And the olfactory ethics of nostalgia.
Politically speaking, cultural nostalgia rears its ugly head perennially like a proverbial hydra — cut one head, and a new one appears more hideous. Nostalgia has been utilised as a political tool most pertinently by figureheads of the right. In the UK, this nostalgia appears in many different forms, but one seen most potently is in the figures themselves. Politicians like Jacob Rees-Mogg don’t simply just talk about the cultural values of a more draconian era, they embody them. His ghostly Edwardian style and clipped RP accent figures as an emblem of a Britishness long gone, a swirling mirage almost phantasmic enough to make you forget about him moving City Firm, the investment fund he founded, to Ireland before his well-flogged Brexit flop unleashed its inertia onto the UK. This connection, between cultural nostalgia and right-wing politics, is not a new one, especially in European scholarly circles focusing on the tenets of 20th-century Italian Fascism, which is making another striking comeback. Particularly, the connection between right-wing and fascist politics to nostalgia is attributed to a certain logic of conservative thinking which constantly looks back to a past, history, or geography — whether these be real or imaginary.
But the fascism of the past is not the fascism of the present. The conditions that allowed for the blossoming of fascism in the 20th century are not the conditions of the present, what would have been considered outlandish — and ultra-right political discourse has made its way to represent the “average” concerns of the “average” citizen. No longer do governments incite paramilitaries to unleash violence upon populations backed by economic decline and rupturing social order; instead, networked civic populations bolstered by online footprints aim to rupture existing “liberal” social orders by inciting culture wars prevalent in the UK and the United States. The inchoate nature of the current age of right-wing tyranny poses a new threat to understanding how tools of nostalgia function in contemporary cultural discourse and production.
But I’ve seen this sentiment spreading beyond specifically political discourse. The exact phrasing of “nostalgia is a tool for promoting fascism” can be seen on joke tweets recounting lovers lost. It’s been applied to the media cycle, constantly re-hashing bits and pieces from past decades, recounting the hits of the ‘80s or ‘90s, devoid of any crumb of criticality. And it’s found its way into fashion discourse, too. Nostalgia, in the original medical term coined in the 17th century, was devised as a specific pathological current in which an individual was “obsessively” looking back to a distant homeland long gone. The term has, as we know, expanded much beyond that initial medicalism. But it’s important to understand how the concept has shifted, from a diagnosis of a spatial homesickness to one distinctly temporal. Instead of only connoting a longing for a distant homeland, nostalgia as a concept has morphed into a longing for a time itself since gone.
But what about when the whole concept of something — the very structural and conceptual corpus of a product — is, in itself, entirely rooted in nostalgia? This is seen most expressly in beauty products, which compel us to yoke ourselves to the past. Perfume, specifically, is nostalgia. It couldn’t function as an object without it. It is an inherent and eternal ligament — the nerves that animate the body.
Perfume is a facade or simulation — one that enacts sensuality into the forefront of its function, yes, but a simulation all the same.
Some of my favourite scents from my favourite perfumers are entirely rooted in cultural nostalgia. Take the perfume house Arquiste. Founded by Carlos Huber, a Mexican architect and building conservationist, the perfume house constantly utilises cultural nostalgia and historicism as a core design philosophy. Venice Rococo takes us back to a 17th-century Venetian parlour room; Anima Dulcis takes the wearer to a 16th-century Mexican church; Nanban transports the wearer to the underbelly of a 17th-century Japanese trade galleon filled to the brim with spices and treasures. The entirety of Arquiste’s production marries historical moments to narratives, expressed in the perfume’s beautiful, artful, and dainty construction. It’s no surprise that Arquiste has claimed some of the most prestigious awards for perfumery in recent years, including winning the Perfume Foundation’s Indie Perfume of the Year for L’or de Louis in 2024 and earlier in 2021 for Misfit, as well as three of their perfumes claiming finalist positions in other iterations of the award cycle.
Huber’s history as an architect is not just hinted at, it exists in almost every perfume available in the catalogue. The built environment and its history rest as the eternal touchstone for the house, an endless source of creative inspiration. As such perfumes touch upon historical artifice, the creation of the perfumes themselves often mimics historic practices of perfumery melded with contemporary methods, breathing an olfactory life into history. For instance, with the fragrance pair “Él” and “Ella,” the perfumer aimed to mimic the disco scene of 1970s Mexico, adding sultry contemporary overtones to more classical imprints of Mexican perfume culture — blending classical herbal concoctions to scent profiles that match that of the Mexican dance floor. It is this blend of historical intrigue and contemporary techniques which sets Arquiste apart from other perfume houses that aim to utilise cultural nostalgia and cultural history in crafting their exquisite perfume stock. Huber’s status as an architect and building conservationist also provides a unique angle that manages to elide some of the othering qualities inherent in the perfume trade. By rooting perfumes in not only the context of history but in the specificity of place and the built environment, generalised nods to “exotic lands” are replaced with a keen interest in evoking the actuality of place and time— rather than an assemblage of generalised evocations of place.
To contrast, let’s move to the other side of the world — England — to perhaps one of the most famous perfume houses in the world. Penhaligon’s was founded by William Penhaligon in 1870, beginning as a barber shop on Westminster’s Jermyn Street. Barber shops in the late 19th century were not just places to get one’s haircut, but rather vital social hubs built specifically for men. Distinct from other social hubs, like bars or pubs, the barber shop enabled cross-cultural and cross-class interaction between individuals. Similar to many Victorian enterprises, the barber shop was often plush, ornate, and extravagant. Many modern barber shops emulate these historic aesthetics and practices today — walk past any barber shop in London, and you’re likely to see groups of people chatting and laughing; a curated aesthetic; and all types of people inside. It was soon after founding his flagship barber’s in 1870 that Penhaligon’s first official fragrance was born. But one might expect — owing to Penhaligon’s current copy and marketing strategy — that the perfumery of Penhaligon’s origins contained some sort of “quintessential” Britishness, perhaps a homage to royalty and aristocracy, but you’d be wrong.
The first-ever perfume created by William Penhaligon in 1872 was Hammam Bouquet. The scent was inspired not by the upper echelons of British culture but by a nearby Turkish bath — called The London Hammam — at which Penhaligon was a resident barber. In the fragrance, we have exuberant, citrusy bergamot dancing over rose and iris root, a powdery blast of hypnotic florals and resinous ambers. During the mid-to-late Victorian era in England, several hundred of these Turkish baths had taken up business, owing, in large part, to the London & Provincial Turkish Bath Company. While the first documented “true” wave of Turkish immigration to the UK occurred over 100 years later, in the 1970s, the 19th-century Turkis baths were actually spearheaded by a Scotsman: the politician David Urquhart. The diplomat’s first introduction to Turkish culture was in 1826 when he travelled to the Levantine region to fight in the Greek War of Independence (on the encouragement of his mentor Jeremy Bentham, who theorised the panopticon). After being wounded, Urquhart was then sent on a diplomatic tour to Constantinople, where he changed his allegiance to Turkey. It’s here where Urquhart developed a deep devotion to Turkish culture, which he expressed throughout his life and career, publishing works such as The Spirit of the East in 1838. He brought the Islamic cultural tradition of the Hammam — or the Turkish Bath — back to England, and championed its use for both medicinal and healing properties. To quote a contemporary who often wrote in the same magazines as Urquhart — Karl Marx — he was a “maniac,” utterly entrenched in conspiratorial political schemes, convinced that Tsarist Russia was threatening a global takeover.
Strange aligning histories aside, the introduction of Hammams into British culture coincided quite neatly with the all-encompassing trend in cultural objects — art, literature, plays — to emulate and sustain Orientalist tropes. The East was treated with a constant tilt of fascination in Victorian Britain, and these tropes found their way into almost every major novelist and artist of the period, from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to the Brontë sisters to the essays of Thomas Carlyle. Orientalism in this period looked to the East as a treasure trove of exotic cultural objects, and it was indeed fashionable to own ornaments and possessions from such places. To have travelled to distant corners of the world was a marker of one’s class, intelligence, and aesthetic training. The East was positioned as wholly Other, and a fixture to project one’s own sensibilities onto. This came alongside a marked shift in the Victorian-era sensibilities surrounding perfume, with a tendency towards heavily perfumed bodies, clothes, and homes functioning as both a status symbol and a method to mask the potentiality for unwanted bodily odour.
Hammam Bouquet was an unmitigated smash hit, propelling William Penhaligon to considerable fame. By 1902, when the business was inherited by his son William Penhaligon Jr., the company was commissioned to create a perfume for the 9th Duke of Marlborough. Here is where that association of Penhaligon’s with aristocracy and royalty begins.
Perfume is nostalgia, yes — relying on the powers of the olfactory sense to provoke elegiac or nostalgic feelings in the wearer. But there’s another element revealed in the powers of nostalgia afforded by perfumery, a form that traces the initial diagnostic weapon as it was conceived in the 17th century. Perfume enacts the nostalgic power of not only temporal reasoning but also geographical and spatial reasoning. How is it that the English bourgeoisie were drawn to the scents and spices of a region they very likely had never set foot on nor had any personal connection to? With the 19th century seeing the ravages of colonialism expand into ever-far-reaching corners of the globe, suddenly, to the wealthier class of Britain, the world blossomed. The spices of the Levant began appearing in London’s barber shops and parlours, an expression of the endlessly consumable nature of the world available to their wealthy patrons. Another example, from the world of art: the shift towards an Orientalist aesthetic and sensibility seen in the curation of home decoration by artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and even Oscar Wilde. Britishness, once held in the confines of aristocracy and the gentry, now became something that could be altered and heightened by engagement with the Other. Perfumery can do this in a deeply specific way. Perfumery completely transcends the need for direct personal experience. Instead of travelling to Turkey, or anywhere in the Levant and the Middle East, one can bring the treasures of the world into one’s own dressing room.
This method of nostalgia has barely changed since the 19th century. Nearly every perfume house you can think of has some sort of oud in their catalogue, whether the house be based in the US or the UK; nearly every perfume house expresses Orientalist tropes in their copywriting; nearly every perfume house has a scent in their range denoting a specific place and space in time. Yet, in most cases, it seems dubious that each niche perfumer has such intimate knowledge of the area.
Perfume is nostalgia, yes, but it is almost always posited in the language of “discovery” — a method of uncovering that which was previously shrouded in mystery.
The entire legacy of Penhaligon’s boils down to one magnetic fulcrum that keeps the entirety of the perfume industry locked into place: simulated desire. Without getting too deep into Baudrillard or Barthes, here, it is markedly interesting that the legacy of such a historic house is rooted in a facsimile of a replica of a real object. Because, at the heart of it all, perfume is a facade or simulation — one that enacts sensuality into the forefront of its function, yes, but a simulation all the same. It pulls the wearer into an olfactory representation of a certain place, time, or theme. Nanban by Arquiste is an exquisite fragrance — saffron, black tea, black pepper, grounds of bitter coffee, leather, Chinese osmanthus, myrrh, and juniper dance around each other in a hypnotic clash of objects. But these are all precious items of cargo, key pieces that enabled the dirge of global enterprise to wreak havoc on the world. Arquiste’s copy describes it as “the intoxicating spirit of a singular, extraordinary voyage of discovery.” But the copy goes one step further. Instead of washing the narrative behind the fragrance in a simplified or vague expression of the period or place, the brand bolds the opening phrase: “January 1618, a Japanese galleon, the Pacific Ocean.” Perfume is one of the few contemporary luxury enterprises where global inspiration is a given, with houses bottling precious materials and selling them to those who most likely have no direct experience with such places, materials, and times. Wearing such perfumes invites the wearer to engage in a simulated experience of the place and time. In perfumery, the idea of a place can be communicated by simply mixing certain ingredients and writing complementary copy.
Perfume as a cultural object is an important litmus test for understanding the shifting sands and wobbling tectonics of the cultural ground it exists upon. In Mandy Aftel’s introduction to her book Essence and Alchemy, Aftel notions towards this by proclaiming that “the world was discovered in perfume’s wake.” We can gather much from this one deceptively oblique sentence. Perfume was one of the oldest high-value goods to be cross-globally traded for the mere presence of its perceived value, and so, this notion highlights how geographically the trade of perfume allowed for the “discovery” of distant corners of the globe. But also, in this vein, perfume’s experience allows the wearer to discover and involve themselves in distant cultures and lands without necessitating actual travel. Perfume is nostalgia, yes, but it is almost always posited in the language of “discovery” — a method of uncovering that which was previously shrouded in mystery. Penhaligon’s most famous oud, Halfeti, inspired by the souks of the Levant, is visually described with the imagery of a distant voyage: a ship’s rope dangles above a sepia-drenched globe beneath pencilled drawings of twee hot-air balloons. Even Arquiste uses this language of exotic discovery in the copy of Nanban. For something to be “discovered,” it implies that it was not known before — but how can we say that the spices of the Middle East are to be “discovered” when that region of the world had been producing precious perfume materials for thousands of years? Here is the marked tension present in almost all perfumery, through both its construction and how it is marketed. Perfume must simultaneously be something imbued with nostalgic power, but at the same time represent the unmasking of some new sensation or experience or place. Discovery is represented as an idealised and individualised experience — an individual uncovering an idea or place or time, which in turn is evaluated by the discerning wearer, who translates their interests in the other and the undiscovered into a markable metric of their own tastes and desires.
But that’s part of the unusual and hypnotic power of perfumery. Perfumers can take materials and create something new, and, in turn, hope to represent the deepest jungle or the furthest reaches in time. Perfume is nostalgia in the way that it crosses both temporal and spatial categories in its production, in the hope of drawing the wearer into an exoticised other. Perfume is nostalgic, yes, but nostalgia is a personal endeavour. What’s nostalgic to me will simply not have the same emotional effect as it will on you. One of my favourite perfume notes is violet leaf because I used to be obsessed with eating Parma Violets as a child; whenever I smell lilies, I think of my aunt in Ireland who only wore Anais Anais; the smell of cigarette smoke reminds me of my childhood babysitter, who drew pencil-thin brows on her leathery brown skin, aged by tobacco and sun. But these things don’t have the same emotional power to you as they do me. No perfume house can create a nostalgic perfume that fully aligns with each individual emotional backdrop, for each memory and sensation experienced. And so, to combat this ineffectual turn, perfume houses turn to the imaginary “other,” Perfume simulates experience, desires, places, and times, and creates something new from the tyranny of the past. 🌀
M.P.S is a writer, zine-maker, part-time urban researcher, full-time perfume over-thinker, maximalist fashion enjoyer, and creature from East London. You can find her looking gorgeous on Instagram as @_femmedetta or giving unsolicited opinions as @cyberyamauba on X.