You can never be too rich or too thin

A little tribute to my grandmother and her favorite place, Lord & Taylor

My grandmother had two great loves: my grandfather and the department store Lord & Taylor. 

Every time we passed the retail palace — either in Midtown Manhattan or on Long Island, where she lived — she would blow a kiss in its direction. “Mi amor!” she’d proclaim when someone uttered its name. She shopped there, ate there (delicate tea sandwiches and tart, creamy frozen yogurt) and socialized there. She may have preferred the bathrooms at Bergdorf’s, the designer duds at Bloomie’s, but Lord & Taylor was her place. 

“If I could have married a store, I would have married Lord & Taylor,” she would tell me in her native Spanish.

I’d laugh and tell her she was “loca.”

Félix Vallotton depicts the pleasures of shopping in Le Bon Marché, from 1898.

My grandmother’s ardor may have been extreme, but I understood it better after reading Julie Satow’s new book, When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion. As Satow tells it, the 20th-century department store — whether in New York City, San Francisco or Main Street USA — offered American women more than shopping. It was a safe haven, a playground, and a place of empowerment: a ladies’ paradise where women could congregate, experiment, and even earn a living away from men.

You can read the rest of my review at The New York Post.

I absolutely adored Satow’s book — an incisive, sparkling social and cultural history that’s bursting with bright personalities and details. I also liked it because it made me think of my grandmother, and the hours and hours and hours I spent accompanying her to these establishments.

My first taste memory is Lord & Taylor’s cool, tangy frozen yogurt, served in a little metal taza. My mom tells me that when I was a baby, she and her mother my grandfather would haul me all over town: plopping me atop the table at their favorite kabob joint, taking me shopping at Fortunoff and Bloomingdale’s. If we ever went to the city (aka Manhattan), my grandmother insisted that we go to Bergdorf’s, not to go shopping but to use the loo, which she deemed the best in all of New York City.

My grandmother was a young grandmother. She married my grandfather at 17 and had both her children by the time she was 20. (She was in her 40s when I came around.) She dyed her hair well into her 80s — until the pandemic put a stop to her beauty appointments. She loved shocking people when asking for a senior’s citizen discount or declaring that I was not her daughter but her granddaughter. We laughed hysterically whenever this happened. She was proud of her looks. I found her vanity touching, a sign of her vulnerability.

Not a lot of people found my grandmother vulnerable. Her daughters, her husband, and many of her family members found her kind of scary. As a child in Cuba, she plunged a fork into her brother’s hand while they were posing for a portrait. (She smiled like an angel while he winced in pain.) Family lore had it that one Christmas she received coal in her stocking!!! I was a goody-two-shoes, so I found such naughtiness rather exotic. She was beautiful, too. (She bragged that in Cuba people compared her to Elizabeth Taylor, for her dark hair and curvaceous figure.) She had an apron that said “You can never be too rich or too thin.” She was — unlike my friends’ grandmothers — a terrible cook. (Save for her sopa, which could cure all ills, from the common cold to a broken heart.)

My grandparents came to the U.S. in the 1950s, with two young girls. My grandmother struggled. I’m sure she could not have imagined, when she married a handsome Spanish accountant, that in a few years she would be living in a cockroach-infested apartment in Washington Heights, wearing hand-me-downs, taking babysitting jobs while my grandfather worked as a janitor. (The family swiftly moved to Queens — an upgrade! — and eventually my grandfather started his own successful food business, but that was still years away.)

What was it like for my grandmother to step foot in Lord & Taylor for the first time? She lived in the country in Cuba, in Santiago, so this urbane palace of consumerism must have been intoxicating. I imagine she felt a bit like Liz Taylor — or the young woman who resembled her — as she walked through the aisles, the shop attendants greeting her and attending to her, commenting on her beauty, spritzing her with free perfume samples. That’s kind of the magical thing about a store like that. Even if you don’t have money, you can walk in and look and touch and smell and escape into another world, another reality. You can buy a frozen yogurt and sit in the cafe, slowly savoring it, pretending you are a lady who lunches. And for those few minutes, you really are.

A vintage advertisement for Lord & Taylor

***

I lived with my grandparents until my father landed a medical residency in Ohio when I was about 3. (We then went to Pittsburgh, where I spent most of my youth.) But I moved back in with my grandparents when I got my first media job in New York, as a copyeditor at Forbes.com. The first piece I ever published there featured my grandmother, and she was very proud, even if she couldn’t really understand it because of the language barrier. Still, I printed it out for her at the office, and she proudly hung it on the refrigerator. I told her she was my muse. Anyway, I thought I would dig it up and post it here. I have resisted the urge to re-edit it, FYI. Enjoy!

Perfumes: The Guide

My first memory of perfume is being trapped in my grandfather's stuffy, overheated station wagon one summer on the way to the beach. I was in the backseat with my grandmother, who was doused in her signature scent, Extra Vielle Jean Marie Farina by French soap maker Roger & Gallet, a bitter orange and rosemary citrus that, when combined with the sweltering heat and the exhaust from the cars backed up on the Montauk highway, produced an odor so oppressive and noxious that, well, let's just say that we had to pull over. It certainly put a damper on our first day of vacation.

It would be at least another 10 years before I could step foot into a Sephora — and another couple before I could walk through, pick up my makeup and check out without holding my breath.

The way we connect scent with certain memories or people (we like Old Spice, for instance, because it reminds us of our fathers; we don't like Extra Vielle because we associate it with getting carsick) make scents seem subjective and emotional.

Our response to smell is visceral and often anti-intellectual. We wrinkle our noses, gag, perhaps get hungry or sexually aroused, or inhale more deeply. We find a smell heavenly or repulsive, or we shrug our shoulders. But scent is actually concrete. As Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez write in their new entertaining and indeed encyclopedic Perfumes: The Guide (Viking Books, 2008, $27.95), which contains several introductory essays about scent and reviews of over 1,200 perfumes, "We don't smell things differently. ... Our disagreements on smells seem to be mostly over what we like and don't like, and what they mean to us."

Degas’ A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers, from 1865, via The Met

When we smell something, our nose is picking up and recognizing a molecule, or a combination of molecules. Our brain may only identify one or several of these molecules, but our nose is indiscriminate — it reads them all.

There's a bit of a chemistry lesson in Perfumes (Turin is a biophysicist; Sanchez, a perfume critic, but no slouch in the science department either). The science — along with the admission that synthetics make up (gasp!) 90% of most fragrances — isn't meant to demystify the wondrous smell of, say, Chanel No. 5. Indeed, it has the opposite effect. Understanding the work and the precision and the balance required to create a successful scent makes us appreciate perfume as an art.

Plus, to understand the history of perfumery is to (partially) understand its chemistry and (fully) embrace synthetics. Turin identifies the "official birthday of fragrance chemistry" as the discovery of the synthetic simulation of coumarin, an essential component of the tonka bean, prized for its sweet, nutty and smoky fragrance, in 1868. Another one of the most successful synthetic musks was a happy accident: A scientist discovered it while testing derivatives of TNT. It didn't blow things up, but it sure smelled good.

"Giving perfumers pure compounds to play with changed the art entirely," says Turin of synthetics. "The great perfumer and teacher Rene Laruelle has put it succinctly: Synthetics are the bones of fragrance, naturals the flesh." Indeed, some of our favorite scents cannot be found in nature: several musks (traditionally an extract from a gland of the Himalayan musk deer), ambers (a blend of resins) and lemons, as well as "at least two crucial lily-of-the-valley components."

But Turin and Sanchez understand that chemistry alone does not determine the success of a perfume. "Tocade is not a better fragrance than Dior Addict because it better approximates the mix of odors released by a fertile female," writes Sanchez. "Tocade is better than Dior Addict because it is more beautiful."

So, then, what makes a good (or "beautiful") perfume?

Perusing the five-star reviews in Perfumes, it seems that a good perfume is surprising, individual, abstract, witty, maybe ironic, complex (for example, Thierry Mugler's Angel perfume works because of the juxtaposition of cotton candy and flowers with a masculine patchouli), long-lasting, transformative (it somehow makes the wearer feel different).

These abstractions may sound difficult to grasp (How is a perfume ironic? you may ask), but Turin and Sanchez are worthy guides. They don't mean to scare readers away, but to help. The star system and the reviews point the reader in the direction of perfumes to try — and away from those to avoid.

Take Turin's review of Carolina Herrera's 212: "Like getting lemon juice on a paper cut." Then there's Miller Harris' L'Air de Rien: "It smells of boozy kisses, stale joss sticks, rising damp and soiled underwear. I love it." Describing what each scent smells like is a huge consumer aid--so you don't end up buying L'Air de Rien based on the high rating when soiled underwear really isn't your thing at all. Sanchez can be as ruthless and funny as her co-author, whom, incidentally, she ended up marrying after she'd completed this project.

But Sanchez's best reviews conjure the feeling of wearing a particular fragrance rather than just recreating a scent for us.

"I have worn it on and off for years," she writes of Chanel's Bois des Îles, "whenever I felt I needed extra insulation from the cold world." Do we need to know that Bois des Îles is a milky, rosy, ambery sandalwood? That it has a "delicious top note of citrus and rose, with the fruity brightness of a cola"?

Well, those descriptions help, but all we need to know is that sense of warmth and comfort Îles provides the wearer to know the emotional wallop a perfume can pack. And that is something all the chemistry in the world can't explain.