Monthly Archives: August 2017

I discovered the full range of Martin Margiela fragrances yesterday.  At Ginza’s soulless, frigid, testosterone-free men’s fashion emporium, Hankyu – where blood-sucked succubi a la mode prowl stone-faced in search of wallet-decimating garments that they believe will restore some meaning to their vapid and meaningless lives.

This is the coldest, most reticent service in the world; my corpuscles filling up with antifreeze as we attempted to tolerate a miserable void of consumerism and slavish adherence to fashion codes, the modish; observing the gaunt and fleshless, hollow-eyed figures, their fine-boned fingers inexorably magnetized towards distorted, ripped and molecularly rewritten clothing that will only succeed in making them look like brainwashed, human-hating morons.

I despise this philosophically heinous snobbery; this pointless veneration of imported European luxury, where perfume bottles are handled as if they were holy religious relics or priceless works of art, where you can’t even spray or smell them without feeling that you are somehow impinging on the ‘dignity’ of the passionless fuckwits at the counter, whose passive-aggressive, bottomless reserves of froideur make you feel that not only should you not be requesting paper strips to test what seems like quite a fun series of scents – ‘replicas’ of actual experiences – Martin Margiela instead uses ribbons and his ‘assistant’ really wasn’t dispensing with them freely – but that they would really rather that you had actually backed away completely from their customer-repelling counters in the first place.

And this after I had just bought Duncan a t-shirt from one of the fashiony counters nearby! Wowee. But no. This was not enough. We obviously didn’t look right, we weren’t the idealized demographic, we weren’t ghosts out prostituting our souls for the sake of a ‘fashion moment’, and so these pallid, sexless, ageist and racist morbidly dull fashionistas merely treated us as though we were scum queen undesirables that they would just instead ignore.

It’s a real shame, as I quite liked the look and smell of some of these perfumes. Because although they are not cheap, in niche terms, compared to the Tom Ford concession one floor down below, for example, where a young, purse-lipped, very soignee female assistant with a sphinx- like unblinking demeanor ( from the huge pole up her ass) just about let us sample the rest of the Vert collection – all good, but Vert Boheme is still definitely my favourite –  these Margielas were, from some perspectives, relatively reasonably priced.

Beachwalk, a salty, sunscreen holographic olfactory apparition that I think is possibly the best of this type, is a scent I would consider buying if I can avoid throwing my drink in the face of the deathly, paste-faced, thin-moustachioed sales assistant while doing so; Lipstick On the kind of cool, powdered, earthy iris I love with some sweeter, heliotrope facets – I wanted to get to know it more. Others seemed quite interesting too, but I am afraid the gut-clenching over-seriousness and reverential gravitas of the place was becoming so intolerable – you could practically hear the creature’s inner, silent sighs as we had the gall to request more fashion ribbons – that I had to leave.

Fuck Hankyu.

I hope you go under.

( our own vaguely Bohemian botanical balcony..)

I first met Dariush Alavi ( aka Persolaise ) at the Jasmine Awards in London. We clicked immediately and met up for a drink shortly afterwards where we exchanged life stories, perfume ephemeralia and email addresses, later also discovering that we share three, major, passions : perfume, Madonna, and the cinema (and not necessarily in that order). Not often in accordance, either, but those fiery differences of opinion make for stimulating conversation and give new slants on various perspectives, from what are the best Madonna songs – we had a fantastic and rather joyous night of karaoke here the other night together with Duncan and the legendary Madame Persolaise); whether Martin Scorsese is as good as he is made out to be (he believes he is; I still have my doubts); to what niche perfume houses are soulless and overpriced (I am perhaps more cynical about a lot of them than he is) to a shared adoration of the classic Guerlains and Chanels and Diors – I gave him some immaculate Diorissimo esprit du parfum and cologne; a Joy vintage parfum in the classic black and red bottle and an extrait of Le Galion Snob because it shares the very same name as his book.

On their part, the Persolaises came laden with gifts. They had asked if there was anything that they could bring to Kitakamakura from the U.K. and I said Heinz baked beans – because I love and grew up with them and you can’t really get them here, plus, you know, any perfumes that you don’t need, samples and what not, never imagining that when they came down to our house for two nights after a few days in Tokyo that Dariush would be proffering up to my eagerly clasping hands full bottles of intriguing, extortionate niche, including Tom Ford’s Shanghai Lily and, from the more recent Private Collection of 2016 (scents I had not yet got round to smelling before), the delicately lush and entirely convincing, Vert Boheme.

Knowing my opinionated vociferousness and innate ease in speaking the truth (sometimes a social handicap, but basically a gift), Persolaise told me to just be honest if I were to review any of the ridiculously generous cache of valuable bottles that he had given me, and I will be. Two of them I am at best ambivalent about, the ouds and pure sandalwood are already safely stowed away in my perfume cabinets for potential future moments, but even though we clashed a little over Tom Ford, whose perfumes I often quite like but whose psychological depths and validity I often doubt ( he loves Tuscan Leather, Noir De Noir and Santal Blush; I like Jasmin Rouge, Grey Vetiver and Ombre De Hyacinth but have never bought a full bottle of any of them ), I have to say that the two Private Collections that he gave me were completely up my street.

The man is very detail oriented. A perfectionist, I would say, so I imagine that he must have carefully selected which perfumes he was willing to dispense with, mulling over properly which ones I was likely to enjoy, as a dusky, spiced, clove-studded carnation lily and a refreshingly green mandarin honeysuckle are just what the Narcissus ordered.

I had briefly smelled Shanghai Lily before somewhere at a department store in Tokyo, and had immediately formed a generally positive impression of it. Far more impressive than the dull and lacking Lys Fume, whose small sample bottle I sometimes use as an air freshener in the computer room upstairs, Shanghai Lily is a fully realized and genuinely atmospheric, warm ( yet dark) composition, veiled and vanillic, almost ghostly in its florality but still narcotically seductive. While the soft, woody, skin-huggy base is not quite as compelling as the almost cinematically vivid beginning of the perfume, as night lilies exhale their torpor on breaths of languid, almost melancholic spice, this is definitely a perfume that I will wear when my clove-studded cravings start tearing their heads come the Autumn and Winter.

Vert Boheme is perfect for this season, and I am drenched in the thing as I write this on my iPhone heading out for a day of scent researching in Ginza. I had of course read about this new quartet of 70’s inspired green perfumes and was rather interested to see how they had been executed, whether the perfumers involved had managed to capture the essence of the greener trend of four decades ago (No 19, Silences, Cristalle) yet transmogrify them successfully into a contemporary setting.

Judging from this particular perfume, they have. Vert Boheme has the basic odour template of the original Chanel Cristalle without its harsher metallicisms; rather it has the lush, dew dawn sunbeams of Annick Goutal’s lovely Eau De Camille ( 1983). The base, while not the heightened poetry of the finest perfumes, is still extremely pleasant: gentle, green, like the memories of lying in long grass. The top notes are alive and refreshing, a burst of mandarin and galbanum entwined with magnolia and freshly opened honeysuckle, not too chemicalized or overly strident, and the whole has a quietly elegant yet subtly passionate aspect to it that I am finding extremely enjoyable. I think I, or rather Persolaise, might have found my scent for the rest of this summer.