Not long ago, I showed a coworker a painting hanging outside my office door. It’s of a vase of daisies in a garish gold frame. “Phyllis Diller made that,” I told her. Thomas Lauderdale of Pink Martini managed to wrangle an audience with Diller not long before her death, and she donated the painting for a charity auction hosted by the AIDS service organization I work for.
“Who’s Phyllis Diller?” my coworker asked. I was flabbergasted. Sure, the coworker is in her early 20s, and Diller hadn’t exactly been in the public eye for a while, but to me Phyllis Diller was as much a part of American culture as Mount Rushmore. Or at least the Corn Palace.
Over the next few days, my thoughts turned to perfume. Would this coworker recognize another classic, Guerlain Shalimar? Nope, she’d never heard of it. I didn’t have the heart to do a smell test. I had the feeling that the civet funk of the vintage Eau de Toilette wouldn’t impress her.
That day I learned a lesson the perfume industry has already taken to heart: many people don’t know the classic fragrances anymore…
