Tomorrow is our big bash in Yokosuka : all kinds of people coming- new friends, old friends (how nice it would be if some of you could also just turn up and introduce yourselves after all of these years); drag queens, pole dancers, performance art, a mix of djs, we are going all out (even though I can barely walk…)
I suppose I can at least try and smell nice though …. a question I have been meaning to put to you on here for weeks but just been too busy ….
I have considered all manner of fragrancing, from super soapy to white floral – I still haven’t told you my Tuberose Story, when I wore DSH Tubereuse with a natural tuberose oil in Shinjuku ( as Burning Bush) and had by far the most intense night of perfumed compliments ever – people stopping me on the street, screaming with joy (literally), but that doesn’t feel right for tomorrow. The forecast is cloudy / rainy / steamy. It is going to be a long day. Nothing too aldehydic/ poetic/ fragile/ tragic. But then nothing too ‘fresh’ and tedious either – I don’t want to smell like a mindless dullard.
I was going to ask for your advice but, wrong though it might be, I now THINK I am going to be wearing 60’s Shalimar edt ( just because… if it works in all the air conditioning, just some on the body, it could be gorgeous), layered with lashings of the ginger ambered sexiness of original Gucci Envy For Men. Probably too much. I may well reek. but Don’t hold it against me. I just can’t help it.
We went to Kamakura yesterday to meet a new perfume friend and I decided on Patou “1000” parfum. This was a rare decision on my part, as I usually consider ‘Mille’ more of a precious object to enjoy looking at on display than to wear – Jean Kerleo’s elegiacally elegant masterpiece is both effortless and very emotionally involving; an ingenious and deeply interwoven, rich, oily tincture of earthy sandalwood, civet, patchouli, osmanthus and violet, with other, higher green notes of rose and coriander that can feel more like ‘high jewellery’ than mere fragrance. It is quite a lot.
And yet we found ourselves broaching some quite heavy and intense personal subjects, and having this perfume just there in my background made me feel, paradoxically., rather grounded and ‘inside myself’ and yet at the same time confidently open. I enjoyed the experience immensely and wish now that I had more left.
While rather sharp and peculiar at the offset ( on the bus, someone was sneezing and d said to me blimey you smell strong… what is it ?
“Jean Patou 1000”
“It’s very vintage, extremely soapy’
I myself was rather enjoying its stark anachronism and weird, obvious beauty. There is nothing else like Patou, especially in this vintage parfum, and the dirty sandalwood/ violet osmanthus of the finish, still lingering on my shirt very keenly today, is simply sublime. 1000 is a scent that questions but doesn’t answer, leaving you somewhere in the chasm between reality and the abstraction of aesthetics. Unspoken , but expressed ; the antithesis of vulgarity.
This photo was taken last Saturday at a Vietnamese place in Yokohama : D met me after work having done posters at Kinko’s for our upcoming mega party Featureless Void in Yokosuka next week – it’s going to be mayhem I tell you, though our actual 30th anniversary is tomorrow, and fittingly, we haven’t even decided what we are going to do yet ( spur of the moment spontaneity is one of the many things that I most love about him ).
This photo is my parents at my aunt and uncle’s 63rd anniversary celebration last week. I put this in because it is entirely relevant : there is no difference whatsoever : at the top of this post you see a couple; below you see two more. They have all had their ups and downs, their highs and their lows, but something – love, presumably – has kept them together.
With the horrible, threatening-feeling rise of prejudice and homophobia that is tangible in the world right now – existential in scope – I feel that this is a point very definitely worth making.
But tomorrow it won’t really make any difference. We will be off somewhere – no idea where yet, but the weather is supposed to be lovely – just having a good time.
If we cast our minds back to the year 1899, Claude Debussy was in the process of publishing his Suite Pour Le Piano, Queen Victoria was still on the throne; Spanish rule had just ended in Cuba( Guerlain had created Dix Pétales De Roses. Houbigant first sold its Coeur De Jeannette this year, its legendary moss lavender, Fougère Royale, debuting seven years before in the year 1882. Guerlain, of course, had its famously still in production animalic herb-lavender Jicky (1889). Yet Roger Et Gallet, a French perfume house that continues to diligently produce fine quality and inexpensive fragrances somewhat under the radar, also made an enduring, classic lavender in this time period- Lavande Royale – possibly my favourite of all lavender scents, an ingenuous blend which disappeared from view for a long while and which I was delighted to find back on the market last week when I visitied the Roger Et Gallet boutique in Sogo, Yokohama.
Understated, a little brooding… refined, perhaps a tad dour… but at the same time elegant and lightheartedly refreshing, the errant tension in the lovely Lavande Royale comes from the deep contrast between a fresh bergamot/mandarin very low key, clean and crisp central lavender, and a musky, darker cedar – the key note being a hint of nutmeg in the heart which gives an inimitable kick. Theoretically, I shouldn’t go for this perfume – I don’t really wear classic fougères of the oakmoss geranium type, nor do I really wear many lavenders: I like Caron’s Pour Un Homme quite a bit but don’t love it; enjoy Jicky on d, but not on myself; I loved Jean Jacques’ lavender at Harrods – exquisite – but it was astronomically expensive. Probably the only true lavender soliflore I have ever truly gone for was the much more affordable and still missed English Lavender by Yardley, which disastrously underwent probably the most shameful reformulation of any perfume in history – see my furious piece from 2016 entitled The Cruel Desecration Of Yardley English Lavender.
That pious lavender scent, though, was only, for me, a kind of cradling refuge – a back of the hand hair shirt solace for moments of extreme noise; it could never have been an every day scent. I just don’t have an adequately grave mien (nor enough freshly starched and laundered bonnets). Lavande Royale is exactly that – a day scent – which is why I love Roger & Gallet. I love the unpretentiousness of this house; the always ready to wearness of it all. In fact, I think If I could only have one scent for the rest of time, it might actually be the company’s original Vetyver, a cologne I adore (naturally discontinued, probably because I like it ) and which is now very hard to find: if I could I would get the biggest bottles of that scent possible, and use it lavishly post shower on a regular basis : a light, nondescript (even – for most people, really quite boring) fresh citrus vetiver- again, with a palpable nutmeg core, a note I am always drawn to – nothing exciting, but that for me personally, somehow just right : I feel completely natural in it. And how often can you honestly say that about the vast majority of perfumes, even those in your own collection?
The reason I had ventured into the Roger & Gallet shop in the first place last week in my lunch break was to check if they still had my summer staple Thé Vert, a bottle of which I buy every year (even though I am not entirely sure I even like it (!) – I would never really recommend this one to anyone else – a gassy, synthetically sharp green tea/yuzu/ ginger spritz I just buy because it is the only scent I feel cuts through the sheer slimesweat of Japanese August when I just feel continually gross at work and need security (the eventual sheen of green tea that it surrounds you with is relatively pleasant and I have been complimented on it ) – but looking for that one among the new releases such as Feuille De Thé I certainly wasn’t expecting to see the name that suddenly stood before my eyes on the repackaged bottles of Lavande Royale that were newly and unexpectedly on display: my heart leapt a beat.
I hadn’t smelled this scent for thirty years or more. Filed into the ‘pleasant memories of the past’ area of my smell brain. I know I used to sometimes buy the 200ml bottles from posh pharmacies when I lived in London – it was cheap, and it always soothed me somehow (now relaunched as a ‘wellbeing’ eau, the onpointness of the name slightly irritating (the “Wellness” ‘phenomenon; …. shudder) but at least it is true; Lavande Royale was always the ultimate soft cardigan on a slightly cold and grey afternoon; a rudder in the urban eddy.
some lavender at the bus stop yesterday
I wondered : would the perfume still be the same? Or would it be a completely different scent? If not, why would they bring back a template that is not quite ‘relevant’ to the times – older than old school (I wonder what the original nineteenth century version was like?).
I had to know. And spraying Lavande Royale generously, I recognized the same signature note arrangement immediately – as you would when hugging an old friend: I was suddenly taken right back to my mid twenties. Possibly a little more concentrated, a tad harder maybe, not quite as gentle, a little too ‘fine tuned’ but in essence, the same entity. Just like hugging an old friend you haven’t seen in ages – a tender moment. I now can’t wait to go back and get a bottle, as well as some of the always pleasurable soaps.
I used to sometimes hide behind firs and conifers in the moonlight -even in our front garden – and take a long, drunken teenage piss after the pub. Picking off the needles with the other hand to crush and release the scent in the night air,there is a certain sense of liberation and intimacy for me associated with light green cones and evergreens…………..; for a few opening seconds when smelling this scent I was taken to a different, new but strangely familiar place; able to imagine the immediate revitalization of holiday on the ‘riviera’ – the light and shade; of careless time spent in the brand new environs of the great beckoning outdiors.
In Francis Kurkdijian’s first work for the house as resident perfumer, there is a lift. An immediate sense of city respite. Yet despite the energy that is present in the perfume (you don’t just throw the scent strip away but go back to smelling it at least a few more times, it has a certain life of its own), for me, I am pretty sure that a gradual lassitude would quickly creep in if I were to wear Dioriviera. In the same way that the ingenious Baccarat Rouge gets snagged on one incessant (stark and fuzzily deceptively simplistic) theme of saffron, jasmine and burnt amber; impeccable, erotic, but grating, the very fixed and linear structure of the fig/rose/coniferous ‘green’notes’ of this light getaway scent – fresh and potentially quite sexy; pared down and intricately interlocked – in truth, just have me yearning for real nature. Actual nature.
A man passed by me in the station – thirties. vaguely fashionable – and the sour, marmite -like smear of artificial oud he left on the air around him as he passed through the ticket gate, startled me out of whatever afternoon daydream I was marinating in and made me realize just how rare it is to smell this kind of base accord in Japan; that western fragrance tropes have very mercifully failed to permeate the market.
Usually, ikebana flower arrangements are very controlled. Staid, respectable, but often beautiful, even in municipal settings such as train stations.
This overpreponderance of very pungent, thrown together, yellow and white lilies I discovered near the escalators, seemed rather unruly- a plentiful offload of flowers seemingly displayed without any obvious rhyme or reason.
What fascinated me was the SMELL: sealed off behind glass, what would be deathly and nauseating inside the sweltering wooden frame was, for the casual passerby, fanned out in measured installments : a dense, long reaching muffle that descended on your consciousness almost without your realizing, like a slow, silent cacophony of trombones on mute
We were drowned in a deluge for a couple of miserable days, sodden and waterlogged. But the sun has come out again now and I am ready for big, honest blooms with no fuss.
These lovelies from SMN will do the trick. I like all three of these traditionalist, but unbound, flower colognes- all estival ease and no pretence (and in gorgeous glass-frosted bottles) : a collection tuat I discovered for the first time the other day at the Santa Maria Novella concession in Yokohama.
ROSA GARDENIA
As though you wearing a light talcum rose with a pretty top-up of Chanel Gardénia : nothing tropical or fungal plumeria, but nothing dainty or twee either : this is musky and full blown with rose de mai and almond blossom (I do like Penhaligons’ violet-tinged Gardenia also, but it is sometimes a little self-consciously clematis-cleaved English summer cottage). The unabashed Italianate romanticism is well judged here, tremulous and full, but still with the potential, certainly, to throw a bit of a wobbly.
ROSA NOVELLA
Far more sombre and solemn – a rose patchouli sunk delicately into itself as an Italian garden – for days, perhaps spent wandering the weeping angels at the foreigners’ cemetery in Testaccio, I want to try this on skin, properly, for the duration, to see where it leads me.
FRESIA
Fresia made me grin out loud. The young woman at Maria Novella smiled watching me smile. A powdery dose of pure positivity, this is not the lemony sherbet variety of keening freesias on the stem but a full bouquet guarding the entrance of the bathroom at an expensive old boutique hotel in the heart of Florence :soap, soap, and more soap (which I love). With an inherent promise of compressed floral freshness, this sudsy caprice is a beneficent delight.
