Form and Fashion: Balenciaga's Scent Trajectory (With a Drawing)

I've never really seen how the early scents produced under the Balenciaga name had much to do with the designs, let alone mystique, of the man himself. In The Master Of Us All: Balenciaga, His Work Rooms, His World, Mary Blume refers to the couturier's presiding aesthetic as "austere extravagance", demonstrating, again, through the course of the book, for anyone who wouldn't know just by looking at his often structurally oblique clothes, that the man, if not the myth, was virtually intractable.

His garments were often, like something out of nature, unclassifiable works of wonder - and he himself, private to the extreme, offered nothing by way of context or explication. He avoided the public, and he avoided trends. In a world that increasingly, post Dior, valued novelty and an ever changing theme, Balenciaga moved more organically, refining his line at a snail's pace. You look at Dior, Saint Laurent, or Givenchy, several of his contemporaries, and see with each year a new iteration, a different direction. Balenciaga was more of a nautilus, curling outward more and more elaborately over time from some undisclosed axis. Many design strategies of his time - most notably, Dior's New Look - reshaped or remapped the female physique. Balenciaga seemed to dematerialize it, rendering each woman who wore him a floating nimbus of shifting lines and moods. Somewhere inside that cloud, an indivisable idea.

The early Balenciaga fragrances are wonderful, but they seem more like something Dior or Givenchy might have inspired. However wonderful they are, they fall far more easily into categorization than the man or the inimitable clothes he created. His first two fragrances, La Fuite des Heures and Le Dix, were released between 1947 and 1949, more than a decade after the designer had moved from Spain to his Paris atelier. I've never smelled La Fuite des Heures. Released years later for the American market as Fleeting Moment, it has been attributed to Germaine Cellier (of Bandit, Fracas, and Jolie Madam) and described varyingly as a chypre and an aldehydic floral. Le Dix, named after the address at 10 Avenue George V where sat Balenciaga's fashion house, is most definitely an aldehydic floral, emphasis on soft woods and cool violet.

While arguably austere, Le Dix is hardly extravagant. Granted, thanks to No. 5, the fashion at the time was for aldehydic florals, yet something along the lines of the inscrutable woody warmth of Arpege would have made more sense to me. Even compared to Chanel No. 5, Le Dix is delicate and pristine. It's one of my favorite violet fragrances, and has special sentimental value to me, having sat inside my grandmother's medicine cabinet during my childhood in an unmarked miniature bottle, but I would never associate it with anything I've since seen by Balenciaga.

Smelling Le Dix in that unmarked bottle, with no idea where it came from or what it was called, I thought of the fragile vintage tulle dresses housed in an old cardboard box up in my grandmother's attic. You touched them and they started to fall apart, their beads scattering on the floor. Le Dix was something from another time, candied, powdered, and quaint, but indicates none of the sculptural durability of Balenciaga's work. Perhaps this goes toward explaining the earliest ads for the scent, which posed the bottle near the designer's face, lest the link be lost on the consumer, with the simple text: "His creation." It was, in fact, the creation of Roure's Francis Fabron (of L'Air du Temps and L'Interdit).

Le Dix also reminds me of an anecdote from Blume's book regarding Chanel and Balenciaga, once friends, then, abruptly, not. At first an advocate of Balenciaga's artistry, Chanel derided him after a falling out involving a magazine article (was there ever a lifelong friend among Chanel's working relationships?). "To a tough cookie like Chanel," writes Blume, "Balenciaga's vulnerability seemed a weakness. His staff knew it was his strength." Le Dix hints at the vulnerability without underscoring the strength.

After her betrayal, Balenciaga returned to Chanel everything he owned associated with her name, including a portrait of her she'd loaned him, as if to say, "You look at yourself for a change." Anyone can make such a renunciatory gesture. It takes a lot of backbone to enforce it over time, and Balenciaga seems to have, by all reports I can find, never dealing with Chanel again in anything approaching the spirit of their earlier friendship.

He was stronger yet than even that. To the dismay of his friend Givenchy, he attended Chanel's funeral, explaining, "In life there are things one must forget, the ills that people have done to you." It's hard to imagine grudge-holding Chanel appearing at Balenciaga's funeral, had the tables of mortality been turned, and just as hard to imagine that bedrock strength of character smelling Le Dix.

Until the seventies, Le Dix, Fleeting Moment, and a later addition, Quadrille (1955), defined the Balenciaga style through fragrance. Quadrille was rethought (ie reformulated) in the eighties, adapting its mossy chypre structure to the style of those times with an infusion of dark plummy fruits. In either formulation, Quadrille alone comes closest for me to matching or expressing Balenciaga's mystique. You can get a little lost in its moss-laden depths in a way diaphanous Le Dix makes unlikely. Le Dix seems thematically transparent, Quadrille more opaque, its movements more subterranean. Like chiffon, Le Dix seems to hide nothing. Quadrille is sturdier, more voluptuous stuff, recalling the fabrics Balenciaga worked very hard to find - like Gazar, a nubbed silk that took several years to engineer and ably supported the structural folds and contours which became Balenciaga trademarks.

It took a while for the fashions of fragrance to catch up to the fashion of Balenciaga. By then, Balenciaga had closed his salon. By the seventies and eighties, the trend in fragrance was increasingly robust and byzantine, and scents like Ho Hang (1971: a masculine fougere eventually claimed by as many women as men), Michelle (1979: a velvety floriental by Francoise Caron), Portos (1980: a front loaded woody, leathery animalic with a wonderfully pungent cumin accent), and Prelude (1982: an unusual amber pulled in different directions by florals and spices) got closer and closer to the formidable inscrutability that was Balenciaga. These scents required time to understand. Like Balanciaga's constructions - the melon sleeves, the envelope dress, the wedding gown with "coal scuttle" headdress (pictured) - they're at once broadly stroked and infinitely nuanced. The reformulation of Quadrille brought it up to that speed, and taken together these scents, for me, compose a nearly complete and accurate picture of Balenciaga's oeuvre.

Rumba (1989: a rich, patchouli laden floral) tipped the scales to the other side, falling so in step with the trends of its time that, wonderful as it is, it contradicted Balenciaga's singularity. The more recent Balenciaga Paris went full circle, recalling the bright fragility of Le Dix, adding waifish inconsequentiality to Le Dix's ephemeral charms.  Florabotanica put a period on things, and relates to nothing but its own pleasantly content mediocrity. In between, there were Cristobal (1998: floral vanilla), Ho Hang Club (1987: woody leather), and Talisman (1994: early stage fruitchouli), some more decent than others.

(Leave a comment telling me your favorite Balenciaga - or the one you're most curious about - and why, and I'll draw two winners for a sample of one of the following: Le Dix, Quadrille, Cristobal femme/homme, Rumba, Balenciaga Paris, or Prelude)

Balenciaga Paris

Last night, I had a dream I was visiting my step mom, and we got in the camper and drove I don't know where.  Somewhere with an indoor pool and a little coffee house and various dream situational things that made me nervous for no particular reason.  All my dreams are hotbeds of anxiety.  It's never anything particular.  They're just suffused with this unnamed, lurking dread.  I envy people whose dreams are full of well being and happy reunions.  Mine always seem to be about missing flights, unduly upsetting people, looking desperately for an address I can't find, or visiting the dead a minute too late.

My stepmom informed me that the investment thingy my father bullied me into getting was three months past due.  She seemed rather gleeful about it, and of course I couldn't figure out why a.) the statements were coming to her, not me, and b.) why she wouldn't have let me known earlier, so I wouldn't be remiss.  For whatever reason, a friend of mine was sleeping in the bedroom.  Actually, I'd put him in there with another friend, and I was really worried they were going to start having sex, and that it would be noisy, because they were both good looking guys, and they were nude, and they were in a bed together.  So I kept checking on them, hoping for the best.  Later, my step mom was cleaning the place, and she seemed really tall, and after studying her for a while, trying to figure out why suddenly she towered over me when usually she was so short, I looked where her feet should be and I said, "Are you wearing...?"

Yes, Brian, she said, annoyed, I'm wearing stilts.

I woke from the dream relieved not to owe money, though a little sad I haven't in fact been bullied into investing into any such savings schemes.

And I did what I always do when I first wake up.  I went straight to the perfume.  I sprayed on some Balenciaga Paris.  Has anyone smelled that?

The thing about Balenciaga is that it's one of those full-of-well-being fragrances.  I only really got that this morning.  It resolved all the lingering tension from the dream almost instantly.  For weeks I've tried to put my finger on what I like about the fragrance, because, for the most part, the reviews have been, at most, lukewarm.  The biggest surprise, according to the makeupalley customer reviews, seems to be that for something so...faint?...it lasts forever.  Others aren't so friendly, calling it grandmotherly, old fashioned, altogether foul, or just plain unexceptional.  I thought it must just be the bottle, which is incredible - one of the nicest I've seen in a long time.  Maybe because I liked the bottle so much, I carried that enthusiasm over into the fragrance itself, I thought, because, really, it's true what they say, Balenciaga isn't exactly groundbreaking.  So why did I keep coming back to it?

Now I know.  It's essentially a comfort thing.  Balenciaga, with its overloaded creams and slightly sugared violets, is something close to a cashmere blanket.  As others have mentioned, there are a thousand other fragrances like it in circulation.  And a big problem with the thing, for me at least, was the schizoid discrepancy between what it smelled like and how it was advertised.  Charlotte Gainsbourg isn't exactly the soft, candied, creamy sort, and she sticks out like a sore thumb in the ads, like Jennifer Anniston posing as Sophia Loren.  You expect a little more something - a little more edge, a little more oomph - not just because of who Gainsbourg seems to be but because of what Balenciaga fragrances themselves have been in the past.  You want Balenciaga Paris to be something spectacular, and it really isn't.  Neither is a cashmere blanket, most of the time, until it's cold and you wrap yourself up in it.

Later, while shopping at a counter full of things I'd already smelled or bought, I saw Balenciaga again, and in that context it seemed a lot more interesting to me.  I felt like I was better prepared to appreciate it properly.  The thing is, I'm not sure I like this fragrance any less than Balenciaga Le Dix, Prelude, or Quadrille.  And I'm not sure I would like any of those were they to be released right now.  The safety of the past protects them from a certain kind of scrutiny I apply to something when it hits the shelves.  Truthfully, Balenciaga Paris holds its own amongst them, and while in the field of contemporary releases it seems uninspired, held up against the line's classic fragrances it seems perfectly at home.

Balenciaga Paris was created by Olivier Polge, the nose behind Dior Homme, a similar fragrance in many ways.  Like Homme, Paris has a fresh powdery aspect I like.  Both share that distinct creaminess.  Polge also did Kenzo Power, which feels a lot like Balenciaga Paris as well.  Balenciaga's projection is moderate, the longevity decent enough, though with a fragrance this subtle (it's subtle to me) longevity is sort of beside the point.  The violets are somewhat green and peppery, and though people mention carnation, I can't say I detect any.

I woudn't say Balenciaga is a dream, but it certainly seems like a good way to wake from one.

violets are blue...by Brian

Last night, I started thinking about the mini bottle of perfume my grandmother once kept in her medicine cabinet, squirreled away between expired aspirin and a dented tube of Neosporin ointment. A slightly resinous, dewy violet soliflor, it projected much farther than the size of its container would lead you to expect. I have no idea what it was called. It wasn’t labeled. Something very cheap, probably.

Who knows why my grandmother hung onto it all those years. She certainly didn’t wear it—in public. Summers and winters I visited, and each trip I snuck repeatedly into her bathroom, and each year I could recall the scent more specifically in my mind, and I anticipated meeting it again and that shock of recognition and the sense it gave me that all was well.

 I probably don’t need to tell you that I could have spent all day in there with the door locked, that I got lost, sitting on my grandmother’s antique, velvet covered parlor chair, my elbows anchored onto her marble counter top, my mind elsewhere. I doubt I need to explain the intoxicant that perfume was for me. I’m guessing that if you’ve bothered to read this far you’re on the same kind of inexplicably obsessive quest and, like me, can beam to another dimension of pleasure and bittersweet emotional territory simply by placing a bottle of perfume under your nose.

When my grandmother was sick and it was clear she wouldn’t be around much longer I stole the bottle and brought it home with me. I was too ashamed to ask for it, and knew it would be lost forever once she died. I never regretted this filial larceny, as it seemed more like a rescue mission to me. Who else could be counted on to preserve and understand its peculiar mystery? Deceptively banal, it looked like something you would toss out with the rest of someone’s belongings, meaningless detritus from the past.

I placed the bottle in my own medicine cabinet, which seemed to me its natural environment, and the curious thing I noticed from the moment it became mine was that I hadn’t actually been smelling violet all along. It isn’t until someone points it out to you that you detect, say, the leather in Piguet’s Bandit. Before that, it hasn’t existed. Afterwards, you smell Cellier’s masterpiece again and miraculously, to your astonishment, it appears, and stays there—prominently, even—forever after, like the exhaust from a sofa stuffed with cut grass. What I’d been smelling in my grandmother’s mini bottle was my childhood, memories of her and summers there and freedom from worrying intensely about things the way adults do. An incredible sense of love and well-being permeated my consciousness when I inhaled it.

A complex, emotional mother lode of associations had accumulated within the scent over time, for which violet was simply the carrier, a double agent harboring top secret, volatile information. I only recently became aware of top notes and base notes, of linear as opposed to complex compositions. There weren’t perfumers behind Joy and Chanel. They simply existed, like the sky and the sunset, oxygen and birds, situational magic from the universe. I wasn’t a collector or a connoisseur. Perfume wasn’t science.

I didn’t pick scents apart, way back when, or even known it was possible. I didn’t know there were sites to break things down for you. Rose, iris, sandalwood, patchouli, aromachemicals, soliflors and abstracts. Smells were no less mercurial before these terms entered my frame of reference, but they operated in a much more emotional, less strictly analytical way. My experience of fragrance had previously been more primal, and though various perfumes still have the capacity to hijack my consciousness, expanding viscerally in my mind, the intensity doesn’t last as long as it once did, and I suspect that’s because of my arguably psychotic efforts to figure out the name or manufacturer of the juice in my grandmother’s mini bottle.

At one point, several years ago, when my partner was cleaning the bathroom, I heard something shatter, and rushed in to see what was going on. I saw the bottle in shards scattered about the sink, and my response was so violent, so impulsive, so irrational and beyond my control that it sort of terrified me. It meant that my grandmother was now truly gone, and someone close to me had been responsible for her death—or I was. Inconsolable then, I still feel sick when I think about it now. My grandmother kept that scent alive until she couldn’t anymore. I’d taken responsibility for that delicate network of memories and through unconscionable carelessness failed her miserably. My partner collected the larger remains of the bottle, wrapping them in plastic. Some of the liquid remained but has since vanished. I can’t look at it. I get too upset.

Since then, I’ve become like Poe’s unnamed narrator, searching for his beloved Ligeia in other people’s faces. When I approach a perfume counter, I want nothing more than to find my grandmother’s memory. I want that scent back. It’s a time machine. I search for it in all things remotely similar. Trumper’s Ajaccio Violet comes close, foregoing the syrup sweetness which distinguishes most of these soliflors from the vibratory warmth I remember. Close but not quite. It’s impossible for me to think of perfume now without feeling it has nearly religious, sacred properties, and violet has been the holy grail.

Last week, I made an important discovery online. A fragrance I’ve seen at least thirty times in a local discount perfume shop and overlooked as irrelevant smells distinctively, even exclusively, of violet. It was released in 1947, right before my grandmother's home was built, at a time when my grandfather was still trying to make up for his philandering with gifts. The first perfume from the house of Balenciaga, Le Dix is officially described as a floral chypre. Its bottle is a solid , faceted affair, its liquid the color of champagne. It was created by Francis Fabron, the nose behind the original L'Interdit and l'Air du Temps. The pyramid lists neither violet nor aldehydes, and yet these are the perfume's combined impression.

Like other aldehyde constructions, the sum total makes the florals pop, simmering against a cool background of white. In this case, a hot and cold accord materializes, unmistakably violet. Learning this, I rushed over to the store in question, pointing impatiently at the box on the shelf so the Chinese owner, who barely speaks English, would understand. Is old, she said, smiling. You like the old perfume.

I ripped off the cellophane and opened the corrugated glass bottle out in the car, spraying my arm. The air vent carried the fumes up my nostrils, and I jettisoned away, soaring back through time to the high grass outside my grandmother’s window, the feel of her chair’s velvet on my bare thighs and the fabric’s vibrant green hue, the melancholy effect of the striped yellow wallpaper in there and her luxurious gold tub. I heard adult voices outside the door, and saw my little kid face in the mirror, suntanned and frightened, staring back at me.

Then I was in the field by my grandmother’s house riding the lawnmower for the first time, and there they all were in the distance, waving me back, I’d gone too far, but I wanted to show off, so I made another turn, too widely, and before I could stop the thing I’d grazed the enormous vacation trailer my grandmother had taken to Arizona and Florida and Nevada, and I was so ashamed by my bravado, so humiliated that I slammed into park and bolted off into the weeds, and kept running and running, crying so violently I couldn’t see where I was going, until for whatever reason I stopped, panting, just in time to hear my grandmother’s voice calling out to me with the sound of total forgiveness.