The Clubman behind Clubman Pinaud
If you’ve ever walked into a club locker room and found the same old set of toiletries—particularly aftershave, hair tonic, and talcum powder, with a dandy-like frenchman standing with a slight twist in his hips and a cane, and wondered what it was all about, you’ve come to the right place.
Clubman Pinaud is perhaps one of the few things in clubland that owes its descent not to the British, but, rather, to the French. Founded by Édouard Pinaud (1810–68), who hailed from Abbeville, in the north of France, Clubman began as a Parisian perfumery in 1830.
By the time the 1855 Paris Exposition rolled around, Pinaud found himself as one of Paris’ premier perfumers, and, having sufficiently impressed Queen Victoria, earned a royal warrant to supply perfume to the house of Windsor. The French emperor Napoleon III followed not too long after, and Pinaud became the perfumer to English and French royalty.
While Pinaud first sold his products in the United States in the mid-1840s, as evidenced by an ad in the Hartford Courant of Hartford, Connecticut, by the 1870s Pinaud established himself in New York City with offices and an agent.
Pinaud’s eponymous products are so successful that in 1903, the firm built an eleven-story American headquarters a block away from Union Square in Manhattan, right on Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, now home to the School of Visual Arts. Today, Clubman Pinaud is owned by American International Industries, a cosmetics manufacturer based out of Commerce, California.