Our Bottles, Ourselves: Rive Gauche by Yves Saint Laurent
While cultural historians romanticize the first years of the 1960s as a period of promise, the decade’s close is almost universally timestamped by acts of violence or tragedy. The 1960s didn’t end, they died, either with Altamont, or the Tate-LaBianca Murders in ‘69, or the Kent State Massacre in 1970. Resultantly, we’ve come to believe culture entered the 1970s in a disenchanted daze; a reluctant slouch towards Bethlehem characterized by shag carpeting and spiritual disintegration.
In 1971, Yves Saint Laurent launched Rive Gauche, ushering in a perfume for an ambivalent decade that carried the tagline “Nothing like the past.” Packaging designer Pierre Dinand claims the bottle’s aluminum canister was inspired by Andy Warhol’s ultra-contemporary Soup Can series— shiny and impenetrable. Most importantly, the fragrance’s sturdy cap and construction made it portable, meaning the gal on the go could smell as blindingly white-hot as a convertible headlight at all times.
By the early 1970s, ad agencies had learned that the best way to market to a new generation was first to define it. Perfume became the perfect vehicle for projecting loosely formed social ideals; an invisible aura primed like a sponge to absorb visual aesthetics. In the United States, fragrance remained unburdened by pre-established cultural associations—if aldehydes weren’t inherently powerful, the right visual campaign could make them so.
On the heels of the braless, butchy Women’s Liberation Movement, Lois Geraci Ernst founded Advertising to Women, Inc., staffing it with female executives she called Woman Specialists. “This agency is built on the proposition that women are different from men,” said Ernst, “And thank God they are.” The year was 1974: Gloria Steinem was building nationwide feminist networks with Ms. Magazine and tennis star Billie Jean King had just triumphed in the Battle of the Sexes. Unfortunately, female empowerment wasn’t very sexy by advertising standards, so Ernst used Rive Gauche’s 30-minute TV spots to present a more palatable version of women’s liberation.
🎶 The girl who’s so contemporary, she’s having too much fun to marry. 🎶
When asked why she encouraged her beauty clients to forgo print ads in favor of TV, Ernst responded, “When you’re advertising perfume, you’re advertising sensation, not a logical purchase. Television, with its music and the way women move, makes it come alive.” Ernst’s fantasy of the modern woman was a shiny-legged nympho who smoked cigarettes and drove at night—a fantasy working women could buy into with their newly-minted 59 cents on the dollar. In 1971, advertising Rive Gauche couldn’t have been easier: it’s shiny, colorful, and it both looks and smells like a can of hairspray. Feeling not-so-fresh? Rive Gauche is a portable shower in a bottle, ready for wherever the night may take you.
With nuclear sillage that could clear a room, Rive Gauche is still the perfect scent for a single woman. Synthetic rose, musk, and asphyxiant powder lend it an OCD, clinical quality that will leave you smelling like you’ve scrubbed the shame off your body with a mini bar of hotel soap. Sanitizing, neutralizing, and as disinfectant as Marriott housekeeping, it’s a bottle of amnesia that promises to erase any memory of a previous guest. “Nothing like the past”