CAMELLIAS + IRIS by MUCHA (2023)

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.