They were past their best in the main, dried out, some even a little crispy, but many of the peonies at the February exhibition of botan at the Hachimangu shrine in Kamakura were still fritillatedly resplendent.
I do like peonies – both in luxuriantly madame frou appearance and bittersweet odour (though as a stridently artificial note in perfume it is generally hideous ) – and they are probably d’s favourite flowers.
I have good memories of them growing up when some really choice fists of puce peony would unfurl fragrantly on warm early summer evenings, wood pigeons cooing in the rafters of Dovehouse Farm; to me they represent an ineffable resting elegance and an integral part of my mum’s carefully – but ramblingly – curated back garden where I would lounge about reading fairy stories or dreaming under laburnum.
This year – a tough year ! (I have not gone into so much, and probably should) has still been good in terms of relationships : I have a blossoming relationship with a Japanese lady in our neighborhood who has helped me in so many ways I feel very indebted ( a lost wallet here, facilitating a medical referral there..) : what could I possibly do to return the favour?
‘Can you make me an English garden?’
So there you have it. We have been assembling rosemary, lavender, lupins, Christmas roses, anemones and hyacinths : I have suggested peonies as well – she was surprised, as they are such classically popular Japanese flowers- but wouldn’t you say they are part of the Classic English garden? I would say hollyhocks, foxgloves… irises? She buys the plants and we go round and plant them (well, I stand there with my stick and help him choose the best position)- and slowly the garden is taking shape.
Walking behind some Europeans in Kamakura yesterday I was dismayed by the brain-bashing stench of the perfume a young ish man strolling ahead of me had unleashed into our rarified midst. It was…. disgusting. ‘Beast Mode’. Nullifying. A vulgarian boulder blocking up the airwaves.
In Japan, a country that favours olfactory subtlety, such ‘perfumes’ – can we really call them this ? – only pollute the oxygen. Even from several paces away I felt assaulted, as though clubbed by an ox: how could anyone come into physical proximity with such a pollutant-contaminated skin interface?
The chemists that gave us Baccarat Rouge and its infinite variants that slough the breeze like brainless pink godzillas burning our cilia with singed saffron caramels, monsterized jasmins and synthetic oudhs – do they not eventually wish they could retract them from our collective consciousnesses and take us back to a purer air ? All the inescapable, evil ‘ambers’ that troll our minds like a brain bludgeoning life sentence?
The Kamakura perfume yesterday – vile though it was – was nothing in comparison to what I smelled in a Shinjuku hotel room a couple of weeks ago, however – wow ! It was the most shocking, indeed scandalous ! reaction I have ever had to a perfume.
Admittedly, we were overperfumed ourselves. Our friend from Shanghai had very generous it booked a luxury weekend at a Hyatt and we naughtily stayed over – crowding in to her room before hitting the nightlife afterwards (still only in semi recovered mode I couldn’t, alas, take part in the dancing but went out for the first chapter ): she doused in contemporary Fahrenheit; d in Electimuss Puritas – a pink pepper vanilla frankincense – Yukiro in Paloma Picasso, and me in my somewhat smothering ‘Guerlain Winter Special’ – vintage Shalimar, Vol De Nuit and Heritage applied liberally six hours in advance – so yes, it was already too much, and quite old school I suppose- omg, there may have been some naturally sourced aroma materials ! only making any twenty first century heightened aromachemicals all the more noxious in cruel juxtaposition,
but Jesus Christ, when Tony walked in from his suite upstairs and entered our own clouds of excessive perfumanity I had the intensest inner response to a ‘fragrance’ ever in my life.
Reader, I was paralyzed.
Paralyzed! I couldn’t move or speak. A sudden plunge into brief, disorientating insanity.
Thinking at first it was just my usual jolt of initial sociophobia when meeting new individuals, I tried to open my mouth, but the overwhelming flattening of my nervous system by whatever monstrosity he had just obviously sprayed on a few moments before entering our space left me awestruck : physically speechless.
Karen kept looking at me as if to say when are you going to start communicating, but the toxic miasma of searing petrochemicals he had ruined himself with was so severe it took me about ten minutes to gather myself. Is this what nerve gas feels like ? A biohazardous attack, inhuman and system shredding ?
Eventually, of course, I pulled myself together, still marvelling at the power of his pungency and the fact he was supposedly on the pull in the gay zone later that evening ( surely only the fully anosmic could approach another person, no matter how physically attractive, in these circumstances), and though it was hypocritical, for your sake, I had to eventually ask him, if he didn’t mind, what the ‘interesting’ perfume he was wearing was called.
‘It’s the new Scandal by Jean Paul Gaultier’.
‘Usually I wear Tom Ford Tobacco Vanille’ he told me – and oh god, I wish you had was my inner reply
..’ but I got a sample of this at Shanghai airport as I thought it was quite nice..’
!!!!
Admittedly, it did later tone down to just a regular, irritating banality rather than an attack by a bioweapon designed to induce crippling neuropathy – but man, this was a serious nadir in modern fragrance for me : damaging to the spirit and physically utterly intolerable. Obviously this post is hyperbolic beyond endurance – so do take it with your own personal grain of salt – but still, in all honesty, like the proliferation of nuclear missiles currently mushrooming globally – for the sake of humanity – can these ingredients honestly be safe for our bodies ? I really do wish I could rid the entire world of this poisonous shit.
Tiffany. Back in the charts with I Think We’re Alone Now almost forty years after the fact because of Stranger Things. Tiffany Trump. Breakfast At. It could not possibly be more American.
And it was an American girl I first smelled this perfume on almost three decades ago, just another teacher passing through — but I remember that each time we met her she smelled sublime.
Blonde, not petite, this perfume beamed through her cotton and blue jean pores and was impossibly alluring. We would spend all night sniffing her: sniffing Tiffany, bees to a flame.
Yes, it was one of those orchestral white florals – orange blossom / tuberose / sandalwood / vanilla typical of the day, dripping with unctuous femininity – think Sung, Jardins De Bagatelle, Fleurs De Rocaille, Romeo Gigli, then Red Door and Tendre Poison, Ananya and Giò and, more than anything, the luscious Cartier Panthère (as it used to be, which smelled so incredible on a girl at university called Anoushka that I practically hallucinated) – but though some might find this full sensurround off the shoulder too performatively sexy, I am personally rather partial to a nectarous scent siren like this one every once in a while (just a dip in the toe of vulgarity without going the whole hog). This vintage edition of Tiffany – created by Patrick Demachy, he of a million Diors and classics like my beloved Ungaro Pour L’Homme, treads the sensuous line between trash and class rather brilliantly.
There is a smoothness to Tiffany that makes it non pareil. There are no rough edges – all emerges in one honeyed glimmer. Mandarin, orange flower, rose taif and American muguet, the freshness of blackcurrant honing down to a more anchored – but subtle – this is not Giorgio of Beverly Hills – vetiver and sandalwood, radiantly soft and skin kissing amber.
The original pre-reformulation version of Tiffany is now apparently legendary – you realize the ardor the perfume generates when you go on Fragrantica – and now goes for hundreds of dollars on eBay. I rescued this particular bottle from an old iron drawer at a junk yard on Saturday afternoon for five hundred yen, about 2 pounds fifty. Nostalgic for the Theresa memories – she lit up karaoke with this perfume, I knew I had to have it for old time’s sake; polished off its mottles and inserted it immediately into the collection.
Naturally it doesn’t suit me – though Burning Bush might consider it on a hot Tokyo night out in May. But no – this needs a particular person, a particular bombshell with the right natural luminosity to fully do it justice. And if such a person does come over to the house and it fits like a glass slipper, then I may fancifully bestow a decanted vial or two in their direction. Otherwise, this perfume is staying put. I like simply inhaling it from the cap – a fortifying glamour of 80’s Americana and an absolute classic of its genre.
