Ina Chadwick

My mother, a glamorous woman, started her life on New York’s Lower East Side in a tenement in a shared a bed with her four sisters. When she married for a third time she emerged into her own creation: the finery of an upwardly mobile Duchess all the way into Northeast Bronx. 

In 1954 she traveled internationally for three months with my father. She returned with an art history education, French mostly. She could recognize Louis the Fourteenths from Louis the Fifteenths. Sixteenth, too.

Immediately after she disembarked from the ship, I buried my little girl face in the folds of her new Haute Couture Paris fashion coat.  Wow! I was overwhelmed with a dose of a strange perfume.  She told me she’d followed a woman out of the elevator at the Ritz to ask the stranger the name of her scent: Replique.

When my mother died, I inherited lots of stuff-- the smell of Replique clung to everything.  Between my grief and astonishment that she could die so young, her lingering odors were dizzying, and equally intimidating as she was in their effect. I couldn’t have my own life if I kept her scent-infused fabrics.

This 2 X 2 filigree Victorian silver basket sat on her ornate footed glass perfume tray on her bureau. The gold funnel was used to transfer the expensive perfume from the bottle into an atomizer. 

It’s all banged up and misshapen now.  Perhaps if I keep it long enough I can conjure the best of my mother, a Renaissance woman birthed in 1911 into the tenement life from which several relatives never escaped.

The 1944 formula for Replique is no longer marketed. However, I discovered cults of scent experts who maintain websites for the rhapsodic nostalgia of perfumes like Replique.