and Creative Director of a perfume house, Eris Parfums, which newest release will soon be launched; author, critic, collector… I must ask, when did it all begin? Where you from the beginning set on this path?

Barbara HERMAN  – It was very organic how it started. Around 2008 I started reading about perfume, but it didn’t occur to me to write about it. I was just collecting vintage perfumes because I loved the stories I was learning about ingredients, animalic styles and the overall boldness of vintage. As my collection grew, I took notes, and I realised I wanted to write about them, so I started a blog, Yesterday’s Perfume. Before I knew it, more questions came up I wanted to answer.

Alexandre HELWANI – Has vintage perfumery changed the way you felt about perfumes in general?

BH – I remember my shock at the 20’s, and 30’s, and 40’s perfume for women that were bold or dark or dirty. I was so surprised that brands like Dior were skanky and wild and I just loved it, I loved that audacity and thought: « There’s a story in there » and that’s the story I wanted to pursue. I felt I got cultural permission from all these other perfume writers to think about perfume in a respectful, imaginative, and even academic way. But yes, vintage perfume taught me that perfumes could be bold and wild rather than polite and safe.

AH – Is this when the idea of launching your own brand stemmed?

BH – I had no idea when I started writing that a brand was going to come out of it; that was nowhere in my head. I decided to quit my writing job in San Francisco to write the book in New Orleans, so I didn’t have a lot going on at that point. But I felt free and thought « What’s the next move? » So I talked to Antoine (Lie) and said, « Let’s start something inspired by the past and all of the qualities we both love about vintage perfumes ».

AH – How did you come to choose Antoine Lie to create your perfumes?

BH - He and I had developed a rapport because he was one of the perfumers I interviewed for the “Scent Visionaries” chapter of Scent and Subversion, specifically about his infamous creation for ELDO, Sécrétions Magnifiques. In my naiveté, I had reached out to a few of my favourite perfumers, thinking I’d do a trio, a chypre, a floral, and an animalic with a different perfumer creating each fragrance. I had designated Antoine for the animalic, of course, but Antoine was the only perfumer who was able to say “yes” to the proposal, and by the time I smelled his mods, I was convinced he should do all of them, and all floral animalics.

AH – Able in what way?

BH – Antoine wasn’t hampered by the house that he worked for at the time. You have to remember that I was a nobody back then. I didn’t have financial backing. No one really knew about my book. Who the hell was I? To approach a major perfumer in one of those houses like Givaudan or IFF, you had to be recognised or at least recognisable as “someone”. And especially a “someone” with a lot of money! I really appreciated that Antoine took my project seriously and saw it as an opportunity to do something interesting. He also had a deal with his perfume house at the time that gave him more leeway than most major perfumers to choose small projects he wanted to take on.

AH – Well I would imagine that, as a writer, you have a different approach to creative direction, how does that translate into day-to-day work with your perfumer?

BH – It’s very interesting because people ask me « How do you do this, how do you communicate with Antoine » and to be honest, we have an organic way to work together. I usually start with the notes that I like, with other perfumes that I like in the same category, both vintage and contemporary. Sometimes it starts with the name of the perfume. I use mood boards. Describe the effect I want to have on the wearer. And other times it will be ineffable qualities. I would go to Antoine and say: « I want this perfume to make people think or feel this way » and because he’s such a great perfumer, he’s able to come up with something. When Antoine was creating Night Flower, for example, I told him I wanted this fragrance to give an impression of that queasy feeling when you fall in love with someone but are scared at the same time. You know, that punch in the gut, that “I’m so happy this is happening but also I’m terrified”, that feeling when you’re on a roller coaster and it reaches the very top and is about to plunge down. I said: “I don’t know how you could do it but if you can, put that in the perfume” and when I smelled it, I felt it, that plunge from the bergamot, the cardamom, the brighter notes into the intense animalic depth. Somehow Antoine managed to recreate this effect, which has nothing to do with a scent description, per se. That’s a feeling, an emotion he translated and I thought it was amazing. So I’d say that the way I think about perfume is also very cinematic. I really want every perfume to tell a story you can see and feel, and my first 3 fragrances told the “La Belle et la Bête” story of the Beast, of bringing the Beast back into perfumery and of our fear of all those animalic smells.

AH – You are drawn to animalics it would seem.

BH – Yes, because whether we like them or not, there is a kind of trepidation about something that is so stinky, animalic or bodily, when people are taught to view perfume as something you put on to smell good, which usually means clean. As I wrote in my book about why I liked weird, animalic, funky smells, “These Things That Stink felt alive.” I wanted that contrast between the conventionally beautiful and the animal to come out. For example, I knew Ma Bête wouldn’t be easy for people because it has so many animalic notes, but I like it when people don’t quite know how they feel about a perfume. This way, they have to come back to it. I love this idea that it challenges you somehow and I want my perfumes to be challenging, to prompt new feelings, to create a relationship with their wearer, which is bound to change over time. The fragrances that I love were those I wasn’t sure about at first. Like people, I had to get to know them.

AH – It’s almost as if such notes silenced our usual way of thinking, analysing fragrance in general…

BH – So… I’ve never thought about this before. I went from a very linguistically rarefied world of academia where it was all about analysis, writing, philosophy, intellect, which I loved, don’t get me wrong; to a world that moves away from written language to get closer to something more primal. Perfume is like music. It’s an extreme movement away from that over-intellectual life of processing that we do. It’s a relief to me that perfume can take us away from being in our heads too much. Even though we can process perfume in intellectual way, it also exercises what I call in Scent and Subversion our “limbic intelligence,” that structure in our brains that deals with memory and emotion.

AH – Mx. and the extrait version Mxxx. are on the other end of the spectrum however…

BH – Yes well, when I was an academic at Berkeley I studied with philosopher Judith Butler, who basically put gender studies on the map. I’ve always been interested in this idea of “gender trouble” which is the name of a John Waters film and her influential book; this idea that no matter how we identify, gender is constructed in such a rigid way that none of us is ever comfortable in it. We all struggle with its strictures. So when Caitlyn Jenner started transitioning, and I was a journalist at the time, I wrote an article about how the honorific « Mx » was being adopted in more official channels and how people were increasingly being allowed officially to opt out of binary gender. I thought it’d be amazing to tell this story in perfume. One of the fragrances that I loved from my childhood was Charlie, which I connected to the feminist movement. I remember the model in the ads who wore pants and the name of the perfume itself was ambiguously gendered. I found it interesting that perfume could mark a cultural moment. I wanted to do the same with Mx. and Mxxx., only this time, around the gender revolution rather than feminism. Antoine and I made sure that these scents didn’t include any florals but that they still had touches that could be read as feminine.

AH – Now that’s interesting. How do you actually translate genderlessness into a perfume?

BH – For Mx. it was about mixing gender signifiers into one perfume to create something genderfluid, masculine and feminine, rather than about making it genderless, although I suppose in the end that might be the same thing! One of the fragrances that Antoine had shared with me was a base that would be a perfect start because of the sandalwood, the saffron, cacao and a soft-gourmand quality. Then we mixed it up with notes that are traditionally considered masculine like cedar wood or leather. I wanted Antoine to make a bright fragrance that was also sensual. CKOne was a unisex, androgynous fragrance, but it was “neutral,” neither masculine or feminine and very “clean.” I liked the idea of creating a genderfluid fragrance without florals but that could also be read as feminine and masculine at the same time and sensual rather than merely clean. The new Mxxx. is just an extension of Mx. but with the lights turned down and the animalic aspect turned up.

AH – Is perfume impacted by gender or would you say it’s the other way around? Or not at all?

BH – Perfumes fuck with gender by letting you fuck with gender. A perfume can be called “feminine,” but if I’m a man and I like it, I can wear it with less hassle than I might receive if I wore a dress. But especially in the niche perfume community, gender has less sway in people’s decision-making. It’s easier to evade gender in perfume than in fashion, because it’s invisible. Niche perfume lovers, generally, wear what they like, gender be damned. Men can wear orange blossom, rose, lilac etc., and women can wear ouds, leathers, and tobaccos. I remember wearing men’s colognes when I was in high school. Do I think there’s a feminine or masculine fragrance? No. I think they’re coded that way but I don’t think that’s how people really wear perfume or appreciate it. People have been gender-fucking with perfume forever. When I was researching my book, for example, I found out that the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards wears Joy under his armpits, and I recently discovered that hypermasculine actor Marlon Brando wore women’s Vent Vert and introduced it to his girlfriend, Rita Moreno! I just love that perfumes allow you to play with gender in a safe way.

AH – How is it a safe way to do so?

BH – Because it’s invisible, perfume allows you to say what you like without any immediate judgement, from yourself or others. Only after you’ve smelled it and decided you like it and want to wear it do you find out that it’s for another gender or has animalic notes in it or is forbidden somehow. You get to have a more honest relationship with your perfume before all of the prohibitions against liking it come into play. That kind of emotionality, immediacy is also something I really like about fragrance.

AH – There has been a surge of brands marketing themselves or their products as being “genderless” or “gender-fluid” lately. How do you feel about it?

BH - I’d be curious to know what it means to them. There are nuanced differences between genderfluid, gender neutral, etc. A genderfluid person might identify on a spectrum of femininity or masculinity, in a fluctuating way, for example. There’s nothing neutral about that. These terms all mean something specific. They’re not just marketing terms to me. But ultimately, it’d be great if perfumes were categorized by their scent categories alone. And if we get there by first marketing something as “genderless,” why not?

AH – Has this matter been important to you throughout your entire life?

BH – Without my knowing it until later, yes. When I was a kid, I lived in Texas and my mother would often drop me off at the mall because it was one of the only interesting things to do at the time there. I went to the perfume counters and smelled and sprayed everything, gender be damned. Obviously at this age, I wasn’t making a political gender statement, I was just curious about what all these perfumes smelled like. Later, when I went to a private high school and had to wear a school uniform, I found there wasn’t any way to express myself sartorially so I decided to wear Geoffrey Beene’s Grey Flannel, a men’s cologne, as an invisible statement of rebellion. I also really love it. That’s when I became aware that you could play with gender in perfume and get away with it. Unlike the weird socks I wore and got reprimanded for, or my hobby of putting makeup on my willing male friends, no one said a word about my wearing a men’s cologne. At UC Berkeley, I studied with philosopher Judith Butler and learned that gender is constructed and, as a result, you can deconstruct it and play around with it. Perfume gives you a way to disrupt the gender binary. And obviously my book is called Scent & Subversion, so I’d say I like the disruption of boundaries and I think perfume disrupts so many boundaries, not just gendered ones.

AH – Which ones then?

BH – I mean, let’s see… It also disrupts our ideas of what’s acceptable to smell. For example, the fact that Jacques Guerlain said: « I want perfume to smell like the underside of my mistress »… I mean to put perfumes like this out in the world and in public is a naughty thing to do. It’s beautiful but it’s explicitly crossing the boundary between public and personal, erotic space, between what’s socially acceptable and what’s not.

AH – Why do you like crossing boundaries then?

BH – Because I am a rebel, I like unconventional things, for one. But that is informed by my background. As someone who was born in Vietnam, who is half Vietnamese and German-American, who grew up bilingual in the American South, who identifies as queer, and has never totally identified with any one region or nationality or race or sexual orientation — boundlessness makes more sense to me than boundaried identity. I’m pretty conventional in the way I live, but I love unconventional literature, music, anything that questions the boxes that people try to put us in.

AH – Which comes back to the name Eris…

BH – Yes. A goddess outside the system, inside the system, fucking with the system in a playful way. 

 Interviewed by Alexandre Helwani