MILLOT CREPE DE CHINE(1925) + CARVEN ROBE D’UN SOIR (1947)

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?