NEW YORK, NY.- Perfumes have always trafficked in the elusive and the taboo. And since nothing could be more elusive than money, particularly in our current economic downturn, we’ve made cash the inspiration and focus for the latest in the Bond No. 9 series of collectible Andy Warhol eaux de parfum. Appearing on both sides of the bottle is an image of one of Warhol’s iconic subjects, the almighty dollar sign created by Warhol in 1981, while inside is a fittingly rich and beckoning scent we’ve named Andy Warhol Success is a Job in New York. Prophetically, Warhol’s first assignment in the ’50s as an illustrator was for a Glamour magazine article entitled “Success is a Job in New York.” The title was later used for a book about Warhol’s early career. Through hard work and leveraging his immense talent as a draftsman, Andy Warhol would become one of the most successful commercial artists in New York City thus laying the foundation to become one of the most important fine artists of the 20th century.
Throughout his career, Warhol was fascinated with the connections between art and money. In the ’60s, he painted Pop Art canvases with grids of banknotes, and he stuffed dollar bills into soup cans. Then in the early ’80s, just as Reaganomics and Dynasty got under way and paintings became consumer items, he isolated the image of the dollar sign sinuous yet with that ominous slash down the center in a series of silk-screened “portraits.”