It’s late, and I have to work tomorrow. But I can’t stop thinking about Diptyque’s special packaging, and the “movie” they commissioned to promote Do Son.
Orientalism is a problem that is deeply embedded in perfumery. In the early days of modern commercial perfumery, white French men were marketing perfumes using fetishizing fantasy tropes about the exoticism of “the Orient” (and its women). There is an entire category of Western-style perfumes that is/was commonly referred to as “Orientals,” and some people still see nothing wrong with this as a categorization.
I’m not going to explain why it’s wrong. If you want more information, this has been thoroughly discussed in numerous places before, often by people can speak on it more authoritatively than me. The term “Oriental” is becoming phased out as people become more aware of the ways that it is problematic. People are more informed and aware of issues surrounding cultural intelligence and the ethics of cultural heritage than they have ever been. A lot of people are now talking about the intersection of colonialism and perfumery; this is an important issue for us to consider and discuss.
I’ll readily admit that I have not always been aware of or sensitive to this issue myself. I have referred to perfumes using this kind of terminology in the not-too-distant past. When it became part of public discussion, I took the opportunity to listen to others, educate myself, and change my thoughts and behavior. This information has been circulating in the perfume community for several years. I believe in and support people’s ability to learn and do better. However, it’s getting harder and harder to believe that anyone in the perfume industry is completely unaware of the discussion surrounding the problem of Orientalism in perfumery.
This month (January 2023), Diptyque introduced a special marketing campaign for it’s existing perfume, Do Son. When I saw it today, I was troubled. Rather than editorialize about each aspect, I’ll just present them. I think that they speak for themselves.
Do Son was first released in 2005. Diptyque has a description on their website of how it was conceived:
As a child, Yves Coueslant, one of diptyque’s founders, spent his summers at a pagoda on the seaside that his father had built in Do Son, in Halong Bay. Far from the humid heat of the large port in Haiphong, the air was cooler. The sea breeze carried with it the heady and slightly spicy scent of tuberoses, a favorite of his mother.
Do Son is the embodiment of precious and persistent memories from a childhood spent in Indochina. Memories of flowers, hovering between refreshing and enveloping.
I would like to take this opportunity to point out that Yves Coueslant was a French citizen born in France. He spent part of his childhood in Vietnam because his father was the head of the legal department of Banque de l’Indochine. This was a French bank based in Paris which was specifically formed to fund and enable French colonization in Asia.
The perfume Do Son was created to be reminiscent of M. Couselant’s memories of his family’s Vietnamese summer home. This would have been during the 1930’s and 40’s, when Vietnam was colonized by France and the Vietnamese people were treated rather poorly. (Đồ Sơn is the name of a district of Haiphong, Vietnam, known for its beautiful beaches).
Up to this point you could simply say that M. Couselant was a child at the time and that the perfume is based on a memory of a flower and yes it is named after a place in Vietnam, but is that so bad? I should add that M. Couselant is deceased and that this post is not really about him, but about current marketing decisions at Diptyque. His childhood and history are relevant to the conversation though, because Diptyque is using them in a marketing campaign.
Let’s look at the new ad campaign.
The bottle label for Do Son has always depicted a woman sitting in a pagoda. The bottle label and box have now been colorized so you can plainly see the pagoda, junk boats, and limestone karsts.
There was also a short animated film created for the ad campaign. Selected images from the film are displayed prominently on Diptyque’s website.
Discussion
I don’t want to center my feelings about this campaign by ranting about it, I’ll just say that it feels wrong to me. Using such vivid imagery that is clearly meant to conjure images of Vietnam to sell a French perfume seems not much different than Jacques Guerlain evoking “exotic” fantasies of the Taj Mahal and the gardens of the Emperor Shah Jahan to sell Shalimar.
In an attempt to see if there was any way this could be construed as anything other than blatant cultural appropriation, I looked to see who was responsible for the production of the film. I found that Diptyque hired a French production company (Werlen Meyer) to create the film. The music was specially composed by an English singer-songwriter (James Blake). I watched the full credits. The names of the people responsible for the creation and production are mostly people from Werlen Meyer. While I can’t say for certain, all the names of people involved seemed to be French; nothing jumped out at me to suggest that any Vietnamese people were involved or even served as consultants or content reviewers.
I own several Diptyque perfumes myself, including Kyoto. When it was released, I had a conversation with some people who questioned whether it might be cultural appropriation. Kyoto was inspired by ikebana and the bottle came wrapped using the furoshiki technique with a fabric printed with a Sarayi floral motif. The wrapping seemed a bit over-the-top but the images and language around the perfume itself felt more like appreciation of the ikebana art form. We left it as a “maybe,” or a grey area. Perhaps I was wrong about this, but it was something that seemed at least open to questioning and viewing in different ways.
The imagery of pagodas, junk boats, lotuses, and cranes being used to sell Do Son seems like unmistakable Orientalism. This film and ad campaign are presenting a fantasy of Vietnam to sell a French perfume. The Vietnamese people won their freedom from French colonial rule in 1954, at the end of the eight-year French Indochina war. Diptyque was founded a few years later in Paris in 1961. The company started as a “bazaar” where the three owners sold textiles and objets d’art collected during their travels of the world.
Orientalism and Primitivism peaked in the 1960’s. Fashion and trends were based on inspiration from cultures and locations that designers perceived as “exotic.” Often these ideas are presented as the Western “discovery” of non-Western cultural phenomena. Orientalism and Primitivism are inextricably linked to cultural hegemony and European imperialism. Cultural appropriation without considering the context of the appropriated elements and Western exploitation of other cultures to sell goods was always wrong. Sixty years later we all should know better, and it’s reasonable and ethical to expect people and companies to do better.
