Aromatory* Experiences:
On Givenchy, Dior, Audrey Hepburn, Alain Delon and the scents of Hannibal Season 1
*a friend with a lively mind came up with the phrase ‘offensive aromatory’ in the course of conversation and I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind since. I am glad he has let me borrow his word here.
“Like all organs, the heart looked satisfying to squeeze, but also too fragile to withstand more than one good contraction.” -Davey Davis, X (2022)
When I was a teenager, and even into my twenties, I used to wear a perfume by Lush called Icon, which my father couldn’t stand. He always commented on it when I wore it: “it smells like rut” he would say, angrily, as if the smell offended him. I remember it smelling heavy, like candlewax and incense, and I was quite goth and wore a lot of velvet so I thought it suited me. I also wore Nikki de Saint Phalle and Givenchy’s l’Interdit around this time.
In the very late 90s I lived in Montréal and I often went to the movies with a friend of mine. He once turned to me and (deliberately, provocatively) said: “all women want to be Audrey Hepburn.” I countered with “all men want to be Steve McQueen.”
I should also mention that this friend smelled absolutely intoxicating to me a lot of the time. He certainly didn’t wear cologne, and quite possibly he would have considered that a bourgeois affectation. (To give you a sense of this friend’s proclivities, he had three great loves: Tom Waits, bourbon, and the Sunday New York Times.) I was very gratified to see Jamie Stewart recount a similar aromatory experience in his sublime, filthy, tender, memoir Anything That Moves: “there was something about the way she smelled or some other sybaritic chemical influence that immediately and vibratingly turned me on. I have never experienced this sensation as potently or as ferally as I did with her that afternoon.” (2023: 207-208)
L’Interdit was definitely the more acceptable of my scents at this time—it didn’t intrude or hit you in the face like Icon. Like a lot of young women, I had a huge black and white poster of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly hanging in my room, and I knew of her long association with Givenchy, which drove my interest in their perfumes. I was, however, not just interested in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961), in fact I was far more struck by Two for the Road (Stanley Donen, 1967)—a deeply cynical portrait of a marriage where she stars opposite Albert Finney. As it turns out, Two for the Road has the same screenwriter as Darling (John Schlesinger, 1966). When a new acquaintance asks me what my favourite movie is, I usually answer with Darling. It stars Julie Christie, Laurence Harvey, and Dirk Bogarde. Bogarde is the man who continually tops my list of ‘old movie stars you would have liked to fuck when they were young.’ Anyway, apparently my taste in old movies owes something to Frederic Raphael, who in addition to his screenplays for both Darling and Two For the Road, also did the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut.
In How to Steal a Million (William Wyler, 1966) Hepburn has the most wonderful clothes by Givenchy. She stars opposite Peter O’Toole who is fiendishly sexy in this picture. O’Toole’s character is memorably described as “tall, slim, blue eyes, quite good looking.” Hepburn delivers this line ‘quite good looking’ as if it’s an afterthought that’s only just occurred to her, when it is blatantly obvious from the word go that these two are going to end up making out in a broom closet.
At the time I wore it, l’Interdit had green and pink packaging. This perfume is still made and has a bewitching description: “a fearless fragrance imbued with the frisson of freedom. Transgress your limits with audacity”. However, it too is a ‘woody floral’ not unlike L’air du temps, and therefore it is nothing particularly unusual for a fragrance from a big fashion house like Givenchy. At the time I wore it, it was a bit more recherché than some of the other Givenchy fragrances, and as a girl who grew up in the suburbs of Southern Ontario before the advent of the internet that was sort of all I could aspire to. I didn’t know what it really meant to choose a more unusual scent—I saw only what was available to me.
In Season 1 of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal series, Hannibal infamously smells Will. It was not hard to find a GIF of this moment. Will notices this and asks ‘did you just….smell me?’ He’s faintly disgusted, definitely perturbed by this gesture. (A friend’s boyfriend once did EXACTLY this to me, and I reacted in just the same way. On the other hand, I have definitely been the person who has asked to smell someone’s neck late at night at a party.) Hannibal is unphased by Will’s response and simply says “I must really introduce you to a finer aftershave” and there is some comment implying that Will wears Old Spice (FOUL stuff, btw never let me catch any of you wearing it) because he keeps getting it for Christmas, rather as if he too is using what is in front of him, rather than seeking out something more tailored to his individual tastes. As an adorably rumpled, paradoxically outdoorsy nerd, Will ought to wear something like Jorum Studio’s Medullary Ray, but he wouldn’t because it would be too much trouble. But trust me, if you want to smell like a fancy carpenter then Medullary Ray is IT.
The other person that Hannibal smells in Season 1 is Bella Crawford. When Bella comes to dinner with her husband Jack, Hannibal smells her perfume as he serves her at his dinner table. This gesture comes after he relates a story about his very acute and refined sense of smell. Hannibal tells Bella her perfume is exquisite, “like the smell of the air after lightning,” and guesses her perfume is by Dior which she confirms. Bella is tightly laced, and gives little away with her glance or bodily gestures (a wonderfully controlled performance from Gina Torres) and it’s hard to know whether she feels this comment is an intrusion. I wondered what she could be wearing, since Dior is a big fragrance house, but none of the women’s perfumes fit that scent profile: the ‘clean’ smell of ozone. Until I ran across a description of Eau Sauvage, Dior’s original men’s fragrance (famously repped by a delicious Alain Delon at the height of his powers.)
With its clean bergamot citrus, it’s not as middle of the road as the more ubiquitous Sauvage. This seemed like a good fit, that Bella would wear something that is a very traditional ‘men’s’ fragrance, that it would be an old classic, and that it would be one that Hannibal would recognize perhaps because he has encountered it before, on someone else. There’s also a queerness to this reading that I like, that fits in with the show’s fluid sexualities, its love of detail, and of course the name could not be more apt for the scenario, Eau Sauvage—something wild under the surface.
This isn’t to suggest that Bella, as a Black woman, is being characterised in this way, since she is not a stereotypical portrayal of the woman of colour as temptress (the temptress role is spread across a number of characters in this series, but the prize belongs firmly to Katherine Isabelle’s turbo-femme fatale, Margot, of which more in future). Instead, Eau Sauvage is a paradox: it has this delicious name, suggesting something natural and untamed but the fragrance itself is cool and traditional. Smelling Eau Sauvage on card, it seems exactly right, fresh but not citrusy, despite the fact that it’s a bergamot topnote. (Interestingly, Icon also contains bergamot and orange flower, along with other citrus oils, but it also contains myrrh which would have given it the heaviness I remember.)
When I smell Eau Sauvage, I think of men who take great care with their appearance but who are not dandys. Men getting their Friday night fades at the barber, putting this scent on their French cuffs, or steaming their perfectly fitted monochrome t-shirts. It’s a very distinguished aroma, but it doesn’t match that image of Delon in Rocco and his Brothers, an image that (much like Marlene Dietrich in her tuxedo in Morocco) works for many people across a range of sexualities. Eau Sauvage works for Delon as we find him in The Leopard, but not in Plein Soleil or La Piscine, or Rocco and His Brothers.
In those three films in particular, Delon’s characters seem as if they would smell of sweat, salt, and maybe a bit of wayward Campari. In those films, he’s a fellow who dabs
scent at the base of his throat where a necklace hits (hello to those of you that wear it like that, excellent choice). But Bella, (whose name is really Phyllis) who met her husband when they were both stationed in Italy, is a strict, disciplined character, someone who has never really let go of her military bearing. Her choice of something like Eau Sauvage conveys this rectitude, even if it evokes for Hannibal the smell of the air after lightening. Here, it is Hannibal the sensualist and epicure who remarks on the echoes of nature, rather than the rectitude of this perfume and perhaps this is because he knows that Bella has a secret. When I try to wear Eau Sauvage, it disappears on me, and this too feels somehow fitting.
Fantastic 💕