Cashmere Bouquet: Britain, India & Patchouli in the 19th-Century
Today patchouli is strongly associated with the 1970s and hippie culture, but it was a scent well-known and well-loved in Britain a century earlier. The fragrance of patchouli in the 19th-century was associated with optimism for the future, an unprecedented abundance of consumer goods, and empire. It also denoted a disquiet over rapidly changing social norms and a desire, for some, to escape into a fantasy of the East reimagined for the Western palate.
This class will follow the humble herb patchouli from its native range in India and Southeast Asia to the Second Empire Paris salons and London department stores. Along the way, we will examine how significant events in the history of colonised India and its relationship with the United Kingdom shaped the path of patchouli and influenced its use in fragrance to this day.
Meet our speaker: Nuri McBride
Nuri McBride is a perfumer, curator, writer, and community organiser.
Nuri serves as the Program Curator for the Scent & Society lecture series at the Institute for Art and Olfaction. She explores the intersection of olfaction and death rituals with the Death/Scent project and fragrance history in her monthly newsletter, Aromatica de Profundis. McBride is developing a new fragrance line that will launch in the coming months. You can learn more details about Nuri’s current projects by visiting her Project Portfolio.
Nuri has had a profound interest in olfaction since she was a child. This interest led to her applying her skills as a researcher to delve deeper into the subject. Eventually, she apprenticed under several perfumers focusing on traditional West Asian fragrance-making and distillation techniques.
Her professional work focuses on olfactive cultural education, aromatics in lifecycle rituals, and the preservation of traditional forms of aromatic preparations. She is also deeply involved in labour rights and power equity in the fragrance trade.
Nuri spent the first twelve years of her career in refugee resettlement and torture treatment. She worked primarily in Kenya, Thailand, Israel, and the United States before transitioning to academia and eventually the private sector.
In her community work, Nuri advocates for an end to funeral poverty, improved end-of-life care for marginalised peoples, and the normalisation of universal death-care. Joining a Chevra Kadisha (Jewish burial society) and becoming a Metaheret led to Nuri advocating for greater inclusiveness in Jewish death rituals and a return to traditional green death practices for non-Orthodox communities.
Nuri has been featured in the New York Times, Citizen K, Atlas Obscura and other publications. In her free time, she loves Guillermo del Toro’s movies, Umberto Eco’s books, odd smelly things, learning cuneiform, and historical needlework.