Summary
Leleń argues that perfume advertising is structurally constrained by what she calls communicative anosmia: the viewer cannot smell the product, so the ad must compensate through narrative. The solution is not description but immersion — ads engineer “intersubjective engagement” by layering literary, mythic, and cinematic allusions into what she terms palimpsestic narrative structures. Drawing on Kress’s social semiotics, Jakobson’s poetic function, and post-formal narratology, the article reads a series of short-film perfume commercials (Rihanna, Chanel, Kenzo, Dior, YSL) as aesthetic texts that use multimodal sign-complexes to produce olfactory equivalents through non-olfactory means. The argument closes with the claim that perfume ads succeed precisely when viewers stop registering them as ads — narrative desire overcomes the “willing suspension of disbelief” problem in reverse.
Key points
- Communicative anosmia as structural condition: every viewer of a perfume ad is, by definition, sensory-deprived. The ad cannot transmit scent; it must substitute.
- Palimpsestic narrative: ads layer multiple narrative traditions simultaneously — fairy tale, Gothic, myth, literary modernism — so that the commercial “rests on more than one narrative” at any moment.
- Kress’s multimodal semiotics: signs in ads are never single-channel; the “fusion of form and meaning” operates across image, sound, and verbal text together.
- Jakobson’s poetic function: the selection and combination of signs creates equivalences — sensory, emotional, symbolic — that stand in for the absent scent.
- Narrative immersion over description: directors do not try to describe scent properties; they engineer viewer “perspectivization” (Rembowska-Płuciennik) — adopting the character’s spatiotemporal and emotional stance.
- The body-in-motion as olfactory equivalent: movement (surfing, dancing, driving) becomes a visual sign of diffusion — the perfume spreading through a body and an environment.
- Celebrity intertextuality: casting A-list stars activates a polyphonic web of associations from their other roles (Kidman/Moulin Rouge, Pattinson/Dior Homme), at the risk of the “vampire effect” where the star overshadows the product.
- Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” inverted: the narrative contract pulls the viewer in precisely by making the commercial feel like cinema, not advertising.
- Baudelaire as ur-text: the legacy of symbolist synesthesia — “There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children” — runs through perfume marketing’s equation of scent with transcendence and moral ambiguity.
- Gender in tension: some ads reproduce conventional erotic-body coding (YSL Rive Gauche, Beyoncé Heat); others subvert it (Kenzo World/Spike Jonze/Qualley, where the choreography is deliberately non-sensual and gender-ambiguous).
Claude’s notes
This is the most useful methodological source in the vault: Leleń gives us the concept of communicative anosmia plus a toolkit (palimpsestic narrative, multimodal semiotics, narrative immersion) that applies across all the other sources. The Baudelaire section is particularly teachable — it names the 19th-century origin of perfume’s coded relationship to transgression and ecstasy, which Deng & Shi pick up on the representational side. The Kenzo World reading is worth flagging: the Spike Jonze ad is treated here as a genuine subversion of erotic body coding, which sits in productive tension with a more skeptical reading of whether any ad can escape the gender myth frame that Deng & Shi construct. No legal/ethical concerns — published in an open-access Polish academic journal.