Abstract for the conference;

HORTI: COUTURE CONFERENCE
The London College of Garden Design’s Autumn Conference
From the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Cambridge Cottage

This conference focuses on the relationship between gardens and fashion with legendary and leading professional and academic speakers.

For centuries plants and gardens have clearly been influential on fashion sensibility. The fashion industry’s most lauded designers Hardy Amies, Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior, Dries Van Noten, Vivienne Westwood, and Raf Simons are known for recurrent themes around flora and gardens and the influence of their own gardens on their work. But does it work both ways? Are garden designers influenced by fashion professionals?

The Conference will hear from leading fashion professionals and academics including Amy de la Haye, Professor of Dress History and Fashion Curation and joint Director of the Centre for Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion; Justine Picardie, a contributing editor to Harper’s Bazaar and author of the soon to be published Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture; Hairdressing legend Sam McKnight in conversation with award-winning garden designer Jo Thompson; Mairi MacKenzie, Fashion Historian and Research Fellow at Glasgow School of Art; And Geoffrey Munn, Geoffrey Munn OBE, MVO, a jewellery specialist, writer, historian and presenter on The Antiques Roadshow.

Abstract for my lecture.

One does not need to be a perfume connoisseur to recognise the scent of a rose. Its liberal use in modern perfumery has familiarised many with its characteristics and made the rose a part of our olfactory language. However, this ubiquity belies its enduring and mythic status. Throughout history, rose perfumes have been variously used to anoint royalty, cleanse heretics, symbolize Gods, express virginity, cure ailments and flavor celebratory food but this correlation between the scent, beauty and divinity is not fixed. Rose perfumes have also embodied immorality, announced subversion, and signified death.

Whilst many of these uses are a distant memory, fashion houses and perfumers still draw upon and reconfigure these contradictory connotations in the development of their perfumes today. The talk will chart this history - drawing upon the collections of the perfume museums of Paris - and consider the role that mythology, religion, horticultural advances, literature and the growth of the popular press have played in the shifting fashionability of the rose and its perfume.

• https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/7405/