Perfume Diary: Tequila and Tuberose
Last week, I went to a see the new Frida Kahlo exhibition, Appearances Can Be Deceiving, at the Brooklyn Museum (I’m am supposed to be doing edits RIGHT NOW on a longer essay on it this, but there’s nothing so thrilling as cheating on an assignment with an extremely similar assignment; thank you all enabling me). I found aspects of it completely intoxicating: her name splashed across the broad marble edifice in fruit punch colors, her love letters with the photographer Nickolas Muray, who took that famous shot of her on the roof of a Manhattan building in the 1940s, as she smoked a cigarette in a scarlet Tehuana gown, staring out over the skyline with a sardonic side-eye. Kahlo, who loved New York City (the only place in the United States that she ever fell in love with; she called the rest of it “Gringolandia”), and who always wanted her art to be seen, would likely have been tickled neon magenta by the whole spectacle. Apparently, this show, which was a bombshell for the V&A Museum in London, where it first began, and is going to be an even bigger hit in NYC -- it is sold out for weeks and the lines stretch down the block every day. I can see why: Fridamania has swelled in the U.S. over the past few decades to the point of near-farce, her striking image slapped across novelty keychains as a shorthand for “woman who is an artist” and “woman who worked through pain” and “woman who was not afraid to look at the world and find it surreal, and in doing so, mirror the absurdity back to us.”
But there is, of course, an essential danger in the marketing and dissemination of the unibrow sans context -- of course the obvious cultural flattening, the erasure of her Latinx background and her very specific , very devoted Communist politics. It is the same danger that befalls any woman we deem a “badass,” which lately has become a term I truly wriggle my nose at when it comes to describing women who are no longer alive but somehow manage to be remembered. There is this pressing need to scoop dead women out of the past like pennies from a fountain, and hold them up as shimmering exemplars of surpassing all possible limitations; the aviatrix who flew higher, the swimmer who outpaced the boys across the English Channel, the writeress whose prose cut glass, and yes, the outsider artist who worked through pain. But, what of the women who had ambitions (because who doesn’t? Getting out of bed in the morning speaks of ambition) who simply slumped themselves from day to day, trying to stay on top of everything? What of the women who did not luck into (or luck into the natural ability to claw their way toward) circumstances that could allow them a moonshot? What about the women who stopped painting, who stopped singing, who stopped dancing, because someone stood in their way? Or what about the actual failures, and losers, and strivers who missed the final rung? What do we do with these women who never vault past “badass” status? Leave them as historical roadkill? Cautionary tales? I just always think, when I see a clamoring crowd thrumming to view the work of a singular woman (and yes, Kahlo was a once-in-a-lifetime talent, a visionary, a player of the infinite game), that there must be a hundred women whose retrospectives we’ll never see. Maybe a thousand.
In any case, the very best part of the Kahlo exhibit, which you must go see if you are anywhere near Brooklyn, is the last room, which is stuffed with her clothing and adornments. The clothing is so rich -- Kahlo loved nothing more than stiff brocade and intricate embroidery-- and the jewels seem ancient with weight. But the case I gravitated to -- BIG SURPRISE -- was her collection of perfumes. Kahlo loved fragrances; she was a hedonist when it came to juices, both natural and chemical. She loved hacking away at a fresh papaya and she loved dousing herself in Shalimar, or Schaiparelli’s Shocking. As the exhibition text notes, she smelled so good that people noticed, they wanted to be next to her, they wanted her secrets. And speaking of secrets, she also used to fill her old perfume bottles with tequila. A glamorous life hack if I ever heard one.
Shelley Waddington is a perfumer in Northern California who I think I’ve touched on a bit here before -- she has a line of perfumes inspired by women who lived and I wrote once about Zelda -- but I wanted to bring her up again, because after I got home from the Kahlo show I pulled out my vial of Frida and remembered how very much I like it. Unlike some Kahlo products, it doesn’t feel like a gimmick. So much thought went into every note in the bottle: apricots from the garden at Casa Azul, hibiscus flower that would have vined up the adobe walls, Mexican copal and chili pepper. And then this overripe, puffy tuberose, like a squeeze of thick paint, over the whole composition. If you are going to commune with the artist, this may be the way to do it. Just don’t call it the perfume a badass. — RS