7th November 2015 | Hoxton Hotel
Saturday 7th and Saturday 14th November 2015
Twentieth Century Time Travel.
Choose where you want to go... Drink cocktails at the captain's table on a 1930s ocean liner. Drive through the noir landscape of 1940s LA. Hitch a ride to Nepal on the 1960s hippie bus. Ten salons. Ten decades. You decide.
We've coralled the best authors and speakers to bring to life the ideas, the scenes, and the pop culture of an entire century. Then, experience your chosen decades through their scents, sounds and drinks.
Hosted in The Hoxton's stunning mid-century styled Apartment venue.
The Century is a Salon London co-production with Odette Toilette.
Buy tickets here - all of which include a free cocktail.
SATURDAY 7th NOVEMBER: PART ONE
It's a brave new century, and just like today, technology was transforming and upsetting society, from recorded film with sound, to flight, escalators and radio. Is it possible that we can experience for ourselves the shock and strangeness of its innovations as if for the first time? We will open our tour of the 20th Century by gawping in wonder at the tech of the year 1900, before Odette Toillete will explain how the synthesis of new molecules was changing the way our great grandparents smelt. Finally meet Dr Pam Cox, broadcaster and the writer of Shop Girls, to understand how our desire for mass production and freedom of women led to the department store, and its fascinating relationship with 'The Wizard of Oz' as they staged lavish fantastical narratives all in the service of commerce.
10.30am-11.30am, Sat 7th November BOOK TICKETS
4.00pm-5.00pm SATURDAY 14th NOVEMBER: PART TWO 'My dining room looked out over Frank Zappa's duck pond' - Joni Mitchell.
Ever got hysterical at something you saw on stage? Not even that matinee of Joseph when you were eight? We take in this decade through the shock of live performance as Mark Bowden, resident composer with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, takes us deep into Stravinsky's ballet, The Rite of Spring, by inhabiting its disturbing rhythm. Historian and author of Great War Britain Lucinda Gosling tells an alternative story of the decade through its obsession with theatrical fancy dress costumes. And, exploring the vogue for scented performances, we're recreating a stage show of 1915 which invited actors to play an embodied emotion, from lust to greed and hate, using their sense of smell. We'll have to find out whether Eau de Lust works its magic on the day.
11.45am-12.45pm, Sat 7th November BOOK TICKETS
We will begin by taking a Salon London style lateral look at the great works of the 1920s and how they reflect the decade's cultural concerns and obsessions in the first ever era of mass media. Then we take an imaginative walk through the city streets with a architect Mellis Haward of Archio to understand how modernism can be understood through five seminal houses of the 1920s. Finally Odette Toilette takes us into an Upper East Side apartment to recreate the Jazz Age craze for 'perfume reading', channelling the bizarre work of White Russians exiled in New York like Princess Tourkestanoff, Prince Matchabelli and his love Norina.
1.30pm-2.30pm, Sat 7th November BOOK TICKETS 
Can you imagine a time when the enjoyment of travelling began the minute you began your journey? No, neither could we, but we'd like to. That's why we've invited to speak the renowned Ocean Liner expert and author of Art Deco goes to Sea, Tony Cooke, to explain the design of the original, and majestic UK to US shuttles. Tony will help us to see these vessels anew, and understand how the philosophy behind their design informed and imposed the life of the Riviera set at sea, while historian Lucinda Gosling explains exactly what those high-rollers got up to as they rode the Atlantic waves. Lizzie will share how this transatlantic travel and the lure of the tropics altered the perfume fashions. All aboard.
2.45pm-3.45pm, Sat 7th November BOOK TICKETS 
Los Angeles: both City of Angels, and City of Noir. But just what was it like to inhabit this place which had erupted out of the desert to become both the world's fastest growing metropolis, and one of the world's most examined? The Edinburgh University School of Art academic, writer of Sex and Buildings, and LA obsessive Richard J Williams invites us to understand how the development of the city in the 40s could lead to nothing but urban alienation and vice. To help us recover, Times drinks columnist and author of Ten Cocktails Alice Lascelles gets us quaffing those cocktails whic tell stories of LA noir. And Odette Toilette moves us through Pasadena bungalows, seedy casinos and the back of a car boot to sniff out the scent of LA noir.
4.00pm-5.00pm, Sat 7th November BOOK TICKETS
As we forge ahead into the second half of the century, we ask the question 'Where do women find themselves in the post-war era.' Explore this complicated decade with the acclaimed social historian Virginia Nicholson, author of 'Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes' as she tracks the experiences of women during this controversial decade. Then before exploring the world of home entertainment, 1950s, style, with Professor Joe Moran, who wrote Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV? Finally Odette Toilette shares how the fifties mania for hypnosis and regression parties triggered by the infamous story of 'Bridey Murphy' can be tapped into through our sense of smell.
10.30am-11.30am, Sat 14th November BOOK TICKETS 
How did the Hippie movement begin? Cultural historian, and author of Stranger than you Can Imagine John Higgs talks us through influential counter-cultures and their leaders (Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson) whose work encouraged a generation (well, some of them) to shrug off their parents' aspirations and forge their own path towards the transcendental. Then, award-winning author of the Magic Bus Rory MacLean recreates life on the road to Nepal and Nirvana. Little remains of this particular 'trip' because only a heavy bread-head would try to film freedom and adventure on a Super 8. So Rory has painstakingly built a history of those first hippy visitors, those freedom loving westerners in mini skirts and flares who carried hope in their hearts and revolutionary ideas of peace. And of course you can't talk Hippies without touching on their Stink, so Odette Toilette will tour us through a smell safari of the trail in all its olfactory glory.
11.45am-12.45pm, Sat 14th November BOOK TICKETS 
Where feminism found its folk voice when Joni Mitchell picked up her guitar and inspired a million singer songwriters and Crosby, Stills and Nash kept the neighbours up with their all-night jam sessions. But what was life like in their much mythologised spiritual home, LA's Laurel Canyon? UCL music and culture academic (and ex-all girl punk band member) Dr Lucy O'Brien talks us through the politics of this time through the lyrics of the music floating out of the Santa Monica Mountains. We will then take a darker turn to examine the attraction of cults with LSE's Amanda van Eck who will explain the reasons why cults flourised, and what life inside them was like. Then eelax and enjoy the Pacific Ocean breeze as Lizzie shares the perfumes that captured both the energy of freedom and the commercialism of feminism.
1.30pm-2.30pm, Sat 14th November BOOK TICKETS
She's usually working to understand the minds of our most complex and challenging criminals. But today, Britain's leading forensic psychologist Kerry Daynes, turns her expertise to the divas of 1980s TV megabrands, Dynasty and Dallas - together with the era's seminal movies, and will decode their Body Language to show us how movement and gesture can tell a story of the decade. Our resident food historian leads a tour through the weird world of the 1980s haute restaurant scene: the dishes, deals, dalliances and dirt. And if that wasn't high rolling enough, Lizzie recreates the OTT drama of an eighties perfume launch party, put together with all the production razzmatazz of a blockbuster film.
2.45pm-3.45pm, Sat 14th November BOOK TICKETS 
As we reach the end of The Century our focus turns to the biggest party of all: Milennium Eve. Digital humanist and technological expert Dr Tom Chatfield, author of How to Thrive in a Digital Age, explains why and how Y2K fever swept the world, and how that missing digit in the code of the world's computers would signal in a new millennium-a-geddon. Then, top house music DJ Steve Vertigo will keep us calm by talking us through (and spinning on his wheels of steel) the huge house tracks that kept us churning up the dance floors as we slipped in to a new century. And remember the music charts? In ten minutes flat, Lizzie will take us through the Top 10 Saturday Night Scents that we spritzed on as we squared up towards our new century.
4.00pm-5.00pm, Sat 14th November BOOK TICKETS
