François Coty (born Joseph Marie François Spoturno dit Coti; 3 May 1874, Ajaccio, Corsica – 25 July 1934, Louveciennes) was a French perfume manufacturer and the founder of the fascist league Solidarité Française, a paramilitary organization founded in 1933, during Edouard Daladier's government supported by the Cartel des gauches (Left-Wings' Coalition).
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Early Life and Family
Joseph Marie François Spoturno dit Coti was born on 3 May 1874 in Ajaccio, Corsica. His parents were Jean-Baptiste Spoturno and Marie-Adolphine-Françoise Coti, both descendants of Genoese settlers who founded Ajaccio in the 15th century. His parents died when he was a child and the young François was raised by his great-grandmother, Marie Josephe Spoturno, and after her death, by his grandmother, Anna Maria Belone Spoturno, who lived in Marseille[1]:39.
After spending some years in military service, François met a fellow Corsican named Emmanuel Arène. A politician, writer, and future senator, Arène became François's mentor, offering him a job in Paris as his secretary. In Paris François married Yvonne Alexandrine Le Baron and took the more French-looking name Coty, a variation on his mother's maiden name. He also met Raymond Goery, a pharmacist who made and sold perfume at his Paris shop. Coty began to learn about perfumery from Goery and created his first fragrance, Cologne Coty [1]:49.
Perfumer
Through Arène, Coty met Antoine Chiris, a senator and member of the Chiris family, longtime manufacturers and distributors of perfume. At the Chiris factories in Grasse, Coty studied perfumery and began work on a fragrance, La Rose Jacqueminot [1]:61. On his return to Paris, Coty set off to peddle his scents to department stores, boutiques, and barbershops.
His genius, however, was in marketing and in recognizing that the bottle made the perfume. He had bottles designed by the great ceramist René Lalique. His first great successes were his Rose Jacqueminot scent, in a bottle by Baccarat, in 1904 and L'Origan in 1905. [2] One of Coty's greatest successes, Chypre (1917), gave its name to an entire fragrance family used in the industry's classifications.
Besides pioneering the concept of bottle design, Coty was responsible for making perfume available to a mass market. Before Coty, perfume was considered a luxury item, affordable only to the very rich. Coty was the first to offer perfumes at many price points. His expensive perfumes, in their Lalique and Baccarat bottles, were aimed at the luxury market, but he also sold perfume in smaller, plainer bottles affordable to middle and working-class women. [3]Coty perfume bottles, though mass produced, were carefully designed to convey an image of luxury and prestige[4]. Coty also invented the idea of a fragrance set, a gift box containing identically scented items, such as a perfume and matching powder, soap, cream, and cosmetics. [1]:24
Coty summed up his approach to business when he said:
Give a woman the best product to be made, market it in the perfect flask, beautiful in its simplicity yet impeccable in its taste, ask a reasonable price for it, and you will witness the the birth of a business the size of which the world has never seen. [1]:100
In 1922, Coty created an American subsidiary in New York to handle the assembly and distribution of its products in the American market. The American offices assembled their own Coty products from raw materials sent by the Parisian factories, thus avoiding the high tariffs on luxury products in the United States. This allowed Coty to offer more competitive prices on its products [4]:261. Later, additional subsidiaries were established in the United Kingdom and Romania [3]
In 1934, Coty launched his Air-spun face powder, which went on to become his most popular product. Coty collaborated with famous costume designer Léon Bakst to create the look of the Air-spun powder box. [1]:83 It became so popular that soon afterwards Coty launched the Air-spun powder scented with his most popular perfumes, such as L'origan and Emeraude. [5]
Involvement in Politics
He was one of the wealthiest men in France and owned two Paris newspapers, the working class L'Ami du peuple and the aristocratic Le Figaro. He also bought the hunting pavilion of Louveciennes near Saint-Germain-en-Laye, once the property of Madame du Barry. He built multiple large residences, but lived in a hotel on the Champs-Élysées.
Coty was something of a recluse, disliking crowds of any kind, and hiding behind his public image. The company he founded in 1904 is now Coty, Inc., based in New York City.
The movement he founded drew on the previous Coty-backed far-right leagues the Faisceau and the Croix-de-Feu World War I veterans organization. While Marcel Bucard's Francisme imitated Fascism and Benito Mussolini, Solidarité Française looked more towards the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler. On July 1, 1933, François Coty was found guilty in court for libel against Jewish war veterans' groups in France.[citation needed] Never anything but marginal, the group peaked during the February 6, 1934 rally in front of the Palais Bourbon, when it attempted, in alliance with other far right leagues, to topple the Third Republic (Coty had the ambition of having it replaced with a monarchy]). The group was outlawed in 1936, through a decision taken by the Popular Front government.
The Stade François Coty in Ajaccio was named after him.
List of creations
François Coty was a pioneer in the field of perfumery, creating many notable masterpieces, including: [6]
- La Rose Jacqueminot 1904: a floral perfume based on the Jacqueminot Rose
- L'Origan 1905: (The Golden One) a floral oriental fragrance
- Ambre Antique 1905: a soft amber fragrance
- Muguet 1910: (Lily of the Valley)
- Chypre 1917: named after the island of Cyprus, Chypre is based on a combination of bergamot, oakmoss, and labdanum. Chypre gave its name to an entire fragrance family and spawned many variations, such as Guerlain Mitsouko, Robert Piguet Bandit, and Chanel Pour Monsieur
- Émeraude 1921: (Emerald) an oriental fragrance, Émeraude is similar in composition to Guerlain Shalimar, which was released in 1925
- Paris 1922: a floral fragrance
- L'Aimant 1927 (The Magnet) a floral aldehyde perfume, said to be Coty's reply to Chanel No. 5
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f Toledano, Roulhac B.; Elizabeth Z. Coty (2009). François Coty: Fragrance, Power, Money. Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican. ISBN 978-1-58980-639-9.
- ^ "L'origan the golden (advertisement)" (JPEG). Ad*Access On-Line Project - Ad #BH1654. John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. 1950. http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adaccess.BH1654/. Retrieved 2009-11-09.
- ^ a b Flanner, Janet (1930-05-03). "Perfume and Politics". The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1930/05/03/1930_05_03_022_TNY_CARDS_000200397. Retrieved 2009-10-20.
- ^ a b Caldwell, Helen (1988), "1920-1929: The Decade of the French Mystique in the American Perfume Market" (PDF), Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Historical Research in Marketing and Marketing Thought, pp. 259-272
- ^ "Coty Airspun powder: shade-matched for flattery (advertisement)" (JPEG). Ad*Access On-Line Project - Ad #BH1634. John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. 1941. http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adaccess.BH1634/. Retrieved 2009-11-09.
- ^ "Perfumers: Coty, François". Perfume Intelligence. The Encyclopaedia of Perfume. http://www.perfumeintelligence.co.uk/library/perfume/perfumers/data/CotyF.htm. Retrieved 2009-11-09.
External links
- Coty, Inc.
- François Coty – the Corsican father of modern perfumiers
- Perfume Projects Coty page
- Tearing away the veils Coty's articles from L'ami du Peuple
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