making history III: the usable pasts of creed and farina

After a long hiatus we now conclude our look at history and perfume with two extremely juxtaposed approaches of perfume houses to their past: call it source-based history versus history as myth. According to Family Business Magazine the Perfume Houses Johann Maria Farina gegenüber dem Jülichsplatz and Creed are among the oldest family-owned businesses, tracing their beginnings to 1709 and 1760, respectively. Not surprisingly, their age and history plays a key part in both company’s image and marketing. Roughly 30,000 visitors annually tour the old Farina premises in the heart of Cologne known as the birthplace of Eau de Cologne, which house a store, museum and the current managing director Johann Maria Farina’s offices. The company stresses its 300-year dedication to quality, a glorious past as the leading perfume manufacturer for a 200-year period, and a wealth of illustrious clients. Similarly, Creed’s reputation is built around its role as purveyor to the rich and the beautiful, from the royal courts of yesterday to today’s Hollywood elite, as well as references to old artisanal traditions passed down from generation to generation. Both these firms do indeed have a genuine history, as opposed to the many brands who borrow past names but are really newly formed ventures. And yet, the way they deal with their histories could not be more distinct. Succinctly put, one could say that Farina Gegenüber has almost obsessively displayed its history to the public from the necessity of defending its position and reputation against innumerable plagiarizers and forgeries, boasting a series of 2000 court cases which has not yet ceased. Creed, on the other hand, has always felt a need to both obscure and rewrite its history from the desire of wishing to appear as a 250-year old fragrance house, rather than as a respected tailor’s who happened to dabble in fragrance and only became a perfume house proper in the late 1960s or beyond (there is little evidence even for this late period). The purpose here is not to judge these approaches, but to illustrate how two comparatively small perfume houses with no major PR budget use and have used history under differing circumstances to position themselves in a competitive market up into the present, where their businesses create status illusions and confirmations and emotional fantasies for high end consumers in the niche market. Such fantasies, as one should never forget, are the basic product perfume houses sell, for which their fragrances are simply carrier substances, like alcohol for essential oils.

Creed: A Royal Fantasy

The Creed entry in Family Business Magazine reads:

“In 1760 King George III appointed James Creed to make fragrances. In 1854 the company moved its operations from London to Paris. Both Prince Charles and the late Diana, Princess of Wales, commissioned the company to make scents for them. Today, owner Oliver Creed produces 238 fragrances.“

The problem is that such testimonials tend to be unsubstantiated and, more importantly, that there is no available evidence for the historical relevance, or even the existence, of Creed perfumes prior to the late 20^th century. The oldest flacon I have ever seen an image of seems to hark from the late 1960s or early 1970s and bears the name of Olivier Creed. Major visibility seems to have arrived in the 1980s with Green Irish Tweed.

No documents, novels, advertisements, letters of the 19^th or 20^th century mention Creed perfumes, while the family frequently appears in the context of tailoring. Fashion dictionaries and museums feature works by Creeds, but every perfume history I have read is silent. One of the rare statements from within the family is a ghost-written autobiography by one of its “black sheep” Charles Creed (1909-1966), the uncle of Olivier Creed. Primarily an account of his own exploits at tailoring and womanizing it does make references to the family history and its meteoric rise to fame after 1850, when Henry Creed opened a Paris office and collected Royal Warrants from the French Court and Queen Victoria for clothes and riding habits. While it may be that Creed furnished fragrances as well, as did Guerlain, Farina and other renowned names of the day in perfumery, there is simply no available evidence. The internet spews out frequently conflicting dates and wearers of older Creed perfumes, which in their present form cannot possibly have existed prior to the advent of modern natural-cum-synthetic based perfumery in the 1880s. The beautiful Vintage Tabarôme was thus supposedly made in 1876 for George IV (b. *1762, c.1820, d.1830), Green Irish Tweed for Cary Grant (1904-1986) – it is now undisputed that Pierre Bourdon collaborated on GIT, perhaps in the mid-1980s, and would rework some of its key ideas in Davidoff’s Cool Water. GIT just may have been Archie’s deathbed wish, but the facts do not actually compute.

Olivier Creed, then, has chosen to rewrite the complicated history of a fashion house’s 19^th century rise and post-WWII fall into a brand story for his own fragrance enterprise and it has been an unconditionally successful strategy that enables his company to charge a premium for its products in retail contexts. The pomp and circumstance surrounding Creed, from the imitation Prince of Wales ostrich plumes suggesting a Royal Warrant that does not exist, to the monotonous incantation of stock phrases and name dropping by Creed representatives and in PR pieces is also cause for derision, e.g. by Luca Turin, but admittedly, it is a spiel that most everyone in the business plays in one way or another.

Farina Gegenüber: History as a Weapon

Like Creed, Farina Gegenüber is a firm with a rich heritage, a fact that nearly broke its neck when it failed to adapt to changing consumer patterns after WWII. After a long, slow decline, the family bought back all stock in the company from outside investors and began reconstituting the brand as an exclusive niche firm, recreating its historical flacon designs, stressing its unique selling point as the original Eau de Cologne, and restricting sales to selected outlets who may not sell the brand’s discount nemesis, 4711. As with Creed, this has proven a successful strategy that invests the product with a high prestige value. But contrary to Creed, the history of the Farina fragrance is unusually well documented, as it had become the subject of conflicting claims by competing Eau de Cologne firms inventing their own foundational narratives and frequently stealing the Farina brand name ever since the late 18^th century. The Farina archive is one of the most complete company archives in the world, it has been used for a number of academic studies in economic history and it documents the history of Farina cologne extensively – Royal warrants, orders by the celebrities of the day (we are talking Goethe, not some American Idol runner-up), historical advertising. While this does not preclude different interpretations of Eau de Cologne history, a basic factual record from which to proceed is extant and available and has formed the basis for evidence in many of the court cases fought by Farina (and they did win them all). Does this mean that Farina Eau de Cologne is a more authentic or better perfume than, say, Creed’s Bois de Cedrat (a light citrus cologne supposedly formulated in 1875)? No. The Farina you buy today is also a reformulated product containing synthetics. It is meant to preserve and convey the spirit of the original while catering to the wishes of contemporary consumers, e.g. in terms of longevity. However, while Creed long emphasized its reliance on ancient infusion methods and avoided the mention of synthetics (there have been modest concessions in more recent PR blurbs, as would seem necessary considering the obvious high content of synthetics in most Creed releases since the mid-80s) Johann Maria Farina, who is a trained pharmacist and perfumer, openly embraces the ethos of modern (i.e. post 1880s) perfumery and its use of naturals with semi- and fully synthetic materials.

Creed and Farina have chosen very different paths to create “usable pasts” for their brand, which are themselves in many ways determined by the nature of those histories. They offer fascinating insights for the historian of smells into the depths and shoals of the past of perfumes as well as lessons on the fictions involved in fragrance branding for the student of perfume culture today. But for the simple lover of perfume truth lies only within the flacon and history - is bunk.

read making history II: the carthusian candidate
read making history, faking history

making history, faking history II: the carthusian candidate

A cynic might say that the contemporary art of perfumery consists of putting 50 cents worth of materials into an expensive looking bottle which is then cleverly wrapped into the folds of a prestige brand that will allow charging $80 or $150 or $250 for the product (the price point may be part of the prestige sell). For companies not backed up by a strong designer brand – be it Calvin Klein or Boss in the mass market, or the more upscale Prada and nichey Etro, a flowery history can form the basis of high prestige. Age and continuity in volatile markets have always been considered markers of quality and dependability, and they offer the marketing opportunity of romantic narratives about glamorous dandies, passionate princesses, and secret forgotten prescriptions of eternal youth and beauty.

Monk myths in particular have enjoyed great popularity throughout the history of perfume marketing and they carry a kernel of truth, since monasteries were indeed the keepers of medieval societies’ botanical wisdom and antiquity’s heritage. These were harnessed towards the concoction of medicinal products out of which European perfume culture emerged – Eau de Cologne began its success story as a tonic to be imbibed or inhaled. In fact, the legend of what is Europe’s oldest documented perfume – Eau d’Hongrie or Hungary Water recounts that a hermit monk presented it to Queen Elizabeth of Hungary (a composite character uniting different historical figures) with the assurance that it would preserve her perfect beauty forever – which would help explain why the Polish King proposed to her when she was seventy-two.

Variations of this story abound and they frequently feature Carthusians, the herbal cracks among monks who are perhaps best known for their green Chartreuse liqueur. The legend promulgated by the House of Carthusia (as legend) recounts a gift of flowers by the Carthusian monks on Capri to a visiting Queen, which accidentally macerated, turning the flower water into a wonderful fragrance (unlikely when I consider the smell of week-old water in a vase of wilted tulips). The supposedly real history is that the monks’ old recipes were rediscovered in 1948 and were then reissued by a small laboratory in Torino and that the industrial synthetic-natural formulas now marketed under the brand name are made using “the same methods as the Carthusian monks.” I Profumi di Firenze has a remarkably similar secular version of this story in which a pharmacist rediscovered the ancient perfume prescriptions of Catherine of Medici, who is said to have brought culinary and perfume culture from Florence to the French court. Perhaps Leonardo da Vinci, known to be ahead of his time, invented the synthetic perfume molecules prominent in this house’s fragrances before they were rediscovered by modern chemistry? Now that would make history and perfumery journal headlines!

The many monks populating perfume mythology raise the question of whether the clergy should be incensed (no pun intended) by these ecclesiastical borrowings for crude commercial purposes? Well, when it comes to matters of business, the spiritual men of the cloth and the monk’s cowl have always taken a rather pragmatic approach themselves. Witness the monks of Caldey island, whose lavender water was highly praised by Luca Turin. If you read the ad copy of retailers such as manufactum, you get the impression that local lavender is lovingly distilled by Brother Lewellyn himself according to some old book of herbal prescriptions. But according to Turin, the formula was actually developed by a professional Belgian perfumer (hopefully Catholic, at least), Hugo Collumbien, who used the finest French lavender from the Vaucluse and provided it with longevity by fixating it with a (nowadays) synthetic musk called Exaltolid. Next time your at the Caldey monastery listen closely whether its really "Exulte Deo" the friars are singing.

But back to the Carthusians and the making of perfume history: one of the best known and for a long time most successful perfume products was 4711. And guess what? Company founder Wilhelm Mülhens acquired the secret recipe for his Eau De Cologne from a Carthusian monk who had fled the chaos of the French Revolution in Grenoble and was taken in by the Mülhens family of Cologne. A different version tells of the valuable scroll having been the monk’s gift on the occasion of Wilhelm Mülhens’ marriage, a scene imagined in the post-WWII painting you can see on the upper left. As it happens, the monk’s name was Farina- the Italian surname borne by the established and reputable cologne-producing families in the city. As Eau de Cologne became big business, it became common practice for Germans to buy the Farina name off Italians in order to establish their own Farina cologne operation. Alas, the historical record shows that Mülhens, listed in the Cologne registry as a “speculator,” bought the name off one Carl Franz Maria Farina in Bonn, Germany, who had been producing Eau de Cologne under the privilege of Franz, Archduke of Austria and Elector of Cologne. Thus 4711 began its history as “Franz Maria Farina” on not-quite-so-Carthusian ground but as a "phony Farina" - in fact he resold the name thirty times to other entrepeneurs. Only when the strenuous efforts of the original Farinas to protect their name resulted in the first pan-German trademark law in 1874 was Mülhens forced to drop the Farina name and adopted the ingenuously recognizable 4711 moniker, leaving the competition behind in the dust as the number became nearly synonymous with German Eau de Cologne in the 20th century and particularly after WWII.

This story leads us to the third part of this little series, in which we will compare the histories and mythologies of the two oldest operating family-owned perfume companies: Farina Gegenüber, makers of the original Eau de Cologne (1709) and Creed (1763), a well-known niche perfume house. We’ll see how Farina’s obsession with presenting facts and Creed’s obsession with avoiding them is deeply rooted in both houses' actual histories and the need to handle them in a way that ensured their economic survival.

making history, faking history

The Nuremberg Christkindlesmarket, or Christmas Fair, is world-renowned. Harking back all the way to the 16/17^th century, when Protestants replaced the gift-bearing Catholic Saint Nicolas of December 6 with a newfangled Lutheran “Christkind” (reverting into the red-suited male Kris Kringle = Santa Claus = Saint Nicolas in the US) which brought presents on Christmas Eve (respectively Day), it is the very embodiment of old-fashioned German/European festive culture and attracts millions of tourists every year.

Not too many people know that central features of the market, particularly the grand opening ceremony featuring the angelic, blond-wigged child and two tinselled angels, which is even featured on the evening news, were invented by the Nazis in 1933. They considered the proper re-orchestration of the festival and its relocation to the city center, the former site of the Jewish Ghetto, a proper step in Re-Germanizing the town which would become the site of the more pagan spectacle of the “Reichsparteitage.” The Nazi mayor of Nuremberg also brought the town’s historical architecture into line, falsely Gothicizing Romanesque buildings to give them what was considered the proper Teutonic aura.

This little Christmas story is just a minor example of the way in which history is reconstructed, or often purely invented, for the purpose of serving some contemporary agenda. It is one of the oldest games in the book, because history has always provided legitimacy and is a key source of identity for our species, blessed and cursed with the gift of memory. In the world of perfume, history rarely plays a sinister role, but a considerable number of houses has chosen to build their brand image on impressive historical pedigrees which signify tradition, dignity, quality and an opportunity for consumers to connect with a luxurious past of nobility and royalty and the pomp and circumstance of the glorious old European courts. Among these purportedly venerable names we find Creed (1760) and Rancé (1795), Carthusia (1380) and Santa Maria Novella (15??), Farina Gegenüber (1709) and 4711 (1792) and numerous others. Needless to say that their histories, on closer inspection, not always turn out quite what they seem to be…

To be continued…

Illustration: Washington having bought Creed in Delaware.