A very rare find, my eyes almost popped out on stalks of amazement when I saw Diorling standing there impassively and forlorn, neglected by perfume-blind passersby at th…
Source: I KNOW YOU WANT ME: DIORLING by CHRISTIAN DIOR (1963)
DONALD TRUMP : THE FRAGRANCE
Donald Trump is interesting in that he provokes two extreme reactions in me. On the one hand, I could write reams and reams and reams about what he represents, on analysing his self-centred, bigoted, and very dangerous impact on the world. Simultaneously, at times, he quite simply renders me speechless.
( note: re-reading this now, over two years later, I realize that what I wrote here, syntactically this doesn’t actually make sense. Had he already obliterated my brain by this point? What was the second thing that I was referring to? His UNBELIEVABLE self belief ? ( which still completely ASTOUNDS me, and which I am strangely in awe of, as it is precisely this self-powering Ego thst has allowed him to just smash his way around the world the way he so gobsmackingly has, fucking everything up like a satanic baby….
– didn’t you love the protest ballon in London though?!!! )
Today, tired from work and from reading about him all morning in the weekend newspapers, I am veering more towards the latter.
Sheer stupefaction.
I have never smelled any of the fragrances released by the house of Donald Trump, nor do I intend to, so I will let other people talk about them instead.
“Success” is one of The Haus Of Trump’s more recent releases, ” Trump “his eponymous and original signature perfume – though that last word, perfume, is not one that the misogynist and homophobic, illiterate fools that support him would be very likely to use themselves ( no, this is a Trump ‘cologne’).
No, there are no Donald Trump scents in my own perfume collection, nor will there ever be. But it is quite fascinating to read the quite brilliantly evocative reviews of ‘Donald Trump, The Fragrance’ from the Amazon website, if you care to read through a selection from them that I have cut and pasted below: a curious, and quite toxic mix of gungho macho bullshit and scabrous, seething sarcasm (and it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between.)
All of which, in any case, just shows what a deep fascination this narcissistic monster has for the American public, the world at large, and for people like myself who, in some kind of can’t-look-away-from-the-impending-disaster-that-is-about-to-occur type of syndrome, just can’t get enough. A kind of cynical and masochistic despair at the deep idiocy of the world, alongside an undeniable appreciation of the buffoonery and the camp, as well as his obviously twisted brilliance – this man is very, very canny and he knows just how to plunge deepest into the cruellest prejudices and shabbiest instincts of the ‘disenchfranchised’, who he openly mocks, but who are just too blind in their own crude simplicities to see through what are obviously lies, jingoism and blind, unadulterated ambition. This alone, the fact that so many of us are just totally mesmerized, makes me wonder whether in actual fact, despite all our (too late ) mockery, this man just MIGHT get enough votes to win the next presidential election.
I think I’ll start building my underground nuclear bunker right now.
Here goes, anyway. Some brilliant reviews of Donald Trump The Fragrance.
By Gen. JC Christian, patriot on April 28, 2011
Bullish. That’s the one word that best embodies both the spirit of Trump, the man, and and the fragrance of his cologne.
Indeed, a bull was the image that immediately formed in my mind the first time I smelled “Trump the Fragrance for Men.” I’ll never forget that introductory whiff. It seized hold of my entire being, unleashing a storm of olfactory memories that left me gasping from a perch on a long-forgotten “bulling stool.”
Authentic Americans, patriots like Joe the Plumber and Donald the Trump, simple men who revere the values of the Heartland, will always remember the joyful hours they spent on a bulling stool. Who could forget the wonderful sense of anticipation you feel as you sit there behind the bull, slowly massaging his glorious bull grenades while you screw up the courage to sniff the holy land–that tract of hide that resides so invitingly between the bull bag and the cave of shame–until, eventually, the wanting overcomes the fear and you thrust your nose hard up against the bull and take a whiff.
That, dear readers, is the musky barnyard smell of “Trump the Fragrance.”
But that is only part of the bulling stool experience and its relationship to the Donald. Occasionally, the bull will mistake the grenade massage for a medical examination, and he’ll turn his head and cough. When that happens, bovine physiology dictates that the bull forcefully eject the entire contents of its fourth stomach out through its cave of shame. Imagine leaning into that as you’re thrusting you nose in for a sniff. It’s a breathtaking experience, literally breathtaking. It’s also very exhilarating to take the full force of such a load of pure bull in a single sitting. It’s the only experience that is comparable to sitting through one of Mr. Trump’s speeches. They’re the same thing, really.
By G. Eric Sieferman on April 28, 2011
Since using this life changing product, I’ve experienced several bankruptcies and the dissolution of two or three marriages. Never before have I been so close to achieving a pinnacle of the American Dream. I’d give this balm five stars, but it’s annoying that I have to produce a birth certificate every time I purchase a bottle.
By Railbird on April 20, 2011
Whodda thunk it? A bombastic superannuated meglomaniac freak show attraction is also a fragrance maven? Nu? What next, Donald, advice for the lovelorn? Like its eponym, Eau de Trump is no flower born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air. Place a few drops discretely behind your ear and women will “sense” your presence two floors below. Bloodhounds will find you in a chili pepper patch. Babies will sneeze when you enter a room. Teenage girls will giggle as they text their BFFs. Believe me, it happens!
My marriage had been hitting a rough patch. After 15 years I’d put on weight, all we did was idiotic sitcoms and reheated Stouffers dinners. Maybe the magic had gone out of our relationship. I thought about joining a gym, or showing my wife some consideration or maybe stop flirting with the divorced cocktail waitress with the Dolly Parton wig in the trailer next door. All those things seemed way too hard. Instead, I tried a little Eau d’ and next thing you know, I’m in the sack with the cocktail waitress, and it may be a wig, but those memory glands are for real, baby! (Marriage is way-over rated!)
So it really worked out for me, but I wish I had followed the Donald’s example and gotten a pre-nup. The wife got both halves of the double-wide, but at least, I kept the Harley and the pitbull.
Only for Right Wing Republicans
By Amazon Customer on April 29, 2011
I bought some Trump the Fragrance and tried it out recently. When my wife got a whiff of me she immediately sent me outside to the deck. (Thank goodness the Wi-Fi works out here) She said I wasn’t allowed in the house until November, 2012 unless she could hose that smell off of me.
I’m holding out until the Iowa caucuses!
Can’t please those Democrats.
By C. West on April 30, 2011
I find this ‘fragrance’ to be very reminiscent of a bar scene where men tell lies mostly to impress other men.
Of a man who sees women only as Arm Trophies. If I were the man who squandered his father’s fortune, had a comical combover and lied about my draft deferments, this scent would surely bespeak of all of that and more!
Motel Soap will leave a person more appealing than this, yet the latest in self-promotion of a man failed in everything.
Women who can think for themselves will be repelled. Gold diggers and bimbos will love it.
Wear at your own risk.
Filed under Flowers
THREE HAIRY SCENTS BY ROCHAS, PARIS : : : : MOUSTACHE (1948) + MONSIEUR ROCHAS (1969) + + MACASSAR (1980)
BECAUSE THE EDICT ON FACIAL HAIR AT MY COMPANY BUGS ME EVEN MORE THAN THE ONE ON PERFUME. I HAD TO SHAVE TODAY AFTER THE ‘GOLDEN WEEK’ HOLIDAY AND I FEEL LIKE AN INFURIATED AND EMASCULATED DELILAH (WELL, SAMSON, ACTUALLY, BUT YOU GET MY DRIFT…..)
SAVAGERY & CIVILIZATION: : SYCOMORE by CHANEL (2008)
Sycomore is one of my very, nearly, almost perfumes. In that, if I were to somehow receive a bottle as a present I would be quite thrilled, but I am simultaneously not ever quite thrilled enough to buy one (in Japan you can only get the three hundred dollar 200ml bottle, so that is simply never going to happen). I do want it though, someday. Definitely. And when I do I will probably get through it in no time as I did with my Tom Ford Grey Vetiver and my Maître Parfumeur et Gantier’s Racine (exquisite), and all vetiver perfumes generally. I love them. I feel natural in them.
A refined, dense but very sinewy perfume that is all about vetiver from the start to the finish with its typically Jacques Polge excellence and long-lastingly quality Chanel architecture, Sycomore comes on to the skin fully realized, the vine-like vetiver central note encased in a subtle aldehyde and sandalwood papousse, a fine hint of violets, and the mulched, cool earth of the forest floor – with delicate undertone touches provided by myrtle and tobacco. If you have never smelled this lesser known perfume from the Chanel Exclusifs, however, it is possible that I am perhaps, as usual, poeticizing it (or trying to) a touch too much, because despite the perfume’s very wearable and dependable artistry, I do always feel, every time I smell it, that something is missing within the structure, that it is overly monothematic and needed some iris or some other flowers à la Nº19, or else another note of more left-field eccentricity just to elevate it more imaginatively above the merely chic and ‘beautifully done’. The perfume is very nice, certainly, and one of the very best vetiver fragrances that you can buy, but for me it definitely does lack poetry.
Still, I was happy to reacquaint myself again with Sycomore the other night at the Chanel counter in Yokohama’s grand Takashimaya store, spraying myself liberally and wishing in fact at that moment that I had enough money to just plump for a bottle on the spot (I do, also, I have to say, incidentally, that love that name – Sycomore; so evocative for me, as those trees and the little helicopter seeds that come whirling down gently from above to the autumnal ground were something I was always fascinated by as a child, at my lovely little primary school back home – Oak Cottage, a halcyon time in my education at that school surrounded by fields and trees and the perfect place for a boy like me to indulge in his fertile, strange imagination). Like oak trees and poplars, beech trees and all the beautiful deciduous trees in the parks and the countryside back in Ol’Blighty, sycamores having a very magical quality for me, the England in my DNA, the seasons.
Sycomore the perfume, however, has none of this youthful delicacy. For me, it is an impeccable, elegant, but also very urban perfume – if still a tenuously pertinent scent, in theme and partially in execution, in its green and woody evocations of forest depths, for the film we were about to go and watch at the cinema, the Oscar-winning (and oh, how it went for those Oscars!) ‘The Revenant’ , starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Tom Hardy and directed by the Mexican master of miserabilism, Alejandro Iñnáritu. I am not usually a fan of this director’s work with the exceptions of Birdman and Amores Perros (nihilism and despair are two things I am not really interested in), but I had heard good things about this latest film from some friends of mine, particularly about the innovative cinematography, and was precisely in the mood for being immersed in nature, in the iced landscapes of American and Argentina, in the uncontaminated purity of lakes and rivers and snow, and, after all the pink and camp effrontery of the recent shenanigans in Tokyo with our own film making, just some air, some space, and some good old murderous revenge served ice cold.
You couldn’t really have a more malodorous film than The Revenant. You can see quite clearly that all the characters, from our shuttered, modernised viewpoint, stink. What is fascinating about watching it, beside the intrigue of the story, with its raw desperation and gruelling arduousness, the dazzling photography (the film was made entirely using natural light and it shows), and the piercingly beautiful soundtrack, is the visceral truth that ultimately we really are just animals; beasts fighting for survival, dirty and stench-ridden to the point where we blend right back in with nature and where it doesn’t matter any more; and when the cover up and the lie – perfume, for instance – that intricate olfactory mask with which we adorn ourselves – is exposed as a strange kind of deluded frippery. Yes, we might smell beautiful in our chosen beloved perfumes on a daily basis, but how feral and rancid we would all start to smell in different circumstances, toiling rabidly in rank, soiled bear skins just to stay alive, feeding on raw bison liver and whatever scraps of meat we could get our hands on, as our foul, festering wounds from the bite of the bear reveal the organic rot of our own fragile flesh.
For me, as a man who is totally led by his senses, this fear of the wild pungence that we subconsciously know lurks always there within us was one thing that was intimately exposed in watching this quite masterfully rendered film (with Sycomore, as a contrast, always providing a mesmerisingly oppositional accompaniment). Based on the true story of a fur trapper who was savaged by a bear, betrayed by his fellow hunters and left for dead in the wilderness after witnessing his son being cruelly murdered, we watch a mauled, sick and bewildered individual crawl 200 miles through unchartered pristine terrain in vast, primal landscapes of iced rivers, mountains and wind-whipped dark green pine forests, drenched in freezing waters, always on the verge of shivering to death (as the actors and crew were in real life, apparently, always at the whim of their quixotic and sadistic director), compelling and far-reaching to the eyes and the brain in its clear and awe-filled capturing of nature……..but the stench. The putridity. The clinging, great unwashedness. I could feel it. Like the bear that bites through his flesh and drools incapably over his face (a viscerally impactful scene that is nevertheless quite hard to watch as you quake in your cinema seat), the bear is just protecting its young, reacting on instinct, just as the character, Hugh Glass, is trying to protect his. Both creatures are ensconced in their condensed, unwashed odours, the smells that chemically come naturally from their heat producing bodies, as the trappers come across Glass – helpless, bleeding and broken, almost crushed beneath the hulk of the huge wild bear that, stabbed and shot, has fallen down now into a crevasse on top of him, the man on the verge of death and oblivion. Against the back drop of all the ice, and the snow, and the howling, ferocious winds, and the constant unrelentingness of nature, you realize quite profoundly, then, that his crude, foul smells, his blood mingling with the bear’s, would just in fact, in these circumstances, be irrelevant, that they might even be a source of comfort: the warm moisture of self, of still breathing, of still being alive.
THE CRUEL DESECRATION OF YARDLEY ENGLISH LAVENDER (1913)
Like any other perfume lover, the receiving of bottles of scent for Christmas, or a birthday, or any other special occasion, is reason for excitement. My in-laws are from Norfolk, home of the world’s finest lavender (I prefer it to the French or the Bulgarian, this very English, camphoraceous lavender with just the right balance of purpleness, herbs and fruit) and they generously brought over a bottle of Yardley English Lavender in my Christmas package when they came over in December. I was of course delighted to receive it, particularly as I totally associate where Duncan is from with the scent of this hallowed, ancient plant. Daphne will always send me sachets of dried lavender flowers from her garden, which I love to put under my pillow, and we even once went on an fascinating lavender tour all together somewhere out in the countryside in Norfolk, being guided through the differing varietals and seeing the distillery plant where the essential oil is produced. I shed a tear as I saw the machine produce a pure drop of extracted lavender, and watched it drip slowly down into the receptacle beneath.
As for lavender perfumes, while I am not a massive fan of the note on myself, I do love it on the D, from Guerlain’s exquisite Lavande Velours, to Penhaligons’ suavely rendered Sartorial, to Serge Lutens Gris Clair. I have worn Caron Pour Un Homme on occasion, that sultry, musky vanilla fused masculine lavender that is still extremely successful among men back in its homeland (as is that other lavender classic, Eau Sauvage, another one of my youthful favourites when I was seventeen), but as a brilliantly health preserving essence (there is no other essential oil as useful as lavender), I only have the highest veneration for lavender anything in general. I suppose in comparison to these other lavender kisses, Yardley’s English Lavender was always a very old fashioned scent – if you really want to look at it that way and adopt that tedious mindset- but for me it was more like timeless.
Yardley English lavender, especially in the extrait form you see it above, the one I always bought for myself, was clear, removed from reality, refined, cold, and disdainful almost: unsweetened and unadorned, sharp yet soft; natural, very English, and utterly, utterly dignified. I would sometimes buy it to just wear at those moments where I just wanted quiet and repose, and even picked up a hair pomade once which I sometimes use even now by my bedside to relax me at night.
Sadly, Yardley seems to have gone down the trash-it-in-desperation route common to plenty of perfume manufacturers hoping to stay relevant and modern and in the process have utterly desecrated this once simple but beautiful scent beyond description. My relatives back in Norwich were not to know this of course, and I was still pleased to receive it (as I am virtually any perfume), and I know this is going to come across as me being ungrateful and petulant. Forgive me if that is the case. But the indignation I feel upon smelling this cheap common muck that is imposting in the place of the original perfume does need to be expressed. Where once there was a mauve, muslin clarity; thick glass pools that were dry and healthful, uplifting yet calming, now, once the brief and very incongruous top notes of real English lavender have dissipated, all you have on the back of your reeking hand is a vanillic, inexpensive ‘sexy’ bathroom spray chemical accord that has defiled and sacrileged what was once a pillar of perfumery for those who liked it quiet, dream inducing and classical in an attempt to make it pertinent and somehow ‘sensual’.
Absent mindedly picking up the new bottle today has suddenly and inexplicably set off this furious rampage, sorry
(no!!!! look at it!! Sheer toilet cleaner! Surely the whole point of keeping perfumes like this is actually for the very heritage they represent: surely the olde worlde Anglophilia of the original products were the reason that they were still very popular worldwide in the first place ( I actually picked up my tub of lavender brilliantine in Dubai airport, where there was a huge array of the originally packaged Yardleyy products on display, for people from that region probably appealing as total Anglo-Exotica). But in not only giving us an ugly and unattractive bottle, but also taking away the heart of the original fragrance, with its delicately strewn bouqet garni of rosemary, moss and eucalyptus and replacing it with this ‘puking party slag’ overall vibe, Yardley have created an irreconcilable monster that will be incompatible, I would imagine, with virtually anyone. Who the hell will want this shit? The ‘young’ will still find it boring and old fashioned, or just think that it smells like something that belongs in a toilet. Older devotees will simply mourn the passing of the scent they originally loved, and shun it like the grave. As for me, I am just looking forward to having access to the real thing when I come back to England in August. Those lavender fields still waiting for me, hopefully, if we have time for another visit (Daphne and Rod, can we?), and that perfect, perfect essential oil that I would like to stock up on and bring with me back to Japan, to sprinkle on my sheets or in my morning bath water; the smell of raw lavender flowers and leaves, sunning themselves in the late evening English summer light…..
This new and ugly bastardisation, on the other hand, can just go and screw itself.
NINE AND A HALF WEEKS: : : : TUBEROSA by SANTA MARIA NOVELLA (1939)
Off-white lipid tuberoses float in musked, Italian water: looming, moonstruck flowers that exhale blushlessly with a pure and florally animal sexuality – full, rude skinned smells to make the introspective, the loveless, and the anaphrodisically affected white floral hater shudder.
But for hot and uninhibited lovers of the flesh, these beautifully erotic flowers, aided and abetted and then captured in rich alcoholic liquid by those Florentine magicians of the monastery (their chastity very much in doubt as the fumes of this tuberosa rise up from the flacon) coalesce beautifully to produce an unfettered and uncensored perfume that is mesmerizing: rich, sweet, natural and heavy; langid and dripping, like barely sated bodies in blissfully semi-conscious repose.
DO YOU DREAM ABOUT PERFUME?
I have just woken up from a nightmare in which I was trapped in a hotel room in the Czech Republic with my Japanese boss. I was stressed out of my face despite the fascinating array of characters that kept appearing, yet amid the maelstrom, being chastised for lighting a candle in the middle of class (‘but I just wanted to create a nice atmosphere!) I still somehow managed to discover on the way there an intriguing (and actually non-existent) perfume for about 4 Euros – something ‘-issima’ by Armani, spicy, adulterous, leathery and fur-coaty- outside the window of a Czech curiosity shop (I had been in Mexico, but suddenly I went over the border and it was Eastern Europe). I wanted it, and there were other things in there as well, in the dark interior of the shop, really rare looking Carons and their like in beautiful bottles that I was desperate to own but was then dragged away. Thank god that Duncan woke me up with a cup of tea just at the moment that I realized that I and my vicious castigator would be sleeping next to each other and that I would not get a second’s sleep. I could feel my throat closing over. This often happens to me, though. I dream about perfumes that don’t exist. And I can physically smell them.
Filed under Flowers, Psychodrama
D E L I R I O U S (a celebration, and exploration, of all things jasmine, featuring: JASMIN DE NUIT by THE DIFFERENT COMPANY + ACASIOSA by CARON + JASMINE ATTAR by AMOUAGE + VENT DE JASMIN by IL PROFUMO + VELVET DESIRE by DOLCE & GABBANA + OPHELIA by HEELEY + A LA NUIT by SERGE LUTENS + IKAT JASMINE by ERIN LAUDER + JARDIN BLANC by MAITRE PARFUMEUR ET GANTIER + FLEURS D’OMBRE JASMIN LILAS by JEAN CHARLES BROSSEAU + VOILE DE JASMIN by BULGARI + IMPERIAL TEA by KILIAN + FIRST by VAN CLEEF & ARPELS + ECLAT DE JASMIN by ARMANI PRIVE + WHITE JASMINE & MINT by JO MALONE + JASMINE FULL by MONTALE + NIGHT BLOOMING JASMINE by FLORIS + GIANFRANCO FERRE + SARRASINS by SERGE LUTENS + LA REINE MARGOT by LES PARFUMS HISTORIQUES + LUST by GORILLA PERFUMES + LOVE AND TEARS by BY KILIAN + GELSOMINO by SANTA MARIA NOVELLA +PALAIS JAMAIS by ETRO + JASMIN ET CIGARETTE by ETAT LIBRE D’ORANGE + CAROLINA HERRERA + LE JASMIN by ANNICK GOUTAL + ORIO by MONA DI ORIO + SAMSARA by GUERLAIN + JASMIN ROUGE by TOM FORD + JAZMIN by LE JARDIN DE JIMMY BOYD + OLENE by DIPTYQUE + SONGES by ANNICK GOUTAL + EVA EVANTHIA’S INDIAN JASMINE )
IT’S JUST OUT, FILLING UP THE MOUNTAINS AS I WALKED HOME, AND I KNOW THAT PRINCE WOULD ALSO HAVE LOVED IT.
WHEN 2 R IN LOVE……
Filed under Flowers
THE RECENT HERMES RELEASES: : : EQUIPAGE GERANIUM (2015), EAU DE RHUBARBE ECARLATE (2016) + EAU DE NEROLI DORE (2016)
You could do far worse than the contemporary line up of Hermès colognes. From the crisp, citric classicism of Eau d’Orange Verte (green, subdued and angular as it always smelled), the plush, more obvious pink grapefruit of Eau De Pamplemousse Rose; the calm, blue mysticism of Eau de Narcisse Bleu and the more sensual Eau de Mandarine Ambrée (the one I am closest to buying at the moment because it reminds me somewhat of vintage Calvin Klein Obsession and immediately makes me feel happy); and, now, Eau de Néroli Doré and Eau de Rhubarbe Ecarlate, these clear and relatively reasonably priced fragrances are clean, fresh, but effectively pleasing spring and summer scents that work well as taut, spritzy pick-me-ups.
As with the Hermessences, I like some more than others. Eau de Gentiane Blanche doesn’t really grab me (though I appreciate its pale and watery oddness), and though I enjoyed certain facets of Iris Ukiyoé, Epice Marine, Santal Massoia, and Vanille Galante, ultimately, neither did they. The ‘new’ rhubarb, Rhubarbe Ecarlate (which in fact smells almost embarrassingly familiar), also courts my ambivalence. It is quite nice, and should probably be a commercial success I would imagine with its faint vanilla custard note running through it (white musks), reminding me of particularly nostalgic boiled sweets you can still get from a confectioner’s shop in Hurst St. in Birmingham ( Rhubarb and custard. I have always loved that combination). Over this soft and malleable skin scent base note is layed a fine, fruity, and indeed, truly red rhubarb accord that bursts forth from the flacon, appealingly rendered but a touch unimaginative, coming across rather like Rose Ikebana and Eau De Pamplemousse Rose’s sturdy, but perhaps less intelligent, younger cousin. That this is Christine Nagel’s first work in her new position alongside Jean Claude Ellena comes as something of a surprise, then, as it feels like a copy – albeit more rounded and smooth – of her co-worker’s own oeuvre, as though only just esconced in the Hermès studios she is as yet still afraid to really experiment.
Ellena’s own neroli (for which Tunisia and Morocco apparently had half of their annual neroli crop bough up by Hermès) is more successful in terms of creativity – a raspingly smooth, almost bitter, very natural orange blossom scent that is very neroli-centric and indeed smells clean and golden with an unusual underlay of saffron. I like it better than the recent Eau Des Sens by Diptyque, another orange blossom effusion (is this the latest ingredient du jour?) because it smells less synthetic to me and more refined. Neroli lovers should definitely give this one a spin – it would make a very pleasing travel companion I would imagine, but my partner is a confirmed neroli-hater and I would never personally get away with it ( I sometimes secretly spritz on some Annick Goutal Neroli on sunny days when he is not looking, though, my personal favourite interpretation of these provocative and pungent, smell-me early summer flowers).
Surprisingly, given how awful most reformulations or ‘reimaginations’ of classic, discontinued scents tend to be on the whole, Jean Claude Ellenas’s remixes of the classic Hermès masculines are more successful than I would have imagined. I was happy to reacquaint myself with Bel Ami Vetiver again recently- a beautifully rich and elegant scent that seemed like a real Duncan contender to me when I smelled it the first time, and better than the current formulation of Bel Ami which feels a bit doctored. (The original was great -like a hairy, gay 70’s porn star having a quiet night in at home in his leather dungeon) but I personally find it, now, a bit other era – only someone really working the theme with confidence and with the appropriately hirsute physique could properly carry it off, in my opinion. The vetiver remake – more held together and now – is more up to date, modern and more easily worn.
Another classic by the house, Equipage, by Guy Robert (Calèche, Doblis, Madame Rochas) was already the epitome of male elegance for me – one of the most appealing of the traditional cigar-smoking, properly orchestrated masculines – I have a vintage bottle that I dip into from time to time on an autumnal Sunday, say, in a thick-knit woollen sweater as the golden light of yellow leaves filters through the garden. Complex, citric, aromatic, floral (lily) and delicately spicy, Equipage represents the thorough dignity of the thinking male without the bulging thongs of the chest-thumping 70’s ballbearers. There are few classical male scents this intricate, light, yet simultaneously trustworthy, full and self-assured.
The geranium variant of Equipage seem to me to be Ellena at his more experimental and playful, taking a fresh and powdery, yet still quite manly fougère accord, draining out some of the smudged old-school musky animalics that date this kind of perfume easily, and flushing it with a cool, Hermesian fraîcheur, the geranium flower note hale, uplifting and fresh from the bathroom (in fact the whole very much reminds me, in its overall projection, with its rose and sandalwood and cloves, of Imperial leather soap, a creamy and soothing smell which I have always loved and sometimes ask people to bring me from England when they come to stay). Its appearance in Geranium Equipage makes the perfume very wearable, humorous and life-loving – cool, neo retro at its very best.
All housed in similar bottles, now, as you can see in these pictures, the Hermès full collection of perfumes may represent a certain clean, held-back conservatism, bound very firmly by the Parisian laws of chic, and now, packaged quite homogeneously as well. But there is plenty of poetry and playfulness within these scents too. They basically all smell good, imbued with a luxurious feeling of calm and glassy detachment. In these woefully crass and oversugared times, I have to say that I do admire the dignity that the house seems almost effortlessly to maintain.
