When Your Biggest Worry Is... {Paris Photo}

When Your Biggest Worry Is...© 2015 Chantal-Hélène Wagner

Everybody is concentrating on the shoot, which is visibly for a pair of jeans to look its best in the light of a sunny afternoon...

The smell on the shoot was, involuntarily so, that of Amsterdamer honeyed tobacco in a real pipe smoked by a young man sitting on the steps of the Théâtre de l'Odéon, right under the model's elbow - one of the best smells in the world.

This is like a glimpse into La Dolce Vita, French style. For a moment, the two most important things to be achieved are smoking a good pipe and catching a good light.

I really believe that sometimes we need to be reminded of those moments. It's the story of Jane Birkin's mother holding on to her bottle of Shocking by Schiaparelli when her house got destroyed by a bombardment in London. Her reflex was to take it away intact from atop a vanity amidst the rubble as a sign of civilisation in the midst of inflicted death.

You can grasp onto perfume flacons as if they were long grasses on the bank of the river when you're about to drown. People who think that perfume is frivolous could see them in that other light. Cultivated smells are symbols of civilisation.