prfm01

Who's nose hasn't had an encounter with a deck that has been kept in a moist place for too long? Whenever we find a deck like that, we'll tell the seller either that "it stinks" or that "it has a fragrance". That depends: for us, common standard decks stink and rare nonstandard decks have a fragrance. Common nonstandard decks will at the best get a "this smells!"

But don't worry......the xpo here is not about these smelly decks. In this exposition we will show the nonstandard decks that were published by fashion companies that have a perfume line as well. These companies spend billions each year on advertising: TV clips and ads in almost every magazine take up most of that money. But fortunately for us, some of the big brand names haven't discarded this old advertising method and have published a deck of playing cards too. There are a good number of standard advertising decks for fashion labels or perfume brands to be found, but the number of nonstandard decks isn't that big.
These are the ones that we have in our collection at this moment........................

This colorful deck was published by LANVIN.

Unfortunately there is little documentation about this deck and the box doesn't reveal any info either.

So the only thing we can say about it, is that it was published in 1994 and that the designs were done by Joseph Hilton McConnico. His signature is on the box and back of the cards.

Each suit has a different background color. The courts seem to be double imaged, but each side is different, in design as well as in coloring.

Parts of the design go across the outline. The use of different sort of leaves per suit colour has been done before. But there seems to be an ethnical angle here too, that could point to a 4 continent design.

The Clubs would suggest a European origin with the monocle's and -comedia del'arte alike- masks.

The Hearts show a leave that could be from a ginko tree, representing....Asia?

On the Spades one side of the faces is black, but the whole design points more to a Moorish, Islamic origin. The black feather on the Jack even looks like an Arabian sword.

The Diamonds strongly suggest a red-skin, Indian origin, referring to the Americas.

But all this is speculation. There's no explaining leaflet with the double deck.

Each of the number cards shows the number of leaves that goes with the suit's denomination. All the Aces show a single leave.

The two jokers have a similar design. There's one with a black "joker" text too.