Blimey sometimes I forget just how posh Ginza is. Should I buy my jewels from Chopard, Cartier, Boucheron or Harry Winston? It troubles me. My dress from Vera Wang?
Ginza is a jewel in itself.
About to have lunch at a very fancy looking wagyu beef shabu shabu restaurant in the basement of the Tiffany building with Pissara Umavijani from Dusita Parfums – d was supposed to come as well but is ill in bed after some dodgy shumai dumplings we had from the convenience store Thursday night cue fainting and collapsing etc. I just realized it is in fact Saturday, not Sunday, but am too lazy and in a hurry to change the post
Apparently the first perfume to be officially approved by Alphonse Mucha, the Bohemian Art Nouveau artist must be doing very well at the grand age of 164. Forgive the sarcasm. I am always a little skeptical about brands basing their wares on the licensed names of artists – think Salvador Dali, Parfums Andy Warhol etc, the inspiration often runs thin, but this Tokyo based new house has opened its main shop in the Yurakucho district of Ginza, where we swooped in for a much needed hungover brunch at our favourite Chinese Dim Sum restaurant on Sunday, Kamonka Ten: I was quite intrigued by the look of the premises, and after nourishment we decided to take a quick peek.
The Mucha store is very Mucha. The Czech painter, whose flouncy decorative overstatement is a flourish of overstatement – or somewhat beautiful – depending on your perspective, is of course the design basis for everything in the shop, from postcards to soaps, hair oils, combs and other fancies as well as five fragrances and their ancillaries. In the state we were in, intense aromachemicals were not quite the mood, but I did rather take to the iris, particularly the soap, which gave me a rush of white marbled pleasure I remember feeling when I first smelled Crabtree & Evelyn’s lovely Jojoba.
Allergic to repetitiveness, be it visual, aural, olfactory, I get really bored of seeing classic paintings I have seen too many times before. Van Gogh irises and sunflowers: NO. Dali melting clocks: meh. The ‘new’ Warhol portrait print shirts that were hanging in the Comme Des Garcons Ginza branch – dull and uninspired. Tea mats with Mucha : yawn. But go deeper into any of these artists’ oeuvre and you can find surprises anew. I loved the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam and saw new works there, and therefore Vincent, from a different angle. The Dali retrospective we went to at the National Art Center in Tokyo many moons ago was SPECTACULAR – I was reborn. I can’t look at any more soup cans or Marilyns, but Andy Warhol too, when you dig deeper – I love his paintings of shoes and flowers, for example – can still stimulate. Art can become commercialized to the point of pasteurization: you become unseeing, tired. A bland exploitation. Sometimes you need a different context.
A rainy day in Prague, 1993. My friend Hilary and I were totally exhausted. Our flight from London had been delayed twelve hours. We had then had to make an emergency landing midway in the dangerously icy fog that we were passing through in Bratislava, and take a night bus for the rest of the journey. It was only a weekend trip, and we had lost half the time we would have there, and were a bit crestfallen seeing that we were doing it all on student budgets, but Francis Ford Coppola’s gorgeous, brilliantly hammy Bram Stoker’s Dracula had only come out the year before and was still deeply obsessing me, so while she slept, I was secretly spellbound in a moonlit thrill watchingr the landscape pass by vampirically all night, another eight or nine hours unsleeping as we came into Prague at the break of dawn, all shrouded in dense fog – The Charles Bridge, with no tourists in the bleak icy grey, utter perfection.
Later, we had coffee and cakes at the Kaverna Obecni, an exquisite turn of the century municipal building partly designed by Mucha: I remember the stained glass windows, leaning into East European bliss in the deliciously warm coze. It had been a (literally) bumpy start – but now we were finally getting the real Prague we had been hoping for. It was wonderful. When I saw this shop, therefore, in Tokyo, on Sunday, I had a moment of flashback. Totally decontextualized, a little phony, but they had just about carried it off. There was still a flavour. The little combs, you could imagine Sarah Bernhardt using backstage: the powdery iris heliotrope raspberry of the Iris scent was Belle Epoque enough to convince. I will definitely need a soap or two and will take it from there re the edt. The ‘Camellias’ struck me as a little too typically modern floral vanilla – you have smelled this thousands of times before – but it was still quite warm and pleasing. If a waitress at the Mucha cafe were to drift by smelling like that, carrying my Viennese whirl and a piping hot milk coffee on her tray, I know that I wouldn’t complain.
I am digging this. A slick, sensual and buttery affair dressed perfectly for the luxe sarong, Vanille Des Afriques Intensivo is an ideal holiday perfume for sundown on the terrace.
Beginning with a surprisingly animalic, floral fresh funk of jasmine absolute, osmanthus and magnolia oil segued with coriander and pink pepper, as the vanilla beneath makes its self known immediately richly swimming in a slow, amberesque ooze of orris butter, vetiver, sandalwood and musc : the effect, opulent, a little dirty, is like fresh ylang ylang flowers plucked at their most pungent directly from a tree (I still wish we had gone to the island of Nosy Be in the north of Madagascar, when we had the chance, where the vanilla absolute for this perfume is sourced)
D lived for a while in Tanzania, and would like to take me back there one day to show me his old haunts. I would love to too, especially to visit all the spice fields on the island of Zanzibar. It sounds fascinating. I have no idea what an African sunset is like – the vibe that Ormonde Jayne is hoping to evoke here- but there is a sultriness and dark sweetness to the scent that reminds me of Chopard Casmir; Scherrer Nuits Indiennes and Patou Sira Des Indes; all erotically inclined sandalwood ambers for the sybaritically rich and idle taking indolent advantage of their glorious surroundings. Well put together, huskily voiced: a little self satisfied : sexy.
The narcissus season in Japan is very long. I started seeing some opening up in December, they proliferate in January and February, but seem to be reaching a climax about now. Big clumps of them in every shade from snow to paper white to ivory to duck egg yellow to daffodil, jonquil; sometimes you cycle along and think before you get a visualizer on the whiff, blimey, whoever that was by the roadside had some seriously bad breath : they stink ! Of decay, of indoles, and yet there is often also something shudderingly erotic.
These you see pictured, picked along the way two days ago, have a purer scent, joyously vernal, almost like a house freshly covered in white paint (though I might be getting confused by the decorators on the scaffolding next door). I sit at my desk, writing, and the flowers sometimes breathe their perfume towards me, suffusing the air with the delicately narcotic
I woke up this morning ready to rock. It is a gorgeous sunny day, we are both now on spring break, and I felt like dousing. Before I knew it, my hands had reached out for a dabbed, poured or sprayed on all of the following : on the right wrist, arm – letting the bottle just pour out in rives onto my skin and cashmered sweater sleeve: extrait de Parfum D’Hermès, both spray and cap bottle, as well as Rouge edt (oh the animalic costus! The powdered rose ylang! the sheer hyacinthine theatrical glamour of these perfumes, among my favourite of all time); on the back of the right hand, rich, oleaginous smearings of the original and always glorious Gold Amouage, housed in the 1001 Arabian Nights Scheharazade gilt bottle (at least $1000 now on eBay) – all Mysore sandalwood rose/aldehydes and honey at their apex : I felt like a Saturday morning Sultan luxuriating with my coffee in the sheets.
On the left hand: large dosages of pre-reformulation Calvin Klein Obsession For Men (with self-infused cassia cinnamon oil I bought from Saigon Cathedral some years ago – because why not), and on the left wrist; arm, and all over the rest of the sweater: my very own galbanum oil -added Must De Cartier Parfum, (it needed revitalizing); sweet, vanillic; an ambered miasma of spiced, extravagant, woozy, velvetine sirops de fleurs – as I said before leaving the house to go grocery shopping down the road to D : ‘I think I have enough perfume on to kill a horse’.
Just case you were wondering, I don’t usually wear so much scent that it can interfere with your breathing (was I slightly wheezy because of all the perfume or because of all the pollen flying around ?) – and it is probably not the best thing to be wearing chemical warfare volumes of perfume when you are about to go vegetable and meat shopping on a local shotengai where there might be other scentless and scent-sensitive human beings milling around, yet to my great surprise, the eighty year old greengrocer I know quite well – she grows a lot of the produce herself in fields down the road, she has a lemon tree behind her house and has excellent florist’s taste; I sometimes can’t resist buying flowers there as well – and her much older customer, who were garrulously chatting away when I entered the shop, immediately and visibly perked on my entrance, commenting brightly (in my English translation):
“Wow. What a wonderful smell. You smell Beautiful. Beautiful!”
(me demurring, a bit embarrassed….: er, I rather overdid it today….” )
“No, it smells wonderful. Every time you move back and forth around the shop we keep getting drifts of it” (both make beckoning motion with hands as if to want even more coming in their direction).”Have you ever had or worn or known a perfume as lovely as that?” they asked one another. “I know that I haven’t.”
I was blushing and beaming at the same time.
Having another look round, distancing myself a little bit in case they were only being polite, buying what I wanted, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” I said, trying to change the subject.
“It’s a beautiful smell, you mean” said the older woman, avidly, and I smiled to myself as I said goodbye to them, after a conversation about buying flowers (mainly chrysanthemums) for the local cemetery, apparently the tradition at this time of year; cycling away, clouds of powdery classics floating in the air behind in my wake, surprised by their elated reactions to my impulsive pungency (which, after all, I had done for myself, not for anyone else – I loved the periodic but harmonious dominance of experiencing each perfume simultaneously but at different times); pondering the fact that, as is so often the case, the cultural stereotypes we have, even the ones I undoubtedly propagate myself, such as the misbegotten idea that Japanese people hate perfume, ‘they only like watercolour lotus’ and the like – are often just complete and utter garbage.
This time last year we were getting ready for our presentations on perfume at The Honolulu Museum Of Art.
I thought I would share again the most amazing thing that happened in Hawaii – the discovery of a completely unique, one off Chanel perfume that I had the chance to smell there in a private collection (amazingly, I was also able to obtain a small bottle of it in the process), – and a rather fascinating back story to the entire saga that turned out to be rather horrifying…
With the recent Allegorias it has felt as though Guerlain was just phoning it in. A bit of sparkly effervescence up top and then a nothingy musky pap – none for me have been memorable. I tend to think of them as being just something people pick up mindlessly when passing through airports.
The latest three(discounting the new Florabloom, which I haven’t smelled yet) immediately on testing feel as though they have been created by a non-Thierry Wasser: sleeker, tauter, urbanically stream-lined – and in fact they have; these were all solo pieces by co-in house perfumer Delphine Jelk. I sense something new here: a sturdier gleam. My favourite of the trio is probably Rosa Pallisandro, a rosewood/gerainum/rose boisée featuring a very dehumidified , gossamer aridity with coriander, chypric tonalities, and a crackled dryness of patchouli underneath that detractors say smells like dill pickles – but whose sillage, though admittedly a touch harsh, I think is rather chic for the contemporary trench-coated femme or homme fatale.
I love, also, the contrast between the Dubai-dry (if somewhat anodyne) ‘oudh’ base in the Yuzu variant of this trio, and the sheer effulgence of the citrus opening, which for a few minutes or so gives a genuine sense of futuristic optimism; revitalizing and awakening – perfect as you fling open the curtains in the Burj Khalifa to stare out at the glittering sea.
In really hot sun, post-beach, I can imagine trying the Vanilla Bosca – again, bone-dry driftwood, salty, and rather un-Guerlainish, even with the solar vanilla all gliding underneath (unless you have worn Lys Soleia, which I sometimes do in summer): shimmering like wave mirages on the sun-tingled ocean, with fresh green touches of eucalyptus, this smells saline and chemical – and undoubtedly is – but it is also rather dazzling, like sun-oiled skin, soaking the rays in a state of blissful oblivion.
The Black Narcissus 