Angel

perfume history

[From Viscose 07: SCENT] There’s a scene in 90 Day Fiancé: Before the 90 Days, where reality TV baddie Darcey freshens up in the airport bathroom before meeting her British internet boyfriend Tom for the first time. After washing her armpits in the sink and drying them with the hand dryer, switching out her Gucci flats for thigh-high Louboutins, she announces assertively, “gotta smell like an angel.” She pulls out a full-size bottle of Angel by Mugler and proceeds to absolutely douse herself, spraying her body a total of 34 times. The backs of her knees, the nape of her neck, her blonde extensions, and fabutanned cleavage—all directly in the line of fire.

The episode aired 27 years after Thierry Mugler, in 1992, thrust Angel onto the world stage, forever altering the landscape of modern perfumery. Angel is the first proper gourmand fragrance. It smells sweetly of cotton candy, coconut, chocolate, caramel, fruit, and honey. No fragrance before it had ever used such a high percentage of ethyl maltol, traditionally a confectionary flavor. Exactly how edgy it was to smell edible back then is hard for me to gauge. I’m only two years older than Angel and by the time I was a preteen, sugar rush and fairy floss lotions and body sprays were readily available for mallrats shopping at Victoria Secret or Bath & Body Works and beyond. By then, Angel copycats had entered the luxury realm too, most notably Chanel’s Coco Mademoiselle, which launched in 2001. But Angel’s arrival into the world of perfume was no mere product launch: it was a veritable shock.

Perfumes have their trends. Too many smelled like violets in the 1900s; sweet amber in the 1920s; fur in the 1950s; big and green in the 1970s; loud and red in the 1980s; thin and pink in the 1990s. It’s vulgar when there’s too much of anything, but complexity plays as much a role as context. It’s not just about chic becoming tacky when it trickles down.

Angel has been called shrill, cloying, and unsophisticated (Dariush Alavi). It’s been compared to a blockbuster movie (Barbara Hernan). And vomit inside a metal container (Reddit). Mugler said he wanted it to smell like his childhood memory of the fairground. The Clarins executives (the skincare company with which the fashion house teamed up with for what would be the first fragrance for them both) screamed in horror upon first exposure. But Mugler and his team declared that it would be “this or nothing,” and he had leverage as one of the hottest designers at the time. From the beginning, Angel was love/hate, but it was bold, and this matched Mugler’s reputation. The former ballet dancer turned fashion designer had a flair for rock n’ roll circus extravaganza and for thinking outside the box, casting folks like Connie Fleming and Diana Ross on his outsized runway presentations, which presented hyper-sexed, cyborgian visions for the female silhouette. And here he was putting lightning in a bottle. Even the bottle was a star. A glassmaker took 18 months to figure out how to manufacture Mugler’s five-pointed design, and the result was so expensive that the sticker price had to be double that of its competitors. While Mugler was at the height of his career, everything about this perfume was a risk, including the name. Vera Strubi, who developed the fragrance’s concept and marketing with Mugler, admitted it was cheesy. But all the risks paid off. Within a couple years it was a massive success, and has remained so for over 30 years, still figuring as one of the best-selling fragrances in the world (and at one point even outselling Chanel No. 5 in France!). When I was growing up in Canada, my mother wore it. So did my dance teacher. Angel was globally ubiquitous, its sickly sweet scent meaning whatever you wanted it to.

Mugler said he wanted it to smell like his childhood memory of the fairground. The Clarins executives screamed in horror upon first exposure.

Angel is warm and distant at the same time. Luca Turin described it as “at once edible (chocolate) and refreshingly toxic (caspirene, coumarin).” And there are strong notes of patchouli that explain the body odor comparisons. “Without it, Angel would be all clouds—sweet, saccharine, and nothing more,” says Audrey Robinovitz. “Exactly like the toilets at Efteling,” says one Reddit commenter, referencing the amusement park in the Netherlands that the original Disneyland was based on. “Many perfumes have tried to mimic Angel, but they all seem to miss the point: they either tone down the rot or they abandon it completely,” writes Ollie Landsdowne. “Angel’s copy-cats are all 10-tonne flowers and sweetness with no tension, nothing left to resolve.” Turin agrees, “The only thing that’s worse than repeating a joke is leaving out the punchline.”

As a fashion house, Mugler’s crowning moment came in 1995 with the Cirque d’Hiver show that featured Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Verushka, Patty Hearst, and James Brown. In these years the fledgling perfume brought to life in its campaigns a frosty fantasy world striking a chord between ambivalence and purity. Black shoulder pads backdropped by blue sky and a cityscape (Estelle Lefébure); a mermaid in the desert wearing a silver sequined gown (Jerry Hall); a living crystal inside a kaleidoscope snatched by Mr. Pearl (Amy Wesson). But by the time Anna Marie Cseh rose to international stardom with the vertically dramatic Bladerunner-esque campaign—the background city a composite of Tokyo and Hong Kong—Mugler ready-to-wear was dead. The fragrance quickly sold better than the clothes.

When Clarins shut the fashion part of the business down, people wondered if the perfume would continue to flourish. It did. Mugler stayed in charge of creative for a while, aided by Strubi and his longtime assistant Christophe de Lataillade, who had previously translated French romance novels before coming to work for the designer. While the brand financially restructured, the icy snow-globe worlds of the campaigns remained fantastically brightly cold. Take Bianca Balti in a maze of mirrors, or star-powered ads featuring Naomi Watts and Eva Mendes emitting eternal celestial cool. For eight years, the house only existed as a fragrance purveyor. The brand dematerialized, you could say, into an odor that lingered in the fashion imaginary. In fact, Mugler, the label, didn’t produce clothes again until that bullshit with Lady Gaga and Nicola Formichetti in 2010. (It was a commercial success, but between Gaga, the nodel with skeleton tattoos, and the whole venture’s digital tech evangelism, the hype was annoying. Fashion establishment veterans like Cathy Horyn disapproved.)

Mugler was unrecognizable, he explained, because he didn’t want to be recognized.

By then Mugler had changed his name from Thierry to Manfred. He allegedly exploded during a New York Times interview learning that Clarins had gone through with the publishing of Thierry Mugler: Galaxie Glamour, a survey of the designer’s work in coffee-table form. “They wanted to do a book and I disagreed. Why should we do a book now and open the door to our archives and show even more things so that people can rip us off? I don’t see the point.” He had just undergone major reconstructive surgery, transforming into a bodybuilding, pitbull-coded ugly-hot beefcake, complete with a new nose and jaw. He was unrecognizable, he explained, because he didn’t want to be recognized. Vindication had come in 2008 in the form of Beyoncé commissioning new costumes for a tour based off one of his motorcycle jackets from 1992. The clothes only flopped because he was too ahead of his time. But the perfume, full of impassioned excess yet sweetly naive, always sold. It still sells. Maybe Mugler’s deeply impractical vision is better suited (commercially anyways) to scent, with its ephemeral invisibility. Today, in Mugler’s Casey Caldwaller era, the parent company is now L’Oreal; and the latest Angel girl, hawking the spinoff Angel Elixir, is actress Hunter Schaefer. In an ad from last year (styled by Haley Wollens), she goes intergalactic posing in front of the blue marble in outer space.

Maybe it’s inaccurate to project the psychology of Mugler, the man, too closely onto the fragrance. After all, the nose behind the perfume, Olivier Cresp, had long been tinkering with the formula that would become Angel before he was approached by anyone from the label. Still, as this fruitchouli gourmand was perfected and introduced to the world, it became inseparable from Mugler the person, swirling under the eponymous banner he’d birthed, with his astronauts, vampires, and doms. And since we only know the two together, maybe it’s okay to interpret the story through the perfume’s lens. Lansdowne meditates on how there’s something moreish and unresolved about Angel’s kick of rotten pineapple: “If your hope doesn’t smell like death then it lacks ambition.”

No one could accuse Mugler of a lack of ambition. Even before he passed away in 2022, he’d died many deaths already. They say camp is always mourning its own death too. Haunted by its ghosts, artifice sacrifices the present to project a future that isn’t real but could be. •

Viscose is a fashion criticism magazine. Launched between Copenhagen and New York in 2021, the irregular periodical publishes critical writing and research projects from a wide range of authors from the worlds of art, fashion, literature, and academia. Viscose 07 includes contributions from Olivia Kan-Sperling, Andreas Keller & Ro Miller, Diane Severin Nguyen & Juje Hsiung, Elise by Olsen, Sissel Tolaas, and more. viscosejournal.com