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.

Late to the Party: Donna Karan Chaos

I’m ecstatic. I found DK Chaos, a jewel of a perfume, at the moment it’s been reissued. I never smelled the original and didn’t know very much about it until reading that it was to be reissued this year. I’m happy I never smelled the original because I need not concern myself with whether the reformulation lives up to the pre-discontinued juice.

I have no idea how I missed Chaos the first time around. I’m a huge fan of Black Cashmere and even purchased 3 back-up bottles in the frightening event of discontinuation. Chaos slipped silently under my radar screen all these years.

Chaos’ list of notes reads like my fantasy bespoken fragrance: (taken from basenotes) sandalwood, cardamom, cinnamon, padukwood, agarwood, saffron, clove, amber, musk, sage, lavender, chamomile and coriander.

Chaos is the ultimate woodsy spicy oriental scent. It is so perfect that it almost smells familiar ~ like something that has always existed. Chaos must have been quite edgy back in the 90’s. I was so proud of Estee Lauder for launching Sensuous this year, but this was before I knew of another more daring and beautiful woodsy fragrance which had already been introduced to the mainstream market over a decade earlier. A molten river of wood? Chaos fits this description, not Sensuous.

I’m nearly delirious from sniffing and spritzing Chaos. I cannot get enough. I just sprayed the inside of my suitcases and bags with it. The name, however, doesn’t suit the scent ~ it is much closer to peaceful and serene than chaotic.

Kudos to Donna Karan for the new bottles, too. I thought the older Black Cashmere vessel looked like an odd thing - a black vibrator to put it bluntly. The new bottles are simple, classic and easier to hold and spray.

Longevity: very good, 5+ hours
Sillage: soft but definite projection
Rating: 5 stars

PS: I should tell you that I purchased my bottle of Chaos from Bergdorf Goodman online. It cost $85, for a 3.4 oz bottle, which seems inexpensive, given how drop dead gorgeous this fragrance is, and how much it's been fetching during the discontinued years.

Letter To A Young Man in Flip-flops

Dear you,

In your American Eagle T and your madras shorts. You in your meticulously frayed baseball cap, which bears the insignia of a camp you’ve never lost your virginity at, let alone been to, or heard of. You with the boxers peeking out at your waistline, a look you stole from the black boys at school, along with their music, though, alas, not their rhythm. I’ve seen you at the mall, bushy-haired and slouchy, that smirk on your face. I guess you know you barely lift your feet as you saunter along the pavement. Is that the style now, that shuffling, almost narcoleptic gait? Is walking already passé—or have I been asleep at the wheel?

Oh my flip-flopped not so fleet-footed friend, just this morning on my way into Sephora I saw you and your peeps, sleepwalking ahead of me like a little row of baby ducks whose mama had already scurried off around the corner, frightening them with the sudden prospect of independence. The wind was moving in the wrong direction, but I’m going to guess what you had on under the madras and the T and the boxers and the cap. Your cologne. I’m going to say Izod. Or is it Lacoste? I’m going to say Nautica, or even, just possibly, Varvatos. I know you were wearing cologne because I know what cologne means to you. I know how it conveys an image you want to project, or you imagine it does. I know: the guy on the boat or in the field in that ad is your imaginary mirror image—your twin, the secret you—and yet, in your mind, you’d like to cut your own path. That’s why I’m writing.

I won’t tell anyone I sent this to you, but I do want to discuss your purchasing patterns. As I walked behind you, I smelled my wrist, imagining I was you imagining you were that other guy. Would my friends really scramble at the scent of Creation, by Ted Lapidus? Now that every girl in high school isn’t spritzing it in her pink calico canopy bed, dreaming about a boy like you in a mist of fruity chypre, who would recognize it and mark it as sissy? It once smelled the way guys imagined Christie Brinkley must—as if its wearer had been slathered in some dangerously soapy elixir which added to rather than subtracted from her natural musk. It made a girl smell like she’d spilled something on her parents’ leather sofa, downstairs, in the rec room, only she didn’t want her mother to find out, so she’d scrubbed the seat to within an inch of its life, and still she seemed so...fidgety. Her face was still flushed from the exertion. She might have wanted sex but you couldn’t be sure, because you didn’t know what she’d spilled either, and though you had a few wild guesses, it could have simply been your active imagination. It could have just been, like, Jean Nate. Wind Song or whatever.

Creation smelled like a very specific complex of associations back in the day, but that day has passed. Now it smells weirdly virile. It always did, but with all the cosmetic subterfuge, no one ever noticed before. I tell you this because I know a very easy way to distinguish yourself, and all it would require is imagination on your part. You know how to imagine, don’t you? All we have to do is put our heads together, and think outside the box. Step out of your flip flops, and feel the ground under your feet. Lift your feet, and feel the pull of gravity. I’m not asking you to walk. I’m just asking you to think.

I’m willing to let you borrow my Creation. But there are many fragrances you might try. Now that no one sees Christie Brinkley in them, they’re practically dirt cheap. I know you’re on a budget, disposable income or no. I’d be happy to make some suggestions. I might even loan you something, if you promise to turn down that music when you stop by to pick it up. What I'm saying is that, often, scents once intended for the opposite sex make the most electric statement on a guy's skin, totally transforming him and the way people experience his presence. I'm saying that if you have the balls to smell like people used to think a girl should, there's no telling how deeply you might penetrate into other people's perceptions and desires. Krazy by Krizia, for instance, which smells of vanilla rubbed on wood, is a good start. That's putting your toe in without straying too far off the path. Black Cashmere, Balmain de Balmain, Caleche. The limits are mental. The possibilities, endless. And yes, it’s true, such a bold stroke might make your friends scramble--but I bet you’d find, if you turned around, that they were just rearranging themselves, and would eventually all end up in a line behind you, following your lead.

I'm just looking out for you, kid.

Your friend,

Telly Savalas

P.S. Please bring lollipops.

P.P.S. I like grape.