Classic American Beauty, Born in Paris

The headline does the whole job before you reach the bottle. "The Classic American Beauty," it says, across a field of tall grass, and there she is in a white turtleneck, hair loose, no jewellery, no city in sight. The perfume sits small in the upper corner, almost an afterthought, a squat amber flask with a brass cap. Ralph Lauren had already learned the trick that made him rich. You don't sell the thing. You sell the world the thing lives in, and let people buy their way toward it one bottle at a time.

The bottle was Lauren, his first fragrance for women, and by the time this ad ran in 1990 it was already twelve years old. Lauren launched in 1978 alongside Polo for men, and the simultaneous release was itself a piece of strategy nobody had tried before. No designer had sent a men's and a women's scent into the world on the same day. Lauren talks about it now as if it were obvious, that his world held both, so the fragrances should arrive together. At the time it was a gamble dressed as common sense.

The original pitch made no attempt to describe a smell. The 1978 launch advertisement set a woman and two children beside a horse-drawn carriage in autumn light, a polo mallet in a boy's hand, and promised only that a fragrance could "capture a way of living, a certain timeless style." Introducing Lauren for women, the copy said, and the bottle sat in the corner like a detail you might overlook. The strategy was already complete twelve years before the turtleneck and the field; all the 1990 version did was swap the family for a single woman and make the country quieter.

So was the company he kept. He had been courted by Estée Lauder, the natural home for a designer scent, and turned them down for Warner Communications, the entertainment conglomerate that owned record labels and film studios. The two formed Warner/Lauren Ltd, and a media company with no perfume pedigree put out one of the most American fragrances ever made. The juice came from Bernard Chant, the perfumer behind Aramis and Estée Lauder's Aliage and Azurée, a man who built scents like architecture. Chant gave Lauren a green vegetal chypre, all rosewood and cedar and oakmoss, more forest floor than flower shop. Ben Kotyuk designed the flask. The whole thing was sold, with a straight face, as a "natural spray cologne," and that phrase tells you everything. Not perfume. Not parfum. Nothing French. A cologne, natural, the way a sweater is natural, the way a walk is natural.

Nothing about the grass and the turtleneck was accidental either. The pitch was wholesomeness, the open country, the woman who looks like she belongs to a family with land. In the two-page spread that ran in American Vogue that December, the fragrance barely registers and the woman is the entire argument. Everything Lauren wanted you to feel about the scent, he makes you feel about her instead.

The photograph hides a joke. The Classic American Beauty is Isabelle Townsend, and Isabelle Townsend was born in Paris. Her father was Group Captain Peter Townsend, the RAF officer whose romance with Princess Margaret became the great royal scandal of the 1950s, the equerry the palace could not let her marry. After Margaret, Townsend married a young Belgian woman, Marie-Luce Jamagne, and Isabelle was their daughter, raised speaking French and English, reading French and English literature at the Sorbonne between 1979 and 1982. By the time Ralph Lauren cast her as the face of his all-American dream, she had a British war hero for a father, a Belgian mother, a Paris childhood, and a literature degree from one of the oldest universities in Europe.

She signed an exclusive contract and became the brand's defining face for years. The American-flag sweater she wore down the runway in the autumn of 1989 turned into one of the house's permanent images, the kind of thing that gets reissued and reframed decades later. She worked with Bruce Weber and Richard Avedon and Peter Lindbergh, the same photographer who would soon argue that no single face could carry a whole decade. The campaign worked precisely because the Americanness was built rather than inherited. You assemble the myth out of whatever materials photograph well, and a Sorbonne graduate in a turtleneck photographs beautifully.

The fragrance had a quieter, sadder ending than the woman who advertised it. Through the 1990s the licensing passed to Cosmair, then to L'Oréal, and the formula got reworked more than once. Each version sanded a little more off the original, the oakmoss thinning, the strange earthy bitterness softening toward something safer. By the end of the decade Lauren was discontinued. Collectors now pay frightening prices for the early Warner/Lauren bottles, the ones that still smell the way Chant intended, while the thinned-out late versions ran down to clearance shelves on their way out of production.

What replaced it tells you how the whole industry changed. In 1998 Ralph Lauren launched Romance, and Romance took over as the flagship women's scent almost overnight. Where Lauren had been green and woody and a little severe, Romance was a soft rosy floral built for a younger buyer, the sort of scent that sells by the truckload at a department-store counter. The austere green chypre belonged to the 1970s; the warm floral was made to be liked, and liked sells. The brand survived the swap without a scratch, because the brand was never really about the smell. It was about the field, the turtleneck, the woman who looked like she had somewhere green to go.

Lauren the perfume is gone, reformulated into a memory and then out of production entirely. Isabelle Townsend left modelling for acting and the stage, turned up in a Whit Stillman film and a few theatre productions, and mostly stepped out of the picture she had defined. The picture outlasted them both, and it still works on whoever turns the page, which is the strange mechanics of a manufactured image: the more of it you can prove was invented, the better it does its job.

Sources

Original vs Reformulation: 40 Years of Lauren by Ralph Lauren — Fragrantica

The History of Polo Green and its Many "Eras" — InsideHook

Hall of Fame: Ralph Lauren — The Fragrance Foundation

Peter Townsend (RAF officer) — Wikipedia

Biography — Isabelle Townsend