Trampling On The Past…….JUNGLE L’ELEPHANT by KENZO (1996)

It is quite weird revisiting a Former Signature Perfume that you haven’t worn for thirty years.

And Elephant – in its original formulation, intensely, skin-burningly pungent – see my original review – by the inimitable Dominique Ropion – that sickly, addictive vanilla mess – and the one I wore out a couple of Fridays ago – is (was?) a genuinely Weird Perfume. Utterly original. Synthetic to the hilt. Brain-punchingly strong. But also natural (that cardamon, that licorice…..); sexy; strange……..it changed my life.

The vanilla note the next day is divine. Perfection. Couched with enough patchouli and amber and powderiness to drift in the air if it miraculously happens to have delicately raced your clothes. And the beginning………….kin’ell where to start; the cloves, the cumin, the ylang…..they chose the right animal. The sillage is elephantine in its proportions; disgusting, if also exciting in many ways, but as I realized on the Night In Question, where I re-trampled my first months in Japan by revisiting a place I lived then with an old friend who also lived in the same monstrous tower block, the middle, chlorinated, horribly plasticky centre of the perfume – often an issue with Kenzo fragrances, that thrilling plasticity – was so awful that I am not sure I can ever fully go there again (admittedly, it may have turned, but I always remember it actually being like that right from the beginning; a friend of mine bought the perfume based on how it smelled on me in 1997 or so (I always planned it carefully and in particular conditions to bring out the best of the hooves and snout) – but was so appalled when he sprayed it on unawares it practically brought on a panic attack. He ran screaming to the nearest hose.

Ah yes; Peter. He was the first one who wore a ‘female’ perfume convincingly – Shalimar – and made me swoon with all the possibilities. The next thing you knew I was at some airport or other at Duty Free and, fascinated by the ludicrosity of a perfume called Elephant with a metal elephant as the cap and something smelling that spicy and acute – I had bought the thing, undeterred, and brought it back to Japan.

The reactions I got were intense. I couldn’t quite get over it. I was a bit like Grenouille in Patrick Suskind – patrons in bars wanting to feast on my neck. Ok, maybe I exaggerate a little here (I don’t- it was actually like that), but suffice it to say, I rocked this perfume and bust the gender hymen like the finest African Grey.

But it’s like Kouros; Obsession; Givenchy Pi; JPg Le Male; perfumes you wore to death but which wore you and thus wore out. If you have geek tendencies towards Memory Libraries like me, still sometimes wanting to ignite the candle of the snuffed out forever then you might find a collectible and smell it every once in a while, but like Lenny Kravitz, it ain’t over til its over. And Elephant was definitely over for me – forever. Until last month.

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Me and M- who moved back here five years after many years in other countries – decided on the spontaneous moment, one Friday, as there was nothing at the cinema that we wanted to see, to go back to a residential building in the Yokohama suburb of Hodogaya that we both lived in – she quite happily – for two and a half years with some very nice housemates that she got on well with – and I – somewhat more neurotically – for six weeks with a bunch of random strangers I could barely talk to – until I fortunately fled to Kamakura – back in the winter of 1996.

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I hated it.

The extent surprised me. I expected at least a bit of kaleidoscopic ‘trip down memory lane’- but no….for me it was like being plunged back into a black lake. Horrible. But I should have realized that it is very obvious your memory colour of any time in your life affects everything in your later perception: I have have fantastic memories of random chunks of my allotted time in life- a Leamington Spa piano competition in 1984; family holiday in Greece in the late eighties; the summer of 93 after graduating and living with d; making a drag horror film with a wonderful collective of people in 2016 – the list could go on; we had a fantastic weekend just three days ago when Burning Bush made something of a glorious comeback on the piano in front of an audience- and in the house, to boot, for the first time- but if one period in question in your life was shit; depressing, then I think that we should be honest in admitting that it is probably staying that deep brown colour of misery forever.

At that particular point in time, in 1996, the year I ‘escaped’ London and my life with d and randomly flew to Japan, I would say it was probably my life’s actual lowpoint (mmm….yes, all this is coming out in my researching/ writing my ‘cultural memoir’ – painful, in fact, but I had to go back to the source, hadn’t been there for decades), and the sheer ugliness of the sterile, treeless environment of that fume-filled suburbia I was put in, those built up functional living spaces just made me asphyxiate- it really isn’t worth it, business people, just to have a more comfortable commute! – as well as living with three random ‘room mates’ as a 26 year old Failed Londoner in assigned company lodgings unable to sleep – it all came back to me with a force of anti-nostalgia I really wasn’t expecting. The Darkness got to me ;;M and I couldn’t gel, trapped in our own memory bubbles – I was taking over the experience with my negativity and overriding her more positive recollections but I just couldn’t help it – it was practically a ‘Nam flashback for me – just that instead of Wagner on the soundtrack, The Ride Of The Valkyries – it was the unremitting stench of Jungle L’élephant.

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Yes, Elephant wasn’t really helping.

Well, maybe it was. I don’t know. I was certainly fascinated by the time warp of wearing it, how it morphed, how we trudged to the shithole we once lived in as it plodded along and we held on desperately to its tufty tail. But it jarred with my current self. This was not me any more – it was another person; a younger me masquerading in an older body – and I felt unnerved; not quite right. By the time we met at the station after my journey from the divine Kamakura (omg the difference!) it had thankfully calmed quite a lot at least; prior to that I had been seriously considering finding a place with hot water and soap I could wash it off as it stank and I was genuinely embarrassed that people around me might have thought I actually wanted to smell this way. Forty five minutes after having a pachydermic meltdown on the Yokosuka Line thinking no no no get it off me! get this sugar slick from hell off me! it had virtually settled into the odour I think I remember it being, and M – smelling the back of my hand and neck and remembering it very fondly, was delighted (or was she just being polite?) that I had thought to put it on as a perfumed adjunct. For her, Elephant is how she remembers me and her at the time we first met when we were fresh-faced newbies in Yokohama; I would practically bathe in it in the school we worked in together (poor students in their tiny booths!) but more specifically, there was the time I visited her on the maternity ward a few years later in Oxfordshire three or four days after giving birth and I apparently filled up the entire space to the irritation/ amusement of many of the midwives – who were not used to a giant human licorice allsort thundering into their babe-sensitive space. I was mortified once I realized my over-estent- but for some reason, M loved the hilarity of the whole situation and remembers it with great affection – – how it brought some fun and sweetness into the zone and scented the room and her daughter- and captured, olfactively, my living reality as an absolute blunderbuss.

I don’t, in truth, think the perfume has particularly changed since then. And as I said, it did smell incredible the next morning – the best vanilla ever. Angelic vanilla dust. Gorgeous. I just can’t do that middle section again though,- that nasty, nasty, chlorine at the heart that is hideous. (But any other fellow Elephanters, who love this curious perfume, please do feel free to add your own take on the scenario). And bizarrely, though they could hardly be more different, I have found in the time since that the final stages of Puredistance’s famously green fresh and floral Antonia extrait de parfum- in its vanilla and vetiver thickness, more ambery and gourmand, even spicy, than is realized by most perfumisti ,on me, turns out quite similar, and is currently filling the giant shoes of the unwearable Kenzo in a far more appropriate fashion that goes better with Neil Chapman, Version March 2026. .I am getting that chalky, rich and sultry effect without having to wade in elephant sized wellington boots through swimming pools of caraway and mango and risking death to get to the finish. Yes, you can trumpet all you like about how good this perfume is – and its fans understandably still go nuts over it, the ultimate chai latte, the best winter spice ever, etc etc etc etc and they are right. It is kind of amazing, which is why I bought it. But for me personally, I can say with some certainty that, for now at least, this zoo is closed.