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subscribe to style file blog via RSSNina Ricci’s Secret Weapon: Florrie Arnold
July 16, 2010 2:30 pm
In September, Puig will launch L’Elixir, the latest addition to Nina Ricci’s portfolio of fragrances. The sweetness of the scent seems targeted at a much younger audience than the one for, say, Ricci’s classic L’Air du Temps. So does the fairy-tale marketing. But the princess in this particular fairy tale is another story altogether. Some whiz at Puig had the genius to hire 21-year-old London popstrel Florrie Arnold (pictured, in Versus) as the face of L’Elixir. She was formerly in-house drummer for Xenomania, the star-making machine of British pop (Kylie, Girls Aloud, Cher!), and she still picks up sticks in her live performances. Girl drummers make a small but perfectly formed subspecies in music history, from the Honeycombs’ Honey Lantree and the Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker to the Shaggs and Sheila E., though it’s scarcely Florrie’s percussive skills that have inveigled the input of cultural barometers like Xenomania’s Brian Higgins and Ponystep’s Richard Mortimer. In L’Elixir’s ad, she sings Blondie’s “Sunday Girl,” and there was indeed something of Debbie Harry’s pure pop pedigree in her shtick when she performed a showcase for Nina Ricci in West London yesterday. (Her band was done up like the cover of Blondie’s Parallel Lines, too.) But it was her coltish Carmen Kass gorgeousness that commanded the room. Though she was playing to a captive audience of a few dozen journalists, she had a similarly mesmerizing effect on the hundreds she performed to in Berlin’s Panorama Bar three weeks ago during Gay Pride. Florrie went out an ingenue, she came back a star. That’s a true pop fairy tale.
tags: Florrie Arnold, L'Elixir, Nina Ricci
