Exhibition Design for Fragrance and Form
This perfume exhibition made bottles and packaging the real subject.
Research, curatorship, and exhibition design for a survey of Portuguese and international perfume culture, centered on Afonso Oliveira’s collection. The exhibition uses illustrated timelines, archival advertising, material displays, scent samples, and intimate bottle-display tunnels to connect perfume packaging with the histories of glassmaking and fragrance.
Insights
- The core premise, from Andrew Howard, is that the exhibition is not about making perfume but about how an invisible scent becomes a designed, marketable object through bottles, packaging, advertising, and display.
- Afonso Oliveira’s collection holds more than 5,300 bottles. The exhibition selected 260 Portuguese and 240 international bottles, alongside a Lalique group and 230 rice-powder boxes and soap packages.
- To handle the mismatch between tiny objects and a 1,200-square-metre gallery, Howard and Catarina Vieira designed controlled-light display tunnels that isolate the bottles and create a more intimate viewing sequence.
- The research was anchored in material history, with one illustrated timeline tracing Portuguese glassmaking back to 1528 and Fábrica de Vidro do Cóvo, and another mapping Portuguese perfume brands from the mid-19th century through the interwar years and into the 1980s.
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