While it is true that the French have never shied away from wooing the upper class demographic, their real conquest of American women lies not in the winning over of the privileged few, but by seducing the general public. Again, marketing and advertising helped the French attract female American consumers.
While women were studying the new fashion plates, dreaming about diamonds, or thinking about having some special chocolates delivered, they were also being courted into the new market of cosmetics, an affection which French women embraced but nineteenth century American women still had not accepted.
Before French advertising began to proliferate American ladies' magazines, the only cosmetics used by "proper" ladies were cold cream and perhaps a
little powder. "Powder and paint," notes Elizabeth Wilson, " were associated with the
ancièn regime and were therefore seen as unfitting for the daughters of the American Revolution; yet by the mid nineteenth century, it appears that Paris fashion were again being worn with heavy make-up, at least in New York City". By the early 1920s, advertisements like ones created by the French cosmetic manufacturer Vivadou featured voluptuous women with heavily shaded lids and pursed red lips offered American women lipsticks, powders, and blushes as well as cold creams and perfumes. The Victorian lady and the fresh-faced Gibson girl were soon overshadowed by the proliferate images Parisian
femmes peintes. (painted women)
The desire to acquire all things Parisian extended from the top of the head to the tip of the toe. Along with cosmetics, American women also applied Parisian hair tonics, like Pinaud's, which boasted in its American magazine advertisements its winning of the "Highest Award" at the Paris Expo in 1900. In marketing such as this, we see the early attempts of marketer's attempts to "sell" the Parisian mystique. Pinaud's "Eau de Quinine Hair Tonic made outlandish, un-provable claims that it "preserves hair from parasitic attacks; tones up the hair bulbs" and coupled those claims with an appeal to romance by lauding its "sweet and refined odor which makes it a luxury".
Whether fashions or cosmetics, the French message was that just a little bit of their products could not only work like magic, but also make you feel like royalty.
One way to get even closer to that feeling of being noble was to smell like them. This myth was particularly successful because it was difficult to prove whether one did or did not have a royal scent about them. Perfume was a terrific opportunity to promote the myth of nobility, accessible to the average woman. Parisian marketers did not miss the opportunity to capitalize on the dream. William Leach reports that in 1908, "a rumor was purposely broadcast throughout the trade that perfumes made and named for nobility exclusively" were "being sold in this country under numbers instead of names". This particular myth was so enduring that even fourteen years later, in 1922, Coco Chanel was able to cash in on its power, creating her infamous scent, Chanel No. 5. Chanel No. 5 remains, to this day, one of the world's top selling perfumes.
Chanel, of course, was not the only one successfully marketing French perfumes that implied that wearing a particular scent would do wonders for a woman. Many advertisements for perfumes, initially with floral scents, "claimed a romanticized French connection". They were selling the myth as much as the scent. "In a 1901 advertisement for Delettrez perfumes, the poetic hymn to the "modest violets" of "the valley of the Var in sunny France" implied that only the unique flowers of this region were used," Daniel Hill points out. This ad, and many others like it, claimed both beauty miracles and exclusivity. The selling of the myth probably succeeded anyone's wildest expectations. Sales for what Hill describes as "basically a static floral scent" rose from $17 million in 1914 to $60 million in 1919.
The French perfumers have never relinquished that sense of mystique. It was quite a long time before anyone forgot Marliyn Monroe's famous claim that Chanel No. 5 was what she wore to bed. In 1972, Audrey Hepburn was the spokeswoman for the French perfume,
L'Interdit, and the text that accompanied her beautiful visage read, "Once she was the only woman in the world allowed to wear this perfume". Fifty years after they first marketed perfume as an exlcusive royal luxury, the French found a new way to get American women to identify themselves with royalty, movie stars.
Before Monroe and Hepburn could sell perfumes or cosmetics, the French had to actually have a place to display the real products, and one important venue became American drugstores. Kathy Peiss argues that
"(l)a fabrication industrielle de produits de beauté destinés à la commercialization est issue de la convergence au milieu du de plusieurs activités très différentes: la fabrication des produits phamaceutiques et des fournitures pour drugstores, les initiatives prises au niveau local par les pharmaciens, et aussi l'essor des salons de beauté". "The industrial production of beauty products intended for commercialization results from the convergence of several very different activities: the mass production of beauty products intended for drugstores, initiatives taken at the local level by owners of the drugstores to sell beauty products, and also the rise of beauty parlors." Drugstore owners were responsible for seeing that the products made it off the shelves and into the hands of American women.
American companies were quick to catch on to the appeal of French marketing. One idea Pond's Cold Cream dreamed up to move product was to associate sun tanning with French elegance. A 1929 ad proclaimed: "It's smart to be suntanned! The fad began out of the clear blue sky. A Parisian élégante was told to bathe in the summer sun till she was brown as an Arab. Along with radiant health she achieved an irresistible new beauty which forthwith became the fashion!". Presumably, one was to copy the Parisian beauty in her sun-worship, but follow through with Pond's after sunning to moisturize. Druggists were there to offer these wannabes their cold cream, and perhaps that new lipstick they had just read about, or maybe even that delightful new scent from Franςois Coty. The advertising simply would not have succeeded had the French not had reliable American merchants willing and able to close the sales.
Photo Credit © Olga Ekaterincheva | Dreamstime.com
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