I worked on the launch of this fragrance when I was eleven years old.
The booking agent for the fragrance campaign came to my ballet class, in San Rafael, California, one same-old Saturday morning, out of the blue and plucked three of us right off the barre, mid plie.
The booking agent was striking to begin with: a middle-aged man, impossibly fit, with silver hair—cut like Hugh Grant, perfectly styled and somehow wild and free. He wore slim fitting pants, three quarter length. Until the day when he burst into our ballet class, I had never seen a man in capri pants. His shirt was a man’s dress shirt, and yet. It had a luscious gauzy texture, slightly see-through, unbuttoned half-way. It showed off his sculpted torso. He wore no socks; this was another style trend I hadn’t seen until that Saturday, in San Rafael. His gleaming, hairless ankles slid right into soft leather loafers.
We left ballet class, ushered out the door, squeezing each other’s arms with glee. We felt so lucky to miss grand adagio at the barre that Saturday. Our teacher, retired Russian Prima Ballerina Svetlana Afanasjeva, was known for her very brutal grand adagios on Saturdays. The Bolshoi Ballet doesn’t play around when it comes to leg height and hold.
Svetlana, her class, all she taught me about myself, my strength; all she taught me about dance and movement and beauty—Svetlana, as a topic alone would be an excellent subject for another story. Without a doubt. She was my mentor and meant so much to me. Subscribe to my Substack so you don’t miss a thing.
The fabulous booking agent rushed us out to his shiny black car and ushered us into the light, tan-colored leather backseat. Seatbelts in the 90s were unforgiving. You had to get it right the first time or you were basically in a straight jacket the entire drive.
A bored and inconvenienced looking woman, dressed in black, with fragile shoulders, tiny like a bird, sat in the passenger seat. She turned her head just halfway to take us in, three grubby ballet kids in the back seat.
“Hi!” I tried. I was always the one impulsively blurting words out. I smiled wide. I got the sense my braces offended her, and I shut my mouth for the rest of the car ride.
The booking agent and the irritated lady had an urgent, serious, rushing energy I associated, from somewhere in the back of my little pop-culture consciousness, with backstage at New York fashion week.
She turned around, without a word, and handed us each a black drawstring bag, pulled in, tied at the top. We drew the bags open together, and inside were funny little bumblebee costumes: black, yellow and white, leotards, with a stiff tulle tutu, and a snug glittering gold cap made to look like the cap on the perfume bottle itself.
After some front seat back and forth it was decided that we would wear our own pink ballet tights and leather slippers. The scuffed upness was good. Raw. Chich. They decided, nodding to each other in the front seat, in agreement.
“Hang on to your costumes.” She directed us, sternly, her eyes steadfast on the road ahead. We were on a mission, it felt. This was the same time Mission Impossible came out, 1996. Tom Cruise, when he was hot and not at all crazy.
Jerry McGuire Tom Cruise.
We had come through the rainbow arches of the Robin Williams tunnel, and the magnificent Golden Gate bridge was right there, wrapped in low fog, it’s burnt orange spires leading the way.
“Don’t lose anything.”
More instructions from the lady.
We nodded in the silent “yes ma’am,” way ballerinas learn to do when they’re very young.
They drove the three of us across the Golden Gate Bridge, through the impressive neighborhoods of Sea Cliff, to the Palace of the Legion of Honor. Rodin’s Thinker greeted us, grand and pensive, shrouded, low, like the bridge, in a cloak of fog and palatial columns.
There, we went into the building and down the marble stars to the basement of the Legion.
We settled into a small dressing room with a snug bank of four mirrors, tucked in a row, framed with bright light bulbs. The chairs were old fashioned classroom ones, orange and blue, with sturdy smooth worn plastic bottoms and chrome legs. I imagined the Opera Singers and Prima Ballerinas that sat before these same mirrors, transforming into parts: Coppelias, Black Swans, Lady MacBeths, and Bumblebees.
A big presentation was brewing on the other side of the wall, in a dark, expectant theater filled with crisp suits and pencil skirts and white collars.
We changed into our bee costumes and pulled the gold caps over our slick taught ballet buns. It was just us for a few minutes as we dressed and pulled the look together.
The door cracked then, in came ladies in black with radios on their hips, clip boards in hand, and instructions for us. They told us the plan:
The presentation was underway, the theater was dark and a large screen at the middle of the stage was projecting the power point launch presentation. The house lights were down, and the room was hushed and focused on the presenters and the screen on the stage.
Our job was to burst into the theater in the middle of the PowerPoint presentation, and surprise the audience. The seats were filled with buyers for Nordstrom, and Sephora, and Neiman Marcus. As well as curious competitors from Prada, Chanel, and Dolce Gabbana. A few thousand, serious, sullen, skinny people—in expensive suits and lots of black.
We would run around the aisles of the theater, “ballet-like,” “bumblebee like.” The ad campaign for the fragrance, you see. Was black and yellow.
A classic combination. Not unlike coffee and penguins, or bucket hats and converse, if you ask me.
We should count to thirty in our heads, they instructed, slowly, then run back out the doors and exit at the back of the theater.
That was it.
We nodded. No problem. Ballet dancers all our lives, we had zero trouble following these simple directions. The ladies in black seemed pleased we were easy to work with. They chatted a moment, then one made a request through the radio on her hip. Within seconds the Hugh Grant hair, capri paint wearing man from earlier in the day was back.
He handed us each a thick, glossy gift bag with gold rope chord-like handles. Inside each bag were three large rectangular boxes of Dolce Vita by Dior, wrapped in perfect folded cellophane. For our moms or whatever, he said with a smile and a wink. He then pulled out a little tube of red lipstick from his shirt pocket and held it up to his nose, thinking, while he stared us down. He showed us, with his own mouth, how to relax our lips just so, so he could apply the lipstick.
Like this, he demonstrated.
We copied him, and made our mouths look like his.
He blotted the fragrant red creamy lipstick on our lips one at a time. He gestured to his colleague, and she rushed over to followed behind with a folded tissue, instructing us to blot our lips together to smudge the lipstick just so. They both stepped back then and admired their work.
That’s it, they agreed, like satisfied painters.
We we’re ready.
I remember the feel of the broad metal theater door resting on my quivering palms as I prepared myself, on the balls of my feet, to burst through the heavy door. I looked left and right to my fellow ballerinas, waiting together for our cue. Grand Adagio was definitely over by then back in San Rafael. Phew.
As far as Dolce Vita by Dior, the bottle was my absolute favorite part of the product. The design, the colors, the competing textures, its dimension, and especially, the liquid light, reflecting with the glass. Dolce Vita, “life is sweet.”
They took a few photos of us. I think. None survived, and I’m very fine with that.
I was much too distracted with counting to thirty in my head to notice much of the crowd’s reaction, although I can recall glimmers of smiling teeth, and I remember feeling a low rumble of chucking through the theater carpet up my slippered feet.
We thought the caps we’re hideous, but we knew that same-old Saturday was special. Twenty-five years later, I believe that Dolce Vita by Dior was absolutely right, life is sweet.
Juliana Dhond