Monthly Archives: June 2013

Kenzo is a fashion house I can’t help but enjoy: a (privileged, expensive) refuge from reality that combines a precise, childlike Japanese aesthetic with a vivid, jungled, ‘ethnic’ spectrum: an idealized,  Franco-Japponic, rainforest-batik world of colour. On occasion I go to their shop in Aoyama, Tokyo, just for a quick Kenzo fix ( love how they print flowers), and to consider the possibility of buying one of their leafy, kookaburra neckties. Eye-catching, lush, is the way I would describe the brand.

There is also something quite artificial about Kenzo: it’s ‘le monde est beau’ mantra, its smooth, plastic, futuristic packaging; those poppies, ubiquitous, trapped in their eye-brimming plastic towers – but somehow, on the whole, it all works. Many of the perfumes in Kenzo’s range, whether discontinued or not (Le Tigre, L’Elephant, Kashâya, Parfum D’Eté) are good: pleasing little concepts of scent and visuals that are very neatly, appealingly, packaged. 

Like the magnificent Kenzo Pour Homme (one of my favourite summer fragrances of all time), Kenzo Summer is deliciously evocative of this season, and on first spray brought back to me a delirious myriad of photographic images of childhood holidays, flashing by in my mind in rapid, emotive succession: the unfamiliar yet comforting scent of a rented chalet’s bedclothes next to sunkissed skin after a day by the sea: my father asleep on a beach towel in the evening sun; flickering white and yellow light behind closed eyes as the waves crash on the shore and you slumber, beneficently, in that oceanic, dreamy limbo-land between sandy, sun-lidded consciousness, and shaded, cavernous more watery underworlds.  

I don’t know how the perfumer (Alberto Morillas) achieved this estival feat, but it is all really rather clever. While the scent does contain an odd jarring synthetic, soapy note initially, this can be quickly forgiven, as from the start the scent is so extraordinarily cheering; the loveliest, yellowest, looming mimosa flowers cut through with a bladed breeze of leaf-green grass;  a skin-caressing scent of sweet almond milk and sunscreen that softens, then, to a delicious, lingering, note of airy, care-free, sun-filled afternoons.

With its acerbic fuselage of sharp, gleaming galbanum; bergamot, leaf notes and blue hyacinth; an unsentimental floral heart of narcissus and cassia, and a dry, resinous, woody base, Silences is both sexed and restrained;  attractive and scary, an almost callous scent, bitchy even, despite its cool, midnight vulnerability.

I always imagined Silences on a jaded Japanese ‘hostess’ of the eighties, reclining on the black velour banquette of a nightclub in Ginza, scrutinizing you as you pass her doorway, eyes meeting yours, not shrinking from your gaze. A shrewd, black cat on the surface; in reality nervous, tender, wanting you to look deeper.

This is the house of Jacomo’s keeper, its classic, and is still sold in France, or at least it was the last time I was in Paris. Often compared to Chanel N°19, another angular, no-nonsense, green-woody floral, I find that the Chanel – more powdery, complex and beautiful ultimately – wilts nonetheless in the presence of Silences, which is more bolstered, pared-down, eye-on-the-game.

Curiously affecting on the right person, Silences, with its minimalist, verdant breaths of flowers and resin, its shiver of night garden, catches your brain with a wordless immediacy: digs her talons in with a simple, mesmerizing chord structure;  fixes you with her stare;  kisses you, and refuses to let go.

In the ‘notorious’ district of Shinjuku Nichome there are small, intimate underground venues that stage the most elaborate and effective Tokyo drag. In a recent springtime revue there were two creatures of exquisite, quivering femininity:  with poignance in his generous figure and high shoes, the star and his partner entered, having shivered outside in the cold until the right moment had come;  delicate ladies in their white and red polka satin sixties dresses,  the air filled with a beautiful cotton white lightness of clean fresh spring petals, that, in the context ( fat, hairy men ) was troubling – yet touchingly right.

At the Shinagawa fleamarket the next day, by some strange coincidence I was astonished to come across a graceful perfume that seemed to possess this exact same quality, almost as if this had been the perfume of the night before (a scent I hadn’t been able to identify) : the little known, and slightly difficult to find, E Coudray’s Camélia Iris. This perfume (originally from 1946) is a curiously haunting spring floral, with a delicate whiff of confectionery:  virginal; evasive, like a celestial magnolia soap.

The most exciting thing on childhood summer holidays was our enthusiastic exploring of the dunes. I loved the sea and the beach, the sun in my eyes, and especially swimming underwater, but there was always something, up close in the strange roots of broom and other beach plants; dampened, insect-laden, away from the dry ease of the sand granules, that always perturbed, drew my brother and I in; into those dark, cool, salinated shadows. The strange, tunnelled canopies where we would stop arguing for a while and just crawl along together, stopping to examine this and that, our senses and imaginations stimulated.

As soon as I sprayed on Eau de Moheli by Diptyque, it felt very familiar to me, and I immediately got some of this feeling again. A fresh, commercial summer floral it may be, but there is also something quite potently tropical there (despite that freshness); the haze of the midday sun atop the dunes, the plants, alive and drinking in sun, just being…

The idea behind Eau de Moheli was apparently to encapsulate the whole ylang ylang tree and its surroundings; an in situ, ‘solar’ take by perfumer Olivier Pecheaux:  the scented vibrations of the tree and its roots; the leaves and the flowers, and the scent, to me at least, is not ylangishly identifiable straight way (it is certainly not a ylang ylang soliflore).

Yes, there is ylang, and orange blossom perhaps, but all is overlayered with a fuzzy, peppery, gingery incense accord that twists the usual ylang profile into something slightly more savoury, arboreal. The result is quite pleasant, and  it immediately pressed my mental ‘like’ button with no hesitation, a citrussy cologne-like brightness chiming nicely with its uplifting island florality. It is familiar (a ylang-ish Chasse Aux Papillions, perhaps, if slightly more feral), and certainly nothing spectacular, but it is also, on a hot summer’s day, enjoyable, comforting.  It is the kind of perfume I would put on early on a hot summer’s morning: that shimmering, unfurling, time, early, before the heat sets in, when you feel the promise of the day, the flowers about to rise.