Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 25, 1992 TAG: 9201250301
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EXTRA 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELAINE LOUIE NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
THE SCENTS OF THE '60S ARE BACK
For the last few years, the 1960s have been rediscovered, re-invented and regurgitated.Miniskirts and false eyelashes, LSD and the Grateful Dead have all enjoyed revisionist status.
It seems the only unexplored territory of that overworked decade is its smells: musk oil, patchouli and sandalwood. And guess what? They too are back.
Twenty-five years ago, certain fragrances - like rock 'n' roll - represented yet another gesture of rebellion. Mothers wore Chanel No. 5, an artificial aldehyde scent; their sons and daughters wore patchouli essence, plucked almost directly from the plant.
Now, a new generation, too young to remember the decade, has nevertheless embraced those same scents, perhaps taking its cue from a few pop-culture icons.
Cher wears sandalwood; Sandra Bernhard, the comedian, patchouli. Nor- ma Kamali, the clothing designer, wears a blend of patchouli and woody incense.
At Kiehl's Since 1851, a pharmacy and natural cosmetics store in Manhattan, musk oil represents 60 percent of the store's sales in the United States, said Jami Morse, the store's chief executive officer.
Perfumer's Workshop, a Manhattan company that sells essential oils, reports that 15 percent of their sales is in musk. In September 1991, Erno Laszlo introduced Sea Mud Soak, scented with patchouli, among several oils.
And just last week, in front of Tower Records on East Fourth Street in Manhattan, a street vendor held up a bottle of her best-selling fragrance: African musk.
In Los Angeles, some date the rediscovery of '60s scents to March 1989, the month Madonna's patchouli-scented "Like a Prayer" album was released. It sold 11 million copies.
"When Madonna put out her album with patchouli, everybody, including the yuppies, had to have it," said Michel Chenelle, the manager of Soap Plant, a shop on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood that has sold essential oils for 20 years.
"Madonna put patchouli in the album because she wanted to capture the scent of the '60s and also the smell of the church," said Liz Rosenberg, vice president of publicity at Warner Brothers Records. Rosenberg would not disclose the cost of scenting the packaging but said, "It was a major embellishment for a record."
Madonna, apparently, learned about patchouli from Bernhard.
"I turned her on to it three or four years ago," said Bernhard, who bought her first bottle in 1986 and wears it as a reminder of the '60s, when she was a little girl, "lighting the incense when my brothers smoked pot."
Certainly, the earthy scents of patchouli et al are the aromatic memories of a decade when many bedrooms, draped with Indian paisley cloths, were perfumed with incense and smelled like Catholic churches or Buddhist temples.
The '60s were also a time when people wanted their bodies to smell like their rooms, which of course smelled somewhat like their drug of choice - marijuana - earthy, exotic, musky.
When Norma Kamali, the 46-year-old fashion designer, created her own fragrance in 1985, she knew what it would smell like: the inside of a Catholic church, mysteriously blended with patchouli and musk, the scents that lingered on King's Road in London in the '60s.
Her two fragrances, Norma Kamali Perfume, a floral with a patchouli base, and Norma Kamali Body Incense, a woody scent, can be worn separately or blended together, as she wears them.
Customers, she said, come in two age groups: "Those of us in our 40s who smell the incense and immediately connect it to the '60s, and the younger group in their late teens and early 20s who are rediscovering the Beatles and the Grateful Dead," Kamali said.
Betsey Johnson, the fashion designer, is now 49, and wore patchouli in the late '60s, when she lived in San Francisco. When shopping, "I was asked to leave Macy's perfume counter because my patchouli destroyed the smells at the counter," she said.
In the '70s she switched to musk and, in the '80s, to perfumes, which she still wears, by Ralph Lauren or Paloma Picasso.
Johnson's assistants, however, wear the '60s fragrances. One, Maria Klimas, 26, wears Egyptian musk, and another, Matthew Batanian, 27, wore patchouli from 1986 to 1989, but then changed to frangipani and gave up deodorant.
"I don't believe in deodorant," Batanian said. "I bathe every day, and I like the fact that the oil is strong enough so I don't smell bad."
Jonathan Van Meter, 28, the editor of "Hip Hop," the working title of a magazine being developed by Quincy Jones, the composer, and Time Warner Inc., is also too young to remember the '60s.
But like so many patchouli devotees, Van Meter has a habit that springs from a kind of primal, aromatic memory.
In 1978, when he was 14 and in the ninth grade in Cape May, N.J., he spent his study period sitting in the cafeteria, near an 18-year-old girl who, he said, "was deeply into her hippiness." She had long hair, wore the requisite beads and perfumed herself with patchouli. "She smelled good," said Van Meter, who inhaled her aroma for nine months.
Now he collects the oil, and in December he had 10 bottles, none empty. "It's an obsession," he said.
Even adolescents buy the '60s scents. Donald Bauchner, founder of Perfumer's Workshop, said that his youngest customers are 13 and 14 and consider themselves experts. The children, he said, walk into his boutiques, which are tucked into department stores, with an air of great authority and say, "Let me smell your musk."