Ephemeral Cities

This essay is part of Scent Access Memory, our editorial series with Dirt.

For their 10th anniversary, the French perfume house Ex Nihilo created Chandigarh Express, a fragrance inspired by the Indian city of Chandigarh. Cities are a common jumping off point for fragrance (see the Gallivant line or Le Labo’s city exclusive collection), but Chandigarh represents a particular kind of urban escapism. Ex Nihilo is Latin for “out of nothing,” as co-founder Benoît Verdier told me recently, and so they turned not to the likes of Tokyo or Paris, developed organically over centuries, but Chandigarh, a city constructed from scratch against the foothills of the Himalayas.

Chandigarh, designed in large part by Le Corbusier and inaugurated in 1953, encapsulates a mid-century modernist vision of the future — an urban site in which “citizens can live a full and harmonious life,” as Le Corbusier wrote in his edict on the city. Built under his urban planning principles of orderly zones and shared green spaces, Chandigarh’s Brutalist, concrete government buildings loom over a network of gridded sectors connected by grand, leafy boulevards. It is an imagined utopia, and subsequently a promise that has never come to fruition.

And it is one of many such cities: Unveiled in 1960, Brasília announced Brazil as a modern country, with a shiny new capital largely designed by Oscar Niemeyer, a protege of Le Corbusier. When I lived in Rio de Janeiro, the capital of Brazil for two centuries before it moved to Brasília, locals told me that the location of the latter was chosen not for its geographic centrality but because flinging the capital to the middle of nowhere would stymie citizen protests. Irvine, Brasília and Chandigarh’s less glamorous cousin, was developed in the '60s as a master-planned suburban oasis in industrializing Southern California; my older sister attended college there and told me the city was intentionally designed to be difficult to navigate, keeping outsiders lost on its high-speed thoroughfares and repetitive cul-de-sacs.

Cities like Chandigarh exist both out of time and are wholly of their time, a past vision of the future that can never quite materialize. “Brasília is an abstract city,” Clarice Lispector wrote in an essay on her 1974 visit to the capital. “There is no way to make it concrete. It is a rounded city with no corners.” Perfume is similarly abstract; among the notes in Chandigarh Express is Mahonial, a synthetic interpretation of lily of the valley. Lily of the valley is one of perfume’s many “mute flowers”; too delicate to be distilled into essential oil, their fragrance can only be imitated through synthetic aroma chemicals now found in perfumes the world over. 

But just as Mahonial is rooted in reality, Chandigarh too did not truly come from nothing. Following the dissolution of the British Raj and the Partition of India in 1947, the state of Punjab was divided in two, with the Muslim-majority regions going to Pakistan and the remainder left to India. The state’s capital, Lahore, landed on the Pakistani side. Rather than retrofit a capital from an existing city, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru wished to forge a new path. “Let this be a new town, symbolical of the freedom of India, unfettered by the traditions of the past — an expression of the nation's faith in the future,” he said of Chandigarh’s ambitions. 

Like those planned cities, perfumes are also distillations of the time in which they were made. And Lahore, which emerged as a city as early as the 10th century, has its own perfumed legacy. The capital is home to the Shalimar Gardens — a 17th-century vision of utopia as a walled paradise on Earth — which served as the basis for French perfumer Jacques Guerlain’s most seminal creation: Shalimar. 

Originally released in 1921, Shalimar’s spicy, warm aroma birthed the “Oriental” perfume family, bottling the Orientalist art and architecture movements of 19th-century Europe. Shalimar was a reflection of technical advancements as well: What makes Shalimar Shalimar is not merely raw materials like rose or sandalwood but an overdose of ethyl vanillin, a synthetic vanilla-derivative patented in 1894. Along with perfumes like Chanel No. 5, its reliance on synthetics led the way for a new world of scents — these were perfumes based on abstract ideas, untethered from the confines of nature. 

New materials like reinforced concrete similarly served as the foundation for modernist architecture and its principles like “form follows function,” concepts on which planned cities like Brasília were created. But the utopian vision of those cities has fallen short. “In conception, it was utopian,” architect Siddhartha Wig states in the 2023 documentary The Power of Utopia: Living with Le Corbusier in Chandigarh. “What has turned out, I’m not so sure is fully utopian.” As Chandigarh’s population has swelled, its neatly-planned city limits have kept wealthy residents on the inside while impoverished communities extend around the periphery; the city’s namesake chairs, devised by Eulie Chowdhury for government workers (though often attributed to Pierre Jenneret), are today exported as status symbols for the likes of the Kardashians. The contained subdivisions of Irvine and Brasília have created car-dependent sprawl stripped of street life rather than egalitarian communities in harmony with nature. As Robert Hughes wrote in his 1980 book The Shock of the New, “Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future.”

The outlines of a city are never really done, however, no matter how well-planned they may be. Attempts to calcify Chandigarh as the work of Le Corbusier have faced criticism for reinforcing a Euro-centric hierarchy and erasing the Indian modernists and craftspeople who contributed to its creation. “Historical preservation is often a colonial project aimed at saving the white master’s genius creation from the colonized, who, being ‘inferior,’ are thought to have failed to grasp its value,” architecture professor Dr. Vikramaditya Prakash said in a 2020 interview on Chandigarh. “That is certainly the case here.” 

Shalimar’s legacy has also fractured under a 21st-century lens. Figures like perfumer Yosh Han have called for an end to the “Oriental” nomenclature for its perpetuation of colonialist fantasies of the East. Shalimar inspired not only countless spicy-vanillic perfumes, but imagery that relies on exoticization of the Other: Guerlain’s 2013 Shalimar ad starred white Russian model Natalia Vodianova romanced by multi-ethnic model Willy Cartier in a fantasy version of India. In 2019, Dior filmed a Sauvage fragrance spot showcasing Johnny Depp interspersed with Native American imagery; the ad was quickly pulled due to public backlash.    

But those images were made in the first place because the appeal of perfume is that it promises to escape such Earthly baggage: perfume offers a fantasy, a portal to transport you backwards or forwards in time. President Juscelino Kubitschek had similar hopes for Brasília: the city was laid out in the shape of an airplane, symbolic of his desire to time travel his country to the future, fulfilling his administration's promise of “Fifty Years in Five.” But nothing is made in a vacuum; for all the ambitions of their creators, no place can outrun its past. 

Perfume too offers an escape to a utopia at which you’ll never quite arrive. Like Lispector’s Brasília, perfume is impossible to make concrete; at once tenacious and fleetingly ephemeral, it offers no corners to grasp onto, only existing in the seconds before you smelled it.