Flights of Flacons

As an antiques dealer in Los Angeles during the ‘60s, Ken Leach was “lucky enough to get into the homes of movie stars and film directors who were passing on or moving.” Inside those handsome houses, he saw something that was to change his life.

“There was always a dressing table filled with beautiful commercial perfume bottles,” says Leach, now a New York-based dealer and recognized authority on the subject. Maybe, he muses, it was a flashback to his childhood, when someone was always saying, “Don’t touch.”

He and business partner Richard Peters not only touched, they started buying, selling and collecting some of those bottles. Over the years, they also collected more than 1,300 prize pieces, all featured--together with some borrowed bottles and boxes--in Leach’s recently published “Perfume Presentation: 100 Years of Artistry” (Kres Publishing Inc.).

The lavish $165 guide for collectors and connoisseurs is available only from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it is kept in a locked glass case, and from Gallery No. 47, Leach and Peters’ Manhattan antiques haven.

“We set out 15 years ago to put together the most comprehensive collection possible,” says Leach, a collection through which designers and manufacturers could “see their past and, sometimes, their future.” The book evolved from there.

Leach, in Pasadena recently for his first West Coast book signing, collects only from 1900 to 1960--the golden years of perfume bottles when exquisite crystal creations were inspired by art forms of the day.

Ultimately, production costs took their toll on bottle design, he writes, as did the rise of the “youth culture,” the demise of couture dressing and the introduction of the commercial atomizer, which eliminated the need for those incredible flights-of-fantasy stoppers.

For years, Leach says, he considered the end of the ‘50s “basically the end of beautiful packaging,” but no longer: “Happily, I find the industry is looking to the past.”

Encouraging signs include limited edition reissues from famous perfumers including Dior, Caron, Jean Patou and Guerlain. “Now these are collectible,” Leach says of the reissues, which include such reincarnations as 1992 and ’94 Diorissimo bottles. Like the ’56 original, the Diorissimo is of Baccarat crystal set in a bronze base, with a flourish of bronze flowers atop the stopper.

But there is one major difference: The limited edition Diorissimo re-creations, no longer available, sold for $4,600. The original, featured on the dust jacket of Leach’s book, fetches only $2,500.

“Go figure,” he says, likening perfume bottle collecting to playing the stock market. But he does have a reissue story with a different ending.

In 1985, exerting the kind of pressure Leach says he would like to see coming from consumers and others, he and Peters were instrumental in convincing Jean Patou to reissue Normandie--the scent created only as a memento for first-class passengers on the liner’s 1935 maiden voyage--with an identical chrome ship and Brosse glass bottle.

“We had to guarantee we would buy 200 and they would make only a thousand,” Leach says. At $500 each, the pieces were snapped up in his gallery. Compared to the original--valued at $5,500 on the collectors’ market--they were considered bargains. For collectors who missed out, Leach says, there are 30 Normandies for sale in the United States, available from him by special order.

Last Christmas, when Guerlain resurrected its 1914 Parfum des Champs Elysees--complete with a turtle-shaped Baccarat bottle Leach calls extraordinary--the $1,000 limited edition pieces were sellouts. Proving once again, Leach says, that consumers have not lost their eye or appetite for exquisite perfume packaging.

They will be able to indulge that appetite again in September, Leach notes, with a planned reissue of the 1935 Lucien LeLong fragrance, Indiscret. It is to be launched at Bergdorf Goodman in a new, still-secret bottle by New York packaging designer Marc Rosen, praised by Leach as “a driving force in the industry.”

Though not in his book, Revlon’s 1994 Head Over Heels bottle wins plaudits from Leach for its “very clever” top--a pair of up-turned legs jutting up from a black skirt. He also applauds Elizabeth Taylor’s 1991 White Diamonds bottle with bow-shaped stopper, created by New York designer Susan Wacker.

“You are attracted to it. You want to touch it, to try it. And you just naturally aren’t going to throw it away because it’s too pretty.” Keep the box, too, he advises--it increases the value of a collectible.

When he can find a giant White Diamonds factice, or display bottle, it goes for $1,000 in his gallery--and, he says, he knows dealers who get $2,000.

Since the late 1980s, when investors--many of them Japanese--inflated the perfume bottle market, prices have stabilized somewhat. Leach winces at the prospect that his book will drive prices up “because it gives validation to the market.”

On the other hand, he says, people may read the book and realize they have real treasures sitting on their dressing tables. “Bottles are going to come out of the woodwork,” he says. “They already have.”

Leach, for whom these endangered art forms have become both passion and profession, sees the vintage bottles and boxes as “the rescued remains of commercial packaging. They were meant to be thrown away. Luckily, people saw the beauty of them and kept them.”

* Leach will be at Nordstrom in South Coast Plaza in November--the date has not been set--for a book signing.