Comme des Garçons: Original

A good ten years before I started collecting perfume in earnest, I visited New York, and made a stop at Barney's. I'd always loved perfume but I didn't wear it much, if ever. I had an old bottle of Coriandre and a few other things, and I kept these in the bathroom cabinet, back when there was room to do such a thing. I'm not sure what I was doing at Barney's, or why I felt it necessary to go - but Comme des Garçons had just come out, and it was heavily represented on the first floor, and there wasn't much time wasted between smelling it and purchasing it.

A few years later, I gave my practically full bottle away. A friend really loved it, and it was hard to make an argument with myself for keeping it, given I never wore it. Several years later, once I had quite a few fragrances, so much that there was no more room in the bathroom cabinet, I was in said friend's bathroom and saw my old bottle of Comme des Garçons sitting there on the counter. I smelled it again and tried to remember why I'd thought it rational in any way to part with it. Within a few weeks I'd purchased another bottle online.

Marc Buxton created this fragrance in 1994, and while there might have been a few things like it at the time, I'd never smelled them. Intensely woody and spicy, Comme des Garçons explores now standard territory for niche (and even mainstream) perfumery - CDG itself has investigated nearly every facet represented here in its own range of perfumes since - and yet, nearly fifteen years later, the fragrance smells entirely new each time I smell it.

Interviewed upon its release, Buxton spoke of the freedom he was given - and the responsibility that came with it. Given carte blanche creatively, he was limited only by his conviction that the fragrance should be something one could, and would want to, wear. It is wearable, but also stratifying. The alleged medicinal aspects of Comme des Garçons waver on a line that divides opinion. That said, this is no Secretions Magnifiques. I say alleged because I've never gotten any such medicinal thing smelling it. I get woods (sandalwood, cedar), spices (cardamom, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper, coriander), incense (frankincense), honey, and something which conjures rose. The overall impression for me is something as boozy and illicit as a prohibition speakeasy - a little wood, a little leather, the sense of something you wear with the intent of getting yourself into some trouble.

Comme des Garçons is long lasting but not hugely diffusive on me. It falls into a category I have no name for in my collection but which includes Black Cashmere, L'Air du Desert Marocain, Yatagan, Norma Kamali Incense, Monk, Moschino de Moschino, and Jubilation XXV, among others. What is that category, exactly? You'd have to tell me. When I feel like what CDG has to offer, nothing else, not Lutens, Montale, the Incense Series, or even any other fragrance in this loose category will do. Of all the interesting things Marc Buxton has done, this remains my favorite.

Scents I've Reconsidered: Shocking!, Krizia Krazy, CDG Red Series Carnation

Something happened this year. This Fall. Is it because the Summer was so extreme? I could barely smell anything the last four or five months. Spring shot past without registering, plunging us into one of the hottest Summers on record. In that heat, it wasn't just that my skin ate up perfume. My nose didn't seem to be functioning properly, either. I was like the squirrel who thinks the sky is falling in. I forgot, I guess, that seasons pass. I'd started to think it would always be that way. I'd just never be able to smell much again.

So Fall has been a real bargain for me. I always rediscover scents I'd forgotten about when October rolls back around. But I rarely reassess them so drastically. I'm looking at and smelling things in an entirely different way. Logic would dictate that only lighter fragrances reinvent themselves in cooler weather: the cold prolongs their effects, for one. But I'm finding that even heavier scents seem like different beasts to me.

Shocking! de Schiaparelli

The other day, I sprayed on some Shocking! by Schiaparelli, and I was astonished at how deeply I'd previously misapprehended it. I've always loved it, but many of its subtleties were lost on me. I could smell clove, honey, and rose, the polar points of the fragrance. I didn't think of Shocking! as anything remotely close to subtle. The name wasn't at all ironic to me, despite the exclamation point. All I got was the bombast.

This time, I could smell the imaginary places in between, the intricate tensions created by such bold juxtapositions. The tarragon up top was more discernible. I could discern between the tarragon and everything else going on in the opening. And I appreciated the slow, inexorable descent into patchouli, civet, and labdanum, as well as the influence of , I think, vanilla. I'd always thought of Shocking! as a heavy tank of a scent (a good thing, in my opinion) but smelling all these things at play I've seen more clearly how the scent fits into the Schiaparelli sensibility; like a giant lobster on an elegant evening gown, yes, it's somewhat jolting. But the gown is definitely there to give the kitsch emphasis and contrast, taking it into irony.

My bottle is probably from the seventies, possibly the eighties. The ingredients list only parfum, alcohol, and aqua. Shocking was created in 1937 by Jean Carles, the nose behind tweedy green fantasia Ma Griffe and--more tellingly, in this context--Tabu. I have no idea what Tabu once smelled like. I imagine it possessed a lot more of Shocking!'s subtleties.

Krazy de Krizia

I've owned it for well over a year. So I had it last winter, as well. You would think I'd be more than a little familiar with its range. To me, it was merely an Obsession clone. It came out in 91, five or six years after the cultural landmark which was Obsession. That fragrance has changed significantly over the past five to ten years. Obsession is still Obsession, but more piquant up top, more shrill overall, and much thinned out toward the bottom.

I assumed, smelling Krazy, that Krazy gave a more accurate indication of what Obsession once was. What I see this winter is that Krazy, though it speaks the same language, has a slightly different inflection and is much softer at the punctuation points. Krazy is hard to find now, but I've been fortunate enough to find two bottles: one in edp, the other edt.

Several things strike me as being significant differences between Obsession and Krazy. Krazy's pyramid includes Lily-of-the-valley and aldehydes. I believe the Lily-of-the-valley must give it that dulcet quality which sets it notably apart from Obsession when you really get down to it, providing a note of weird, unexpected dissonance, a muted counterpoint. The aldehydes give Krazy a quality of amplification as well. It was interesting to rediscover Krazy lately, because the perfumer behind it, Dominique Ropion, is much discussed these days for what I suspect is a far less interesting or compelling fragrance, Portrait of a Lady.

Carnation by Commes des Garçons Red Series

This one disappointed me when I smelled it a few years ago. I bought it, then returned it, having smelled it all day on my hand. Too subtle, I decided, or something to that effect. It's hard to remember what I was thinking at this point because I like it very much now, and smell it wafting up from my skin for quite some time after application. On the reviews sites, Carnation is criticized for the candied red hots quality people say it has. Too much clove. Not enough persistence. Where's the rose?

I do smell the rose now, where I didn't before. Yes, it is submerged under a rather formidable clove and cinnamon one-two punch. You still feel their impact, but rose softens the blow. Jasmine is listed in the pyramid but I'm still not getting that, however enlightened of late I am. What I'm getting now and missed before is an update of a classic carnation soliflore: rather than the dainty budoir carnation of old, this one radiates with a modern kind of warmth and assertiveness. It feels both friendly and fearsome; there's the slightest bit of edge there.

Highwayman (Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab)

Few fragrances are discussed on the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab forum with as much bewilderment as Highwayman. Though not without fans, it seems to leave detractors feeling as if they've been assaulted by some unseen hand. Two days into spending time with it, I started comparing it to Angel, not because it smells similar, but because Angel elicits equally strong, equally contradictory reactions, and because, like Angel, Highwayman is a proposition of opposites which can be as off-putting as it is mind-bending.

Many of the Black Phoenix fragrances require creative association on the part of the wearer; the oils are interpretations of a theme or a subject, and sometimes they're left of center to your expectations. Dracul's pine and mint notes--brisk, almost cheery--are anything but vampiric for some. Jasmine and patchouli might not readily come to mind when you think of the cryptic caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. Names like Sin and Perversion are bound to divide opinion. These things are discussed at length on the forum by fan and foe alike.

The first image I got, hearing the name Highwayman, was a pavement-bound drifter, dressed in scuffed leather, mirrored sunglasses hiding his eyes, vapors rising off the asphalt around him, desert on either side of the road; an unshaven stranger, fairly unwashed, his face and hands scuffed with the grease, grass, and dirt of innumerable days out in the open. That image sprang to life like a dry sponge hitting water the moment I smelled the fragrance.

Highwayman is the best leather fragrance I've ever smelled, and I've smelled quite a few. There's just no comparison. My biggest disappointment, even with my favorite leathers, is their eagerness to tame the foul harmony of the real thing. Chanel Cuir de Russie and Lancome Cuir make friendly with florals. Even more openly jarring leathers, like Heeley's Cuir Pleine Fleur, are ultimately a lot more softened than I'd like. Knize Ten, too, is incomparable--I wouldn't be without it--yet as it ventures deeper into tanned territory it sprinkles sweetener about generously. Creed's Royal English Leather and Parfum D'Empire's Cuir Ottoman are smooth and buttery, and ultimately more about amber than anything else. I want something that smells of the undomesticated animal it came from.

Highwayman has gardenia, rose, and jasmine in it but you'd never guess. Then again, gardenia and indolic jasmine are the last thing you'd expect to be paired with leather, about as far removed from the polite iris of Cuir de Russie as a baseball is from a basketball court. There's a floral aspect to Highwayman but you'd be hard pressed to say exactly what. It enhances the overall effect perfectly, the way the unlikely addition of chocolate to patchouli radicalized antagonistic opposites in Angel. The rubbery, camphorous vibe of gardenia works ideally here, and your mind continues to struggle its way around such an improbable counterpart.

Highwayman's biggest emphasis is on the smoked tarry ambience of creosote. The asphalt drives of my childhood were fertile with this smell during the summer, when the sun baked their dark surfaces, giving them a tactile rubbery spring and an aroma which seemed both aggressively unnatural and perfectly appropriate to the surrounding environment, smelling as much of wood as smoke. This quality, without taking Highwayman away from leather, places it alongside Santa Maria Novella's wonderful Nostalgia, which is a much more civilized version of Highwayman, a volatile marriage of creosote and kerosene. The scorched pavement Nostalgia burns rubber on is far too small a patch of land. It doesn't last. Highwayman is a wide open road, and it goes on forever.

Another useful comparison is Garage, from the Comme des Garçons Synthetics series. Again, Garage is a much more transparent and affable fragrance than Highwayman, but it plays around in the same space, among fuel spills and oil leaks and the rubber of well-worn tires. Garage pulls up to the dangling tennis ball, but, unlike Highwayman, it leaves the electric door open, allowing the air to circulate. Highwayman is more of a shut-in. It even lights a cigarette. Like Garage, Highwayman's effects have a lot to do with vetiver. Garage, again, cleans that up, making it a much prettier, more presentable contributor. Highwayman uses vetiver the way several good BPAL fragrances do, exploiting its rich, almost chocolatey depth, full of happy contradictions. The dry down of Highwayman is predominately vetiver, and not dissimilar to Lalique's Encre Noire.

I smell so many things that the idea of a holy grail seems a little bizarre in theory, like finding a needle in a haystack. I've smelled a lot of Black Phoenix scents too, and love more than I like. Some, like Djinn and Now Winter Lights Enlarge, are uncommonly good. The past year introduced me to Tabac Aurea by Sonoma Scent Studio and Teo Cabanel's Alahine. I knew when I smelled them what people mean when they designate a holy grail fragrance. It isn't that I wear these all the time, or even often. But they bond with my sensibility in a powerful, emotional way, as if they sprung out of my imagination, or take root there in a wonderfully parasitic way. Highwayman is at the top of that list.

Fendi, "For Women"

With so many of the greats set for discontinuation, it probably seems silly to wax nostalgic about the original Fendi, which was discontinued all the way back in 2005, before any of the crippling restrictions went into effect. Even recently extinct Palazzo is a more practical cause celebre.  Still, before I'd ever heard anything about Guerlain or Givenchy, I was spending what seemed like a fortune at the time (1985) for a bottle of Fendi eau de toilette. It was one of the first perfumes I ever bought, and though it was intended for women and owning it would give me some explaining to do, I couldn't help myself. I had to have it.

I've always been a sucker for a good wood smoke fragrance, which is what I took Fendi to be. I had no idea what was actually in it.  I only knew they sold it in the women's department, and that I loved it beyond reason. Now I know the pyramid: cardamom, coriander, bergamot, mandarin, laurel leaves, lily-of-the-valley, geranium, cypress, cedar, moss, labdanum, tonka. What's most remarkable about this incredibly potent perfume--potent even among its eighties sisters--is how devoid of floral notes it is. What, even then, made it feminine? It has less florals than most of today's men's colognes. Dior Homme is far more floral than Fendi, but so are less overtly flowery male fragrances.

Smelling Fendi now, years after first purchasing it, I'm able to examine it a lot more closely, a little more out in the open, and I realize it really isn't a wood smoke fragrance either, not officially, not exactly.  It smells leathery, with incense undertones, a pronounced herbal influence, and spices.  The spices, of course, aren't polite.  Cardamom gives Fendi a piercing, camphorous quality, a touch of resinous warmth; coriander magnifies the combustibility, reinforcing the overall terpenoid character.

As it turns out, Fendi has a lot more in common with masculines than feminines, a disposition signaled by the advertisement, which depicted a woman snuggling up to Michelangelo's David, perhaps her inner male.  Fendi is closer to aromatic fragrances like Kouros (geranium, coriander, laurel), Trussardi (laurel, geranium, tonka, landanum), and Paco Rabanne (tonka, geranium, laurel) than Poison, Giorgio, or Paris.  Several years later, Fendi would affirm this by producing Fendi Uomo, a more officially masculine variation on the women's fragrance, close enough in spirit that the two might as well have been brothers.

Both EDT and EDP require a light touch.  Fendi EDP is a little less overtly smoky to my nose, but the dry down comes very close to what you get in the EDT.  Both have off the chart longevity.  Comparisons have been made to balsamic orientals like Youth Dew, Bal a Versailles, and Opium, but Fendi is nowhere close to keeping that company.  It has no fruity embellishments and, as mentioned, no discernible floral backbone.  Granted, Youth Dew is no delicate flower itself, but Fendi is butcher still, and maybe even ahead of its time.  Ten years younger, it relates very clearly to the original Comme des Garçons by Marc Buxton (geranium, cardamom, coriander, nutmeg, labdanum, cedarwood) and it has more than a little in common with Comme des Garçons 2 Man, as well, also by Buxton.  Michael Edwards classifies Fendi as a floral chypre, which seems a bit of a stretch.  Still, though not listed, oakmoss is in the basenotes, and lily of the valley IS, after all, a flower.  Fendi is still available online.  I would love to know who created it. 

Random Thoughts on Shocking de Schiaparelli

Recently, over at nowsmellthis.blogharbor.com, Angela posted a piece on Shocking de Schiaparelli, comparing old version to new. The lucky woman found a bottle of one or the other at the thrift store, along with a quilted robe and a shell-ornamented soap dish, and reports that the versions are only marginally related.

I've never smelled the orginal, though I was told by Christopher Brosius of CB I Hate Perfume that it surprised him: "Not at all what I expected--but then, that was Elsa's genius... I can say that I was expecting something rather deep and exotic from 'Shocking' but found it to be quite light, fresh and brisk - essentially the exact opposite of Chanel no. 5 (which present incarnation I must say I LOATHE, although I do get the point of the original)." Sometime last year, I found a bottle of Shocking (the 1990s reformulation, I'm guessing) and have thoroughly enjoyed the fragrance, however big a bastardization of the Jean Carles original it might be. For me, the newer Shocking has few peers in the category of spice rose, with an excellent ratio of longevity to projection. I'm going to put myself out on a limb and say that I suspect Brosius would dislike it, as in interviews he's made it very clear what he thinks of the volume at which contemporary perfume speaks as a whole. It's true, new Shocking speaks loudly at first, but it settles down into something I'm willing to wait out. Angela isn't exaggerating when she says a spritz of Shocking lasts all day. It does, and then some, in my experience. Honeyed and balsamic, with a prominent clove note, it grows richer and more interesting as time goes on.

Schiaparelli herself interests me more and more, too, especially after reading Canadian writer Derek McCormack's latest book, The Show That Smells. Over the top and tightly written, the novel recounts the story of a non-existant "movie" made by Todd Downing, director of the cult classic Freaks, which stars Elsa Lancaster in the role of Elsa Schiaparelli, a vampire. Her arch-nemesis: Coco Chanel. The whole thing takes place in a hall of mirrors, where Schiaparelli and Chanel fight for the soul of poor, hapless Carrie, whose husband, country singer Jimmy, is dying of Tuberculosis. Schiaparelli agrees to save Jimmy if Carrie will relinquish her soul. I think she wants to eat her, too. Schiaparelli's restorative magic elixir? Why, Shocking, of course. Chanel plays good, Schiaparelli bad, and it's abundantly clear, from the first sentence, that McCormack clearly favors the latter. The Carter Family make appearances as well in this "thrilling tale of HILLBILLIES, HIGH FASHION, AND HORROR! Literate perfume aficionados would definitely find the book thrilling--trading as it does in fashion and fragrance lore, including a longstanding , extravagantly vicious enmity between Chanel and Schiaparelli.

I'd never read much about Schiaparelli before. I assumed she was sort of a novelty act. Reading up on her after McCormack's book, I learned that a lot of this has to do with how her legacy was managed, or mismanaged. Chanel is assumed to be the more relevant, more important (i.e. better) designer. And yet to google Schiaparelli's work is to witness the intersection between surrealism and fashion in the thirties and forties: a skeleton dress, the bones quilted into the fabric; a hat shaped like an upturned shoe; a gown with simulated rips, called the Tear Dress. Schiaparelli, much more so than Chanel, had a sense of humor about what she was doing, and her direct descendants would be Comme des Garçons, Martin Margiela, John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Moschino, and Etat Libre D'Orange, all of whom share her interest in playing around with the line drawn between good taste and bad, low brow and high. To assume that Schiaparelli is no longer the household word that Chanel is would be tantamount to saying that Van Gogh never sold any paintings during his lifetime because he was a dreadfully untalented painter.

The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Comme des Garçons

People love to decry the death of something they once loved which has, by their estimation, subsequently jumped the shark. Thus, the "end of the novel", the "decline of the movie", and the selling out of this or that beloved band. Bob Pollard of Guided by Voices fame has, according to fans and non-fans alike, sold out at least five times to date. No one reads anymore because books aren't well written. No one watches movies because they suck. Artists can sell out. Filmmakers, politicians--even hoteliers. It's only ever one bad move away.

There's always some defining moment, some compass point by which to pinpoint the exact transition from great to god-awful. On The Brady Bunch, it was a trip to Hawaii. Fonzie literally jumped the shark, via waterskis, on Happy Days. The sellout-resistant band ultimately welcomes sponsorship from Starbucks. Toward the end, Will and Grace started peppering episodes with lazy turns by famous guest stars. The people who determine the exact point at which something jumps shark usually have high standards, a bottom line which becomes the final straw. Their expectations are disappointed and they can't make adjustments any longer. Hard core fans, they have definite ideas about the way things should go with their favorite group, TV show, celebrity, or cereal. Increasingly, perfume aficionados have joined these ranks, a migration which makes sense, given how educated, articulate, and cultured many of perfume's biggest followers are.

L'Artisan, to some, is walking thin ice. It's the whole persistence thing. The prices went up last year, and yet the longevity continues to go down. Some will excuse L'Artisan for as long as humanly possible, hoping that the company will consider its fans and do something to turn this around. Lutens has done its own dance with the shark, producing, for every Iris Silver Mist, a Miel de Bois and a Serge Noire. The commercial houses disappoint so regularly, are so generally inconsistent that their inconsistency becomes the one thing to rely on. Others (niche lines, typically) set the bar so high that even when they fall short and are way above average in effort and accomplishment they can seem more like dismal failures.

Comme des Garçons has practically defined the concept of conceptual perfumery over the last fifteen years or so, but their project began with fashion. The clothing line was started as a women's label in 1969 by designer Rei Kawakubo. It was established as a company in 1973. By 1978, a men's line was added. Over its first several decades, Comme des Garçons (translation: "like the boys") pushed the fashion envelope in almost every conceivable way, distressing, tearing, fraying, and puncturing fabric, dissolving or disassembling structure, fading the palette to a monochromatic black, turning ideas like "pretty" and "glamor" and "silhouette" inside out. Their mission seemed to be a total re-evaluation of the psychological underpinnings of fashion, with an emphasis on, as Kawakubo herself put it, "breaking down the barriers between art and fashion." The 1997 collection, which came to be known as the "lumps and bumps" line, advanced a destabilization of traditional forms of beauty and form. More recently, in 2006, the label presented a collection on the theme of "Persona", mixing feminine and masculine elements to explore how we define ourselves through gendered dress codes and rigorously enforced social attitudes about self-presentation.

The first Comme des Garçons fragrance was released in 1994. It was a woods and spice eau de parfum in a now iconic flattened oblong brown bottle designed by Kawakubo and Marc Atlan. The juice was composed by Marc Buxton, who had just done Dalissime for Salvador Dali and Pasha for Cartier. The original CDG perfume has spawned so many imitators that one easily forgets how truly avante garde it was at the time and, to some extent, still is. The following year, a flanker, called White, was released, adding to the initial formula a strong floral quotient and the fruity influence of pomegranate.

In 1998, CDG released Odeur 53, the first in a series of "anti-perfumes". It was the company's boldest fragrance assertion yet, the first to match the irreverently off-kilter spirit of the clothes. Composed of 53 non-traditional notes (flash of metal, sand dunes, nail polish, and so forth) the "scent" questioned what constitutes a perfume in much the same way the clothes challenged what it is to be a shirt or a dress. Clothes, Kawakubo has always seemed to say, serve not just a cosmetic but a social function. What happens if they are liberated from this responsibility? Who says a skirt has to look like a skirt? How far can you take a skirt before it isn't one at all? Odeur 53 asked similar questions, much to many people's consternation. An abstract floral seeks to replicate known natural entities with unknown or unfamiliar ingredients, often synthetic. Odeur 53 went further, arguably in the opposite direction, creating an abstract banal. Rather than conceal the synthetic aspects of its composition, 53 embraced them, proposing scent as a Brechtian exercise.

After Odeur 53 CDG presented ever more ambitious propositions. Comme des Garçons 2 (1999) evoked flowers without employing many. The logo was rendered in the squiggly line of a ballpoint pen, while the scent itself recalled the inky aroma of the childhood classroom and the theoretical outdoors. Like the bottle, a variation on the original flat oblong, the juice shimmered with metallic sheen, reflecting and distorting various associative impressions like a sleek funhouse mirror. 2 took its cues from an object or evocation the same way other perfumes did, but where their departure points were flowers, spices, woods, and fruits, 2 looked to everyday objects and sense perceptions. Odeur 71 followed in these footsteps a year later, extending the experiment of 53.

The years since have been very productive for the company. What started as individual releases became multiple part exercises in conceptual perfumery, starting with the Leaves series: Calamus, Lily, Mint, Shiso, and Tea. All but Tea, Lily, and Calamus have since been discontinued. Series 2: Red (2001) included Carnation, Harrisa, Palisander, Sequoia, and Rose. Perhaps the most popular series, involving incense, followed. Avignon, Jaisalmer, Kyoto, Quarzazate, and Zagorsk are largely gorgeous iterations of the company's unusual sensibility, and predate the rage for incense compositions by several years. The series themselves, taken collectively, have asserted perfume as an endless resource for investigation into everything from color (red, green) to different religious chambers and states of mind from around the globe, tying the latter all together into an aromatic declaration of religious tolerance and spiritual unity, taking transcendence out of the cathedral and into the head space.

The company's increasingly ambitious exercises have produced a wider variety of hits and near misses, and everything in between, prompting some to level accusations of decline. The general consensus seems to be that the shark fin approached shortly after the incense series, though Series 5: Sherbert has as many admirers as critics. Series 6: Synthetics goes some way toward closing that gap. Series 7: Sweet seems almost universally derided. It's too early to tell with Series 8: Energy C, whose Lime, Lemon and Grapefruit seem to have been received lukewarmly at best. It's difficult just yet to situate singular scents like 2007's Play and this year's Monocle Scent 1: Hinoki and 8 88 within the CDG oeuvre. Though they follow in the footsteps of earlier CDG fragrances, they depart from the "Series" Series, sticking out sore-thumb-like. A few of the company's smaller series (mini-series, if you will) have been charged with the blame of bringing the line's heyday of playful and provocative experimentation to a close, if not an imaginatively bankrupt standstill.

Guerillas 1 and 2 are named after CDG stores which sprouted up briefly in unlikely places, challenging the concept of permanence and brand stability in a world inhospitable to such things. Guerilla 1, with its meat notes and vague air of urban refuse, is often regarded as unwearable on the one hand and a tad too conventional on the other, somehow both too arty and too boring to bother with at the same time. The top opens with pear, saffron, and clove, an unforgivable offense, if not outright assault, to some. From there, insult adds to injury: the heart notes include Champaca flower and black pepper. Guerilla 1 is certainly an unusual scent. Inhaling it, the mind tries to connect it to something, filing through a mental rolodex of potential source materials. The effect is a wavering indeterminacy, a sort of way station fragrance, like the pop-up stores the scents are named after. Guerilla 1 was the brainchild of Marie-Aude Couture, whose other best known fragrance might be the previous year's Eau d'Amazonie.

Guerilla 2, by Nathalie Feisthauer, is considered the more conventional of the duo, though it's hard to see exactly why when in this case the word conventional becomes highly relative. The notes are listed as bergamot, pink pepper, ginger, red pepper, curcama, raspberry, tuberose, vetiver, cedarwood, and musk. The key word is "red". The result is tangy, tart, and somewhat savory too. The vetiver seems just the pinch of salt the affair calls for. Feisthauer has done work for Etat Libre d'Orange, another equally adventurous perfume line which arguably wouldn't exist were it not for the path CDG has forged. Both Guerillas are wearable and, though said to be more feminine than not by some, each mixes feminine and masculine attributes and impressions in ways which fit perfectly into the company's credo. Guerilla 1 has more development and seems slightly more indecipherable. But Guerilla 2 demonstrates more than a little stealth itself; hard to tell what exactly is going on in this fragrance, though it seems to know where it's going.

Of the Synthetics, I prefer Garage, which as a friend pointed out, smells like your grandparents' detached garage, with the Schwinn bike tires and the still-wet innertubes stacked in a corner, the tennis ball hanging from the ceiling to designate the stop point for parking the car, some oil on the concrete floor, some sawdust, old magazines, humidity, and vinyl. It's a wonderful evocation, with persistence like nobody's business, creating sensory memories out of thin air. Even the maligned Sweets Series has its standouts. Nomad Tea is actually one of the more unusual and enigmatic fragrances of the entire line, mixing what smells like birch tar with minty artemesia. Wood Coffee and Sticky Cake are far more compelling than they're given credit for.

Luxe Champaca and Patchouli are standouts, not just in quality but cost. They're expensive, to be sure, but Patchouli, at least, lingers so well that it might make up for it, if you give it the time. These two seem like something of an anomaly for a line which is otherwise fairly affordable and populist. Nevertheless, they open questions about what luxury means and who has access to it and in some ways they seem to indicate an exercise in irony, though it's unclear who the joke is on. One thing seems abundantly clear. Comme des Garçons is alive and well, despite claims otherwise, playing around with form and content and what it means to smell and be smelled. Recently, the company designed a line for the H & M Department Store Chain, complete with signature fragrance. This will inevitably be seen as a compromise of some kind, a watered down version of previous genius. But let's all get real: Comme des Garçons has never pretended to be anything but fake. If a shark fin is in fact circling the company's image, it's attached to a stick which Kawakubo manipulates from under the water.