I have been eyeing this one for a while. A leaky Jean Patou Mille, whose rose patchouli vapours long infiltrated the Kamakura antiques shop in which it was ensconced.
I finally snapped it up yesterday, transferring its trail of supercilious franco-reverie to our house.
Placing it in a prime position in the most treasured vintages on the dresser by my bed, I found it hard to sleep last night : this old parfum, macerating in itself for decades is so intensely potent it affected me at various levels of (sub) consciousness, almost approaching brain nausea.
Do you know 1000? (pronounced ”Mille?’)I would love to hear the opinions of aficionados, those sworn to the enigmatic witchery of the vintage only (I also have an edt and an edp, both effective) though the sly, oiled luminescence of the serpentine extract really does take some beating.
Mordantly, effortlessly elegant, 1000 is quite a peculiar perfume – making its statements but also somehow unexpressed : a classical floral chypre centered on violets and osmanthus with herbaceous green edges; delicately animalic, sandal-musked base, and a rich, dark red geranium-stained , Joy-echoing rose that inhabits the heart.
At the same time, there is also an explicit sensuality hidden within the implicit good taste of this Patou : the 1000 of the name referring to either the alleged one thousand attempts perfumer Jean Kerleo made to attain perfection, or, if you watch the old advert, the number of times…
If you can get your hands on a good bottle, 1000 is a perfume with a fascinating evolution. The particular bottle I bought yesterday – for twenty five pounds, a reasonable deal, has possibly lost some of the strange green beauty of the jade / red smaller 7ml iteration, in which the slow slide from green plants to osmanthus, apricot and lucid violet, with whispers of papery muguet slowly descends to a more subtly pheromonal, chypric leather base.
But this bottle also has an added richness, containing the very essence of Patou 1000. And though I had to move it to another room – just too distracting for sleep – what would I be dreaming of ?- its inspired emanations -will have to rise up into my writing room instead, taunting the surrounding greenery.
D and I don’t really have any hardfast traditions at Christmas and New Year : each December is different.
We don’t do gift giving either – birthdays are our big splurge – but on occasion it is nice to spontaneously buy presents for each other – as is what happened on December 25th.
We were up in Tokyo for our first ever British Pub Christmas lunch with a ragbaggle of friends who would otherwise have been by themselves – and in the morning I suddenly had the idea of going to a lovely Japanese owned British antique shop that is sometimes open nearby (a bit coals to Newcastle, I know – but there was something charming about getting him a 70’s Norwich Cathedral bone china mug in the middle of Tokyo when he is actually from there, and that magpie can never resist jewellery : two chunky rings were snapped up with relish from my end of the bargain), while I just ‘settled’ for three ravishing bottles of vintage French perfume that blew the barn off my roof):
Crêpe de Chine?
Good lord is that Crêpe de Chine ?!
Oh my god look at those original white Bakelite caps ?
wow wow wow, omg.
I was gagging.
And Ma Griffe ? A full bottle when my stocks of the vintage edt and parfum are now quite low?
Not Ma Griffe? !!
MAIS ALORS QU’EST-CE-QUE C’EST?
You realize the frothiness of your bicarbonate soda inner geek levels when you find yourself so extraordinarily excited, simply by seeing some green and white elegant stripes on an old perfume box- that then you realize weren’t even what you thought they were was but something else entirely – Robe D’Un Soir – which I had not even heard of, to my shame – you are practically panting and palpitating, even – sorry for this part! – when the actual smells of the perfumes themselves, though intact olfactively, don’t, for me personally, quite reach the same aesthetic heights. The joy of the avid collector, however, remains undiminished.
*
Crêpe De Chine is the kind of legendary perfume only read about in classic perfume histories – I have actually written about it before in the context of a wonderful afternoon I once had down the hill near Kenchōji temple when a pair of elderly sisters invited us for dinner and the wilder of the two rushed off to get her beloved bottle of the Millot perfume she has had since she was a young girl. At that time, though I was intrigued by the scent, my pleasure came more from the joy that smelling the scent gave the younger of the two sisters: I couldn’t quite ‘read’ the perfume then, and I can’t now either. It smells mossy, manly, musty – androgynously rich and beckoning, but lacking that factor. When Karen came to stay at our house over the new year she agreed: she loves Mitsouko, but couldn’t wear this – just a brief step too far perhaps into the realm of the dust-laden Ms Havershams (she also put the idea into my head that the bottles look a bit like pine disinfectants, which de-accentuated their visual brilliance for a few moments when I couldn’t help but agree with her- yet they fit so beautifully in the hand and give me intense visual satisfaction every time I glance at them in my writing room where plants and green predominate that I don’t mind).
Robe D’Un Soir, apparently part of a whole quartet of Carven perfumes in different variations of the classic green and white patterns and featuring Vert Et Blanc, Chasse Gardée as well as by far the most well known, Ma Griffe – a perfume I love and wear for its intense, lemon-leaf freshness and softness – is a lilting, silken number, a little like a slighter greener, more white floral No 5 with a dreamy top note of lys blanc that can apparently be seen on the dresser in Belle De Jour starring Catherine Deneuve – but unlike Griffe, which on my skin softens down to a beautifully soapish, chypric vetiver, is slightly sordidly musky and unfresh. I think you had to be there, perhaps, to be in the cultural context, in the presence of a particular woman of that time in her particular bedroom before her mirror in that particular evening gown or dress to fully indulge in this Carven; it is rather lovely, despite its not having turned, this bottle must be fifty years old at least, but I am not entirely ravished.. Still, I love having it; the fonts alone are enough to thrill me, and the mere knowledge that I had these beauties wrapped with typical Japanese origami flair in old newspaper on my person during the at times slightly nerve-wracking Christmas pub experience – I always worry about people who are meeting each other for the first time getting along – provided an added bulk of inner jubilation.
A question to you, though?
I have not seen the sisters in quite a while now (though I did think I possibly spotted the Crêpe de Chine wearer one day in the environs of where we visited their house when I rode by; she has a very distinctive facial expression, but it has been years, and I don’t know if they are even alive….)
Part of me wants to just go down there, climb the steps and knock on the door with the smaller bottle of Crêpe De chine, ring on the doorbell and give it to her as a present : another is quite happy to territorially keep it right where it is, in front of my eyes even as I type this out……..
But if she loves the scent so much, although there is no guarantee that she would love the ‘eau de..’ variant as much as the precious extrait she was clutching that wonderful evening like a loon, I would be delighted to had it over; when you love a perfume to that extent, it can truly be a timeline to another universe.
Would she even recognize me, though?
It’s been twenty years….Will there be frightened calls to the local police box (‘There’s a weird foreign man in front of me wielding bottles of Millot Crepe De Chine… come quickly please’).
So yes. A question. Should I go and give it to her in the spirit of nostalgia, spontaneity: or should the perfume, like the somewhat unrelatable scent that it emanates, be left in the distant past?
In the midst of Greenlandic – as well as various other forms of despair, the other bright, sunny winter’s day – I found myself inadvertently wearing Kenzo’s cheerily envisioned Le Monde Est Beau.
The charming plastic mounded bottle, like a pebble mounted with ikebana flowers, was gifted to me via d by Mistress Maya, a doyenne of the Tokyo latex scene, who brought it from her parents’ house in the country after her mother died and gave it to d to give to me as a cheer-up: I have long enjoyed seeing it there on the white table next to my writing desk along with the rare glass aphid iteration of a Kenzo Parfum D’Ete that my eyes frequently alight on with a certain nostalgic pleasure.
Naturally, in my increasing clumsiness – worse since my leg operations- good lord, hold onto your champagne flutes, Chapman is coming ! I must have knocked it off at some point without realizing it in one of my extra blunderbussy spasms – though I had definitely noted its green, effortlessly pleasant vanillic vapours drifting about the household semi-consciously- and when I did finally pick it up to track the damage, the half-drained flacon – a non-visible hairline crack ? – yet another breakage ! An uncalled for dose of vintagely macerated liquid then leaked further from the broken flower onto hands and sweater.
I had not been planning to wear this scent at all. It just existed in my presence : the occasional spray into the air, or a sniff from the ornate cap. But there I was, resplendent in The World Is Beautiful, so deeply ironic given the ever worsening headlines that continue to make you crawl deeper inside your over-familiar self on a daily basis – too weary to gasp or frenzy over them any more; the profound, profound horror that just one, aggrieved man-child in his unwavering hatred and rage, has the power to potentially destroy the rest of humanity.
I do still think the world is beautiful, though, even if currently reduced – spinally, and in terms of mobility and lucidity as I slowly recover from my two left knee operations while delaying and reconsidering the third – the other artificial joint implant : I simply couldn’t face any more, in truth; three consecutive anaesthesias and tissue butchering was simply too much to ask, too traumatizing….
Over this difficult and lonely last year, with all its aches and searing pain and self medications, I have nonetheless managed to better and deepen my relationships with everyone dear to me – even my cat ; the enforced time off has been wonderful in that regard (and speaking of important relationships, i do wish I had also been more present on here, my apologies ; I have unfinished posts and ideas and planned reviews that take half seed in the sediment but get blown away by the moment or dulled by painkillers); I been slavering over my book project when I have good days, and made significant progress with that; but still… I really don’t know where all the time has gone.
(Hello, and a very belated Happy New Year to you by the way)
Yes, cycling to and back from the gym, and even up our notoriously steep hill yesterday afternoon. – a perfect demonstration of how i have probably been overdoing it all along, forcing the progress because I have to go back to work in April when I should have been more sedentary and under ICE (but that of course depends on which health professional’s contradictory advice I adhere to ….. you have no idea how confusing all of this has been), I was reflecting that at the end of the day – and excuse these sentimental cliches – all that really matters ultimately is a deep appreciation of what surrounds us, a quest for understanding , and the bonds of friendship and love that bind and sustain our souls – while simultaneously grieving their impermanence; the coursing veins of mortality that exist in every heartbeat – but which also give this mysterious life that we have exquisite meaning.
The vernal beauty of the world around me ; the plum blossom quietly saturating the cold breeze: the plush new narcissus lining the entirety of the eight hundred year old Wakamiyoshi main Kamakura boulevard that links the Hachimangu shrine and the bright sea; the luminous faces of passing strangers; children blissfully ignorant of the strains of the future ; the glinting purity of the afternoon sunlight ; a lovely conversation I struck up with an elderly Japanese woman as she hobbled along the corridors of the gym with her walking stick and we exchanged various tidbits of orthopedica and life information : she said to me something along the lines of ‘it has been lovely talking to you; let’s protect and help each other through this’; which had me tearing at the edges , despite my morning sadness, I felt throughly alive.
*
Perfume, always a vital buffer between the harshest, bone on bone realities and the yearning for the dreamy beyond, has been a constant, of course during this challenging time, though rather than voraciously curious about the new I have tended to be consecutively monogamous, wearing one choice on skin and clothes until I almost run out or spontaneously pivot – you know that feeling when you wake up and just know, very strongly, that yesterday’s scent profile just isn’t going to work for you today.
I went through an Ignoble Chinchilla phase over the pre-Christmas and Christmas period, layering anything sweet vanilla based – Shalimar, Vol De Nuit, with Dusita Tonka Latte – I was revelling in my warm sugared eiderdowns as the colder weather descended but it is possible that other people may have found it a bit sickening (I have come to realize how infrequently, in fact, I am complimented on my vintage, chypric affiliations like Ma Griffe, Chant D’Aromes etc – d turns his nose at them as I sprawl into grey gardens – so it is likely that the less perfume-historied individual on the street might also find my otherworlded sillages strangely unpalatable too… maybe I should just be keeping my Classic Perfumes to myself …)
This has emphatically not been the case with Fragonard Patchouli, a warm, rich, coumarinic rendition of the classic earth-toned wonder which apparently smells alarmingly sexy on me and not like spoiled cabbage- a real come -here-and-grab-you-nuzzler – on a brand new long black cashmere scarf – bought for me as a Christmas present by a friend in China to help me ‘wrap up and write’ – this perfume has been smelling male-witchy voluptuous and grounding – I have used it up to the last tenth and will have to get another bottle from Marks & Spencer when I go back to England this summer.
Another winner has been the now very pricey and long discontinued Gucci Envy For Men – a gorgeously fresh and spicy ginger-centered lavender amber that was destined to wear – though I have used it down to the dregs and will be scouring the dwindling recycle shops in search of a replenishment – this is one of those rare perfumes whose long lingering base accords please as much as the opening – I spray it on milli-vanilli and feel fabulous all day. Late nineties it might be (it doesn’t feel current, more timeless), but I wish I owned liters of the stuff.
*
Gucci Envy For Men was created by Daniela Andrier, a purveyor of smooth, commercially appealing perfumes that feel as if they were born to exist before they actually did ( the hypnotically textile orange blossom heliotrope of the first Gucci Eau De Parfum; the whispering hush of Guerlain Angelique Noire; even when they eventually grate – Prada Candy, the Infusion D’Iris and its interminable cousins – there is a perfected sense of overall desired pleasantnesss over edginess – contrary to the niche preference for the novel and weird – skunk tincture! dried blood on asphalt ! cigarettes in lungs ! – I don’t believe is necessarily a bad thing when it comes to fragrance.
Similarly, Le Monde Est Beau, another Andrier late nineties gem, does feel like a commercial prototype. The contrast between persistent light vanilla tonka / cedar base and sharper, floral fruit top and middle accords has been done countless times since – practically the template for what now passes for perfume at the dire counters worldwide of Female Duty Free.
But there is an overapplied fug slug in so many of those sweetly nasty and chemicalized boob toboggans that is less present in Le Monde Est Beau, which is so startlingly fresh and so KENZO and green in its leafy basil, black currant mandarin, honeysuckle and oglaia odorata over blackberry and cherry blossom that when I started involuntarily wearing it that anxious, embittered morning the other day feeling the hours stretching before me and the swellings, twinges and cracks that have become my new normal, with its almost moronic, neonized innocence, I couldn’t help breaking out into a genuine smile.
The best Kenzo perfumes, in their childlike wonder of nature shot through with the best of the Japanese, idealized plastica fantastica, do capture an unjaded startlement of joyful simplicity that you realize is stil firmly within you even when you are in a bit of a low moment. Though I do, strongly wish, that I hadn’t brought the bottle with me to hospital for this review – my god Neil, you knew it was leaking but you decided to bring it in your bag ? Not sure these technicolour emanations are appealing to the masked and waiting in their own joint and bone pain purgatories (I am here to potentially reserve yet another, smaller operation for a right knee bone spur removal – joy of joys !); I should have thought.
But then again , it’s not going to kill them : it’s not the end of the world (is it? Is it ?). It is hard to always be bright and buoyant even if you get on top of your own troubles – and we all have them, let’s face it – life is no spring breeze – when the world around is shifting so tectonically we are in daily states of increasing bewilderment – and yet the pleasures do, undoubtedly remain. For me the world is beautiful – tragically so. Yet even a minor perfumed creation such as this- refreshing optimistic, not bound by dark, self-aggrandizing cynicism – just existing in the pursuit of providing an (admittedly somewhat facile ) happiness, still can infuse even the most melancholy day with a cheerful beam of sunshine.
