LE DIX; CRISTOBAL + INCENSE PERFUMUM by BALENCIAGA (2025)

I had never before been in a Balenciaga.

Why would I?

For a start, the brand / house / cultural phenomenon gives my brain mixed messages. Growing up, there were dusty old Balenciaga perfumes in my nan’s bathroom that she never used – probably she got them from the duty free on the Costa Del Sol along with the nylon flamenco dancers and Pepe the donkey who I adored – and they just lay there getting musty. I would smell them; Rumba and Ho Hang – ho hum I would think as a child, even if later I did come to really like the Grace Jones tuberose coconut of Michelle and the sly rose of Cialenga (apologies to all the Prelude and Quadrille lovers; sorry, I just never loved them as much as you).

Yes, so to me, the name and image of Balenciaga, in its clunky thick overwritten labels and marinating marinades decaying among old jagged lemon soaps was just a bit naff – most children and teenagers don’t fashion fantasize over their grandparents’ choices – and I was no different. Now, of course, it is another matter; Denma, the previous designer who turned the house into a whirlwind of must-have coolness for young kids after their hoodies and ridiculous sneakers and towels for the gym and backpacks – transformed ‘la maison’ for a while there into dollar-whipping powerhouse; B was all the rage in Yokohama NeWoman and you would see delighted young kids in their early twenties who had saved up for one of the luxurious rip-offs – it’s just for me I totally associate it all with assholes like Kanye West with a bag over his head at the Met Gala and the like – mere ashes in the wind.

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Still, wandering one day, tout seul as usual in recent times trying to find a way to pass the time, and having done a bit of nose business upstairs at Nose Yokohama, potential reviews I could write entering, and then leaving through my right ear, I saw that the Balenciaga concession on the ground fllor had nobody in it except for a couple of languishing sales staff, and that there was a whole range of perfumes stood there that I had never heard of or smelled of before – and that that situation should be immediately rectified.

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As an ‘ex-pat’ I suppose you never really stop comparing. You can’t help putting things side by side from your original culture and judging them to how they are done in ‘the other place’. Food, for instance: I vastly prefer restaurants here, for their incredible quality, value, and no-nonsense – no tipping, no need to flirt with the waiting staff and come up with groovy repartee – keep those false eyelashes out of my dinner, b****! – for me the dining experience at home can be rather arduous. A portion of chips in newspaper I can just take out and walk along with, yes; but don’t get me caught up in no ‘hand-prepared, pan-seared..’ bullshit – I like my food excellent and simple with no palaver. Attentive staff, who deliver what they are supposed to, but otherwise fade into the wallpaper or the kitchen. I am not there to make friends.

Perfume shopping, though, however, but indeed. There is no comparison. I have heard some lovely and envy inducing stories recently from friends having a field day at London Liberty, where you do in fact have the liberty of actually spraying on the perfumes as you see fit – not as tight poled as a sphyx’s sphincter – as it unfortunately usually is in Japan.

Perfume should be Baudelarian; full of sensuality and abandonment, else what the hell is the point? Life can be shite – we know that – and gorgeous potions can take us away from all that for a few moments and much longer, a lifetime even – if a scent sinks into you and you fall in love with it – but – and does anyone have a contention with the following statement – you do, actually need to try the fucker on your skin.

Nose Shop were perfectly ok upstairs; you are not officially allowed to just whoosh willy-nilly (‘please ask the staff if you would like to try one of the fragrances’ – er yes, ok, then) but what is great there is that, up to a point, you can ask to try a fair few of their interesting very contemporary collections, and the assistant will spray a decent amount on a paper card, write down its name, and then insert the card into a little clear vinyl envelope meaning that it is not going to contaminate your clothing or your personage and you can take it out again at leisure – very useful in fact. Yes, thinking about it actually, this is a Japanese custom that British perfumeries might want to take on, instead of the mudheap of confused paper testing strips that eat the atmosphere of your average London niche P boutique. Here you get to take a paper card away – a whole selection of them – and compare it over days without ruining your inner coat pocket with chemical warfare.

At least in such places – what I would call real perfumeries – the assistants do kneau that the customers are there to imbibe. To sniff. To inhale. To want to cannibalize their own skin if the scent is that good- and this requires the physical movement of bottle to body; you can’t just stand their staring at the bottles, through glass, stupidly, as though they were the Crown Jewels.

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I don’t think it was appearance; I wasn’t too much of a hobo that day. I looked fine; I have a nifty black cashmere coat and some very nice scarves – I will never be a fashionista – and very much out of choice, mein liebling, that never interested me – and I am no d – goodness you should see the closets he has built up over the years – but neither am I Stig Of The Trump – I can pull it off. I looked fine. So l’image narcissisien was not the issue. Plus I do know the odd this and that about scent, even if I am not fully at the front of the conveyor belt. . Plus I am a potential paying customer. Plus whatever – just do your fucking job.

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Sadly, you will be disappointed perhaps that this post is not going to be one of those Neil Classics like the post about the Martin Margielas and the c*** that served me at Hankyu Men’s in Tokyo – one of the most passive aggresive department stores with the least testosterone in the air in the world; that was me at my most delectably vicious – and every word was merited. I was ready to ice pick back at everyone just like Sharon Stone.

No – this was not quite as suicidally gelid as that. No. B was not bad service – it was just…….lame.

From what I could gather from the situation, what you are supposed to do in Balenciaga as a J consumer in this situation in which you are supposed to venerate and genuflect within your body in absolute silence and wonder at the imported goods before you is just stand in front of the ten arranged perfumes – some of which have appallingly dumb names such as Twenty Four Seven, No Comment, and To Be Confirmed- our Spanish originator must surely be spinning at 250 bpm in his cemetery at the banality of vision here, even if the labels do look quite nice on this new series of bouteilles; after all, these were what drew me in- no, what you are supposed to apparently do is just stand there like a frightened llama in front of the selection, blink dumbly begging for understanding,, and then the assistant, who has presumably at the headquarters training somewhere or other up in Tokyo gemmed up on the notes and the inspirations in his or her manual under the till; will guide you to what you might potentially like, spraying a tiny amount on the ‘Balenciaga’ paper card built especially for the purpose, which you will then waft your hand over to try and bring its scent molecules to your nasal cilia, but not vulgarly inhale like those brutes across the ocean who just dig they’s noses in like pigs trammelling for truffes.

Immediately rebuffing such wordless boomerangs, my own words were, simply, ‘I want to smell them all’.

The man didn’t quite know what to do. He wasn’t rude; he just slightly malfunctioned, like an oculus-melting android in a Steven Spielberg movie. I explained, in Japanese, that I wanted to have each perfume sprayed on a card at least if I wasn’t allowed to wear it on my body, and that I wanted them to be put in a plastic envelope – just as been previously achieved upstairs.

However, the shop didn’t have the provision of those little plastic bags to encase your precious niche. Instead, there were posh little grey envelopes with, you guessed it, Balenciaga written on them – but you were only allowed one – which I suppose you are supposed to fetishize in some way – stare at it by your bedside, spiritually mate with it, or try to immediately sell on Rakuten or eBay to dopes who do collect such crap, but I couldn’t have cared less. I just wanted. to. smell. them.

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He was blockading my way. No, you can’t smell all of them. You have to choose one. Really? Oh. Ok then, let me go with…er, this one I suppose. I have already forgotten which one it was – Getaria? But it had fresh Angel vibes – no gracias, senorita. I went to the more viscous looking darker elixirs on the right – uuu Incense Profumum might be nice; I do love frankincense; and I did like this one; the aldehydes in my nose might have been a carry over from the Le Dix I also smelled just before it (good; a pretty convincing re-working of a morbidly melancholy violet musk that is exquisite in its way but also perhaps too much of Another Age; purists will disagree, and the new white musk finish could be considered a violation/ a vulgarity/ an abomination etc etc but to me this was quite a convincing touch up- the talc-covered corpse has been successfully resurrected for a new era); Incense Profumum also gave me a slight consumerist boner.

The incense in it was nice; mingly; tingly; real. Frankincense and balsams – a bit tense, perhaps, like the foolish penguin that was ‘serving’ me; not especially original but I would wear it and place it in with my other fumes with a definite amount of pleasure. Cristobal, though intriguing up to a point, was a bit too oud-treacly and dense – but clearly high quality (at an eye-boggling¥47,000 before tax I should certainly hope so – you can rent an apartment here in certain places here for that, even though it doesn’t look like much in luxe terms when converted to pounds or dollars) – and to me not really in keeping with the original Balenciaga image – but then again as I said earlier on, what is that now anyway? Is Elsa Schiaparelli still harking after the lobster? Most fashion houses have little coherence in their aesthetic legacies – Gucci, for example, where Denma has gone to try and save Milanese royalty after the disastrous Alessandro Michele departure a few years ago (how callous, and so very rats-leaving-a-sinking-ship are the victimy fashionistas – and are you surprised?) is also all over the place image wise and has no continuity really : it is all just vile, greedy behemoths – but we knew that already.

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I am also, obviously, a total hypocrite (I think the vast majority of us are). And if we can get back to the UK in the summer – the Great Ochre Blancmange having trashed so many lives with its gammy, boot-polish stained toddler fists crashing down on whole continents that the rest of the world just has to pick up the shards and hope they can afford to get on a plane again, if they even get to live another day – if I do, in the grander scheme of things I do have to say I really fancy some Actual Perfume Shopping. Where the assistants Believe In Inhalation. Where they coat your skin in pungent oil slicks you are immediately desperate to wash off, but where it is at least in the original spirit of Egyptian, Roman, Arab perfume cultures where the prime drive for their production is simply for spiritual, aesthetic, sensual, erotic pleasure : I have had delightful experiences in department stores in Birmingham in the past, with ultra friendly staff who sprayed their wares on you as though they were watering their gardens; of course they were knackered standing up all day in fine hoserie under bright lights -and Christ, all that makeup – but at least, also, there is none of this tight-assed, froze-lipped crapola where the perfumes sit oddly, morosely wondering why no one is spraying them properly; bored and dejected.

They are there because they know they exist to please: to go on the skin, delight – to work up a rumba.