Garden of Glass
Newsletter 4.2024
I’m very happy to stay home, doing nothing except planning my tea time, nap time, and rowing time, but last week a toothache pushed me out the door to rush to see my dentist in my old neighbourhood. This heritage corner of Pune is the sweetest and it hasn’t changed for over 60 years!
There are slim lanes of silver shops, from where I always buy antique compacts for solid perfume, the magical shop with all sorts of ribbons, buttons and trimmings from where I get great ideas for hand-stitching a silk perfume pouch, and the glass workshop from where I get my flacons made. (And then I buy snacks!)
If uncle remembers to, and wants to, he’ll make the flacon I sketch or request. It just might take two years of repeatedly reminding him of the forms I need. I suspect he pretends to forget but he is generally indulgent and there are no other glass makers who are accessible and affordable. I would not be able to stretch my creativity under any other circumstance, in any other city, or any other country.
Truly handmade and unique, I actually refrain from selling the more fancier bottles with fruit and parrot stoppers. I intend to keep them for exhibition display should such opportunities arise in the future. There are no doubt advantages I have over perfumers based in the West whose packaging looks all the same as there are very few bottle manufacturers that meet industry standards. Since I side-step the tedious mass-manufacturing model altogether (branding, packaging, marketing), I can focus on excellent craftsmanship to maintain a micro-niche all my own.
Perfumery is historically a gate-kept, opaque sphere full of bloated egoes who charge the sky for a bespoke formulation. Even these days, only a handful published lifestyle articles reveal how much such big-name perfumers charge. Buckle in, this is a necessary discussion on how bespoke-luxury is defined vis-à-vis how luxury can be made accessible.
One London based perfumer who is usually discrete let slip in an early interview that she charges GBP 15,000. And for extra, she will lock the perfume formulation exclusively for you. But if that seems extravagant, it is not. Guerlain’s master-perfumer, Thierry Wasser’s 12 month process to create a set of bespoke fragrances poured into a collection of 20 Baccarat crystal bottles, costs approximately $55,000.
Offhandedly, I wonder if the price dictates how quickly that special novelty-euphoria wears off, but the more notable detail in this article is that Wasser also conducts these bespoke sessions virtually since the pandemic.
Paris-based Kilian Hennessy, yes he of the Cognac dynasty, says in the same article that he has clients for whom money is no object. At $35,000, you can have your signature scent within 6 months. Slightly more affordable is Berkeley-based Mandy Aftel whose bespoke creations start at $2500.
Each of these artisans are trying to create value around the object, and the price tag is for access to the craft and the maker, not the object itself. What could satisfy a person who has everything? A velvet lined antique wooden box with silver tipped crystal flacons that contain scented elixir?
Is this the end of Made in Europe?
From glass-makers to paper producers, European industries face a struggle to survive. What if they don’t make it? -January 15, 2023 by Charlie Cooper and Giorgio Leali, Politico
Some years back, a curator sought me to collaborate with a Paris-based glass sculptor for an exhibition in South Asia. His production costs were so high, the project fizzled fast. This experience left me thinking about how I could have made the required work on my own in my own style, utilising local skilled labour, pay fairly and still keep enough profit for myself. Plus, at no point in this process would I feel slighted about how 90% of funding would inevitably go to the maker calculating his costs in Euros while I sat here in India being low-balled even as I produce the intellectual scaffolding that makes the artwork valuable in the first place. Concept mine, labour mine, profit mine. Basic Marx.
It’s the end of the financial year so I thought it appropriate to have this conversation on what I charge for my practice. Apart from the context around my own work, it has been important to consider what background and income bracket my clients consistently come from since 2018. Who is my audience vs who spends money on me? The answer has remained women from the creative and intellectual fields. They’re dreamers really! They write poetry, make art, teach literature and theory, or they collect art. Or if they are in creatively dryer professions, this is how they indulge in connoisseurship.
Most return to not only purchase something for themselves, but to actively commission small gifts for their loved ones. They tell me, “I’ve saved up for a whole year to buy perfume from you!” or “I’m commissioning this bespoke box for my friend who has overcome lifelong struggles”, or “this perfume is a gift for my niece who has just completed her PhD!” I love the meaning that so many have come to attach to a “product” that I craft. [And if I should send my friends a parcel of perfume for no reason, it is my way of sending encouragement, affirmation and love.]
My purpose is to delight so I’m particularly sensitive to this segment’s budgetary constraints. I always ask how much they want to spend, and then lead them with options on what’s possible within that margin. There is no judgement and everyone wins! Even though it is a new financial year, and inflation keeps climbing, the prices on my website remain the same. Pick any perfume from $75 and up. FedEx adds up at a flat rate of $75 no matter where you are in the world.
$500 will get you a bespoke perfume in a gorgeous 15ml glass stopper bottle I sourced from a Manufacturer in the UK. The process takes a month, there is no sampling process, and includes a leisurely online tour of my curatorial project Bagh-e Hind. Extras such as bespoke soap, tea, incense, specially commissioned glass incense holder and flacon can be requested, so from there the scale slides upwards. Everything appears in minimal packaging.
I used to be able to offer solid perfumes in silver compacts like this precious toffee shaped one pictured above but since the pandemic, FedEx has refused to ship “precious metal” and “flammable items” such as incense. So if you know someone who can carry this as a parcel for you, we can talk.
Last year I read Aaron Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto” (Verso, 2019), that articulated a possible future world “of unimaginable hope, highlighting how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of nine billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology and build meaningful freedom for everyone.” Funnily, one some posters I have spotted online, Bastani’s title has since been appropriated to say: Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism Now.
A world beyond capitalism, free of heteronormativity, man-made scarcity, war, famine, disease and destruction? Beam me up, Scotty!
Writing this newsletter has made me think about the joys of “luxury” in the small things: a cold raspberry jelly, a rose sherbet, both consumed from vintage steel bowl and glass. The cool metal enhances the taste somewhat.
Luxury in my perfumery practice means access to genuine materials, extracts of rose, pink lotus, mimosa, sandalwood, especially anything grown, harvested and processed right here in India, or more extravagantly, the Yemeni Dragon Blood resin I was able to procure from a local supplier. It is a soap perfumed, slowly layered with colour, and carved by hand. It is an assortment of old school candies that accompany my new Lemon Candy perfume. In the same vein, I also think that the ability to imagine a better future and being able to implement it in small ways, is luxury.
Two weeks back, I was invited by Dr. Kedar Kulkarni to give a two hour lecture at Flame University (Pune) to third year graduate students who focus on environmentalism in literature. It’s a very fancy liberal arts campus with global-generic-corporate-brutalist raw concrete facades, manicured lawns, water fountains occupied by freakishly young students.
My first honest-to-god thought upon getting there was that these students are too young and their parents pay too much money for me to tell them how awful the world is. But I’m glad I went with my instincts. They need to know the truth about colonial & postcolonial devastation, the American Empire, the destruction it has wrought specially in Southeast Asia, the bombs, the Napalm, the Agent Orange, that dropped on Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian people (and still LOST!), how I came to understand politics in order to write about this region’s contemporary art, how I came to building a perfumery practice and what kind of access-to-luxury do I accomplish by building an open access digital project such as Bagh-e Hind together with a gardener-scholar-dreamer. As a treat, I also brought the students incense (as gifts) and the original perfume from the project, that they could smell and experience. One student asked “what is Kewra”, and another asked “what is pederasty (in Mughal courts)?”. It’s OK, Dr. Kulkarni was on hand to immediately address the more sensitive question, while I snacked on grapes*.
This was my first in-person invitation to speak to students and it was a riot! Scent is such an enjoyable medium to bring - and include - everyone safely into subjects that are otherwise contentious or taboo. On the other hand, I also have my fun - when some very-serious-Ivy league credentialed academics at Flame asked me what I do for a living, I scoffed and said, I am a lady of leisure. I nap!
*Please note Nicolas Roth’s extensive reference to grapes in Persian and other languages across history on his Instagram post.
