“S” PARFUM by SCHIAPARELLI (1928)

ooo – – – now this really is rare.

I spotted it immediately, lurking in the corner of the cardboard box. And I just couldn’t possibly resist the paler lilac shocking pink (when I first saw it in the basket of ‘newly received’ perfumes at my haven of Kanagawa I assumed it was, in fact, Schiaparelli’s most iconic scent, Shocking, whose bottle it would be amazing to own, even if, in the suffocatingly fusty turned extrait I have, in a plain, square shouldered flacon, it smells like mouldering, asphyxiated fungi locked up in a spore drenched vacuum).

Still, beggars can’t be choosers. And I snapped it up for $20 (even though I am not supposed to be buying anything at the moment, ) happy to now have this in my possession, if merely for the fact that the surrealist-linked couturieuse always has a certain art museum twang and kink; the curving glass body-oddy of the flacons; the frenesie of the handwriting, once provocative, still allure.

(“Snuff”..

What fabulous nonsense….)

(“Sleeping”, from 1938.

Mmm.. While the box might appeal, the somewhat overwrought candlestick flacon and muffler are a bothersome fandango. This rarity may belong to the Metropolitan, and I saw the same only recently at a Man Ray exhibition in Hayama, but this contraption, I couldn’t quite bear to look at it every day. It would stay boxed. Wild Success – Succès Fou – would also fall into the same unlookable bracket (though you could perhaps use it as a doorstopper). ‘S’, visually, possibly seems a little bland in comparison, even if the edition below, which I would buy at the drop of a hat if I ever found them, does whet my collective appetite for a powdery, post hot summer bath à la Blanche Dubois.

On the topic of blandness. Lamentably, ‘S’, whose moniker suggests some secret agent lampooning you on a street corner, olfactively couldn’t possibly be more straight or muskily conventional (perhaps this was Elsa’s go-to for such situations; in case she ever needed a break from her zany moustachioed gatherings, and had to have an 11am meeting with her bank manager, say): a standard – if soft, becoming, gentle and bedroom lacy – variant on the Nº5 trope we know so well and have smelled so many times, as so many perfumes; so many, many perfumes in the fifty years following the still to this day unbettered Chanel who all copied that format it til the cows came home, often were. The Detchemas, the Interdits – the L’ Aimants and a million other drugstore challengers inbetween, all trod this rose safe jasmine musk aldehyde garden path to pliant, conservative femininity: the classic boudoir accoutrements in the picture above above nailing this sweet, talcumed essentiality of the genre quite perfectly. (All very nice, in other words, if a little disappointing – I must admit that despite the admirable freshness of the perfume, which seemed undiminished and brand new when I unstoppered it excitedly, it did elicit a certain drop in atmospheric temperature within me, an unspoken exhalation of ‘is that it?’).

Still, I am wearing S now, on my left arm, and rather enjoying it. It feels good; domestic, calming; reposeful. Even slightly dreamy, as an underwhelming typhoon winds it way down outside and we have a much needed nothingy, slobbishly quiet day in the house. Napping. Not making the bed.

Sleeping, indeed.