November 7, 2012 |
Laetitia Casta is pinned up against a wall. The warm Sicilian sun is beating down on her. The wind is blowing her fringe across her face. The air around her is filled with the sweet scent of Dolce & Gabbana Pour Femme. Notes of neroli and raspberry and tangerine and jasmine, centred around a marshmallow and sandalwood base, all mingle together in a harmonious manner on the summer breeze. Can you smell it? Feel it tingling against your skin? Of course you can. For that is the power of a well-crafted fragrance campaign. You see Laetitia and you want to smell like her. Because, let’s be honest, no matter how much surgery we subject ourselves to, we’ll never achieve the same sharp cheekbone that is born from nature and not from a well-placed scalpel. Admittedly, Pour Femme was originally released in 1992 – it was the first Dolce & Gabbana perfume. But Pour Femme 2012 is not a reissue. It’s a maturing of fragrance. It’s the capturing in scent of the moment a young girl crosses the threshold of womanhood. If it were a song, it would be Rihanna’s Te Amo, which is the moment our favourite Bajan princess herself crossed that same threshold of maturity and embraced her sensuous side with the help of Laetitia. But instead of Laetitia slamming RiRi against a wall in a French castle, they would be transported to the set of The Only Girl in the World and Laetitia would be slamming Rihanna into a giant pink flower. The force of that fit of passion is like the force of Pour Femme when it hits your nostrils. It lingers like a bruise. Staying with you long after the moment has passed. As Stefano Gabbana, himself just a young buck back in 1992, puts it, “It’s not so much a re-edition as it is a fine-tuning. We altered the bottles a bit… There has been an evolution [of the brand] since the 1990s; Domenico and I were much younger then – we’ve really matured a lot.” It even comes in a new crimson velvet box. The perfect shade of a sweet-smelling petal.
by Natalie Dembinska
