If I Wanted to See Your Tan Line I'd Be Buying Your Drinks, Not Your Perfume

My response to a post called Who Will Save us from the Vulgarity over at The Perfume Chronicles, one of my favorite blogs.  Who Will Save Us talks about perfume advertising and marketing which uses sex as its, um, central thrust.  The most recent example of this, taking it, supposedly, to the level of high art, is the project Petit Mort, a collaboration between a perfumer (Bertrand Duchafour) and several others, under the auspices of Kilian Hennessey.  Petit Mort is meant to evoke or provoke--whichever comes first (puns are inevitable discussing such things)--that apparently salty and pseudo-revolting moment of sexual orgasm:

"Yeah, the Petite Mort ["project"] is…well, I mean, what next, petite merde? Thankfully it hasn’t permeated the perfume enthusiast’s consciousness much yet. I posted what was intended as a satire of the Petite project last week, thinking everyone would immediately apprehend the references, and it dawned on me that not everyone has heard of the project, as eminently laughable as it is. The Petite Mort website is truly like a Saturday Night Live commercial parody, back when they were worth watching. I lifted most of my ad copy for Petite Fart directly from their site, verbatim. What I’ll give Marc Jacobs, though I generally class him with Tom Ford, is a sense of humor (self serious Ford lacks one).

An Interview with Jack

You probably don't need us to tell you we have sort of interesting readers. I met Jack on Facebook, after doing a search on Paco Rabanne's La Nuit there, and we hit it off instantly. Jack treats his facebook profile like a perfume blog for the most part, posting vintage ads, his scent of the day, and observations about everything from why the kid in an old Arpege image is creepy to the fact that he just found Florida Water at Wal-Mart. He does a recurring thing called Edith's Shopping Bag which keeps track of his perfume purchases, with pictures for the short of attention span. It made sense that he'd been reading the blog for a while--even though it took us a little longer than your average person to figure that out. Hey, you're the guy from that blog, he said one day. Um, yeah, I answered. You know it? Duh! Jack's a really smart guy and, like Abigail, and a lot of you, a lot of fun to talk to. We met on Facebook to chat tonight, in the first of a continuing series:

TWRT 7.16.10

This week's random thoughts ~

I love Prince. Purple Rain was among the first concerts I ever attended as a pre-teen. It was also one of my first R rated movies (along with Flash Dance) both of which I snuck into numerous times. I saw Purple Rain, the concert, with rivers of blue eyeliner and thick blue mascara streaming down my cheeks due to the adolescent hysteria of good seats, proximity to Prince, and my gawd, it was just so thrilling. But I’m thinking Prince must be batty with his latest thoughts on the internet. I mean, I know Prince lives in his own little "Prince World" but I thought he was a savvy business man of some sort.

I’m fixated on all the prairie dog colonies out here in NM. Photos to come. That's my little Girl Greta in the above pic. She'll be 8 this October.

The only TV I’m watching these days is True Blood and Hung. Hung is mostly unsatisfying, I mean, really, I want to SEE IT (oh, c’mon you know exactly what I mean by “it”). True Blood is back to its usual charms. With True Blood I always wish the episodes were 2 hours long, I hate for them to end. And what about that scene with Tara “doing” the vampire a few weeks back. Her eyes were rolling back in her head. I was all “I’ll have what she’s having” a la that scene from When Harry Met Sally.

“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.” Guess who said this? (Don’t look it up, just guess) I was surprised.

Upcoming perfumes I’m excited about: the new flanker for Hermes Eau des Merveilles called Claire des Merveilles and the new Shalimar with more focus on vanilla. Notice a trend here? I’m making my peace with vanilla. And also the new Etat Libre d’Orange called Sex Pistols. Sid & Nancy was another flick I watched at least a dozen times during high school. High School = the rebellious years, hence the attraction to these idiots, who for the life of me I can’t figure out why they were so interesting. They made only 1 album and their popularity was just a blip before Sid & Nancy’s deaths in their early 20’s. But Gary Oldman sure as heck did a bang up job as Sid.

Tauer’s new Carillon pour un Ange. Hmmm. Not sure I’ll be able to review this one in full. I think it just isn’t my thing. LoTV usually goes all air freshener on me unless it’s vintage Diorissimo, which in fairness is the polar opposite of what Tauer has done with Carillon, so there’s barely a reason to bring it up. Carillon is a dense, strongly green, mulit-facted floral. There’s some LoTV but just hints. I can see this being a love or hate scent. Now Orange Star, on the other hand, is gorgeous and I concur with everything The Non Blonde wrote about it. I’m coming to realize The Non Blonde and I might be scent twins.

Today I’m wearing Guerlain Aqua Allegoria Ylang & Vanille. This is pretty stuff. Pretty, uncomplicated and well done.

Ever notice how nobody ever mentions Mitsouko Fleur de Lotus?

So I had a perfume catastrophe last night. I was pulling out Micallef Hiver in order to wear it and write a review because I love this stuff when the bottle of Micallef Rose Aoud in front of it fell to the floor and smashed. It took me awhile to realize the bottle had smashed because I keep it in its box and I didn’t think much of its tumble; I figured it had managed unscathed. Well, when I saw the pool of perfume (think: crime scene pool of blood puddling around a body, I let out a yelp). Then I got all sulky wondering why I have such bad karma. Now I’m just peeved that half my house reeks of Rose Aoud. The bottle was 98% full and it leaked all over the floor.

I’m also not sure if I can write a review of Serge’s newest Bas de Soie. It’s just ok. Not much to say either positively or negatively. My love for all things Serge is quickly fading. My favorite fragrance from SL is Fleurs d’Oranger (among my top favorite perfumes period) which has now been reformulated. FdO was not massacred but it’s definitely NOT the unbelievably gorgeous and most stunning orange blossom on the market anymore. This reformulation coupled with Eau de Laundry Detergent and several blasé releases (Nuit de Cellophane, etc) have left me disenchanted and wondering if Lutens/Sheldrake have lost steam or perhaps are just doing what the corporate suits tell them to do. Most likely the latter.

Sandwich of the week: a breakfast sandwich. Scrambled egg whites on whole wheat toast with sliced tomato, mild green chilis draped across top and Monterey jack cheese. Cut into 4 triangles for easier eating. You truly can’t avoid the cultural phenomena of green chili in NM.



Have a fragrant weekend everyone!

Etat Libre D'Orange: Divin' Enfant

I've worn and appreciated it for months, but current events brought me back to Divin' Enfant for a closer look. Hearing raves about another orange blossom fragrance, Maison Francis Kurkdjian's APOM, I took the first available opportunity to smell it, and was, to use Nathan Branch's phrase, woefully underwhelmed. While APOM has good longevity, it seems fairly weak in every other respect. There's no THERE there. It surprised me all day, wafting up from my arm. It seemed to have said everything it had to say. What was the point of sticking around?

I thought of APOM again this week, when Etat Libre D'Orange announced the upcoming release of a scent inspired by Tilda Swinton. What a perfect match, I thought. Swinton has always worked with smaller directors on compellingly oddball projects. By choosing her, Etat Libre D'Orange has advanced a celebrity sensibility they initiated with Rossy Di Palma: one that celebrates the unique rather than capitalize on the cliched. I pulled out my bottle of Divin' Enfant, forgotten behind more recent purchases. In contrast to APOM, it seemed even better than I remembered, so lush and dense and full of things to admire.

Listen, don't look at me. I can't smell the alleged marshmallow in Divin'. It doesn't even smell particularly sugary to me, no sweeter than orange blossom itself. People who discuss it on the web tend to engage in a debate about how much of an infant Enfant is. There's supposed to be a tantrum in there, so which dominates: the precious little thing or the monster child? I'm not sure I see the point of that, though I'm guessing this is an argument having to do with how sweet it seems to some. I'm not sure I smell rose, amber, leather, or musk, either, but it's all very well blended, emphasizing the orange blossom without dominating it. I've never thought of orange blossom as particularly innocent. I do smell a nicely judged addition of tobacco, and an interesting counterpoint of mocha, anyway.

Where APOM is rather flat and inert on my skin, Divin'Enfant sings. It has personality, a lot of presence. Whether that presence is adult or juvenile isn't something I've wasted much time pondering. I wear the hell out of it. Enfant has what I'm starting to recognize is a trademark Etat quality: it feels rich and playful without making these things seem like polar opposites. The line merges high and low in fascinating ways, and I think Etat is ultimately far more populist than Maison Kurkdjian, which seems to think that people who can't afford their perfumes but can afford their cleaning liquids will see this as a real bargain and an aspirational gateway. Etat makes one size for all. Aside from the celebrity fragrances, everything is priced the same.

At a time when a small bottle of Chanel costs you between sixty and eighty, seventy five for a niche perfume is about as close to a bargain as you can expect for a luxury item. What you are promised for this is, more often than not, a damn good bottle of perfume. Funny how people dismiss Etat's sense of humor; inappropriate, they say. In bad taste. Out to shock for shock's sake. What could be more ridiculously inappropriate than offering someone who can't afford your perfume a bottle of overpriced cleaning solvent. Only the well off can smell good, by this logic. The rest of us are offered a lovely bucket of mop water. Surely this is more offensive than a cartoon penis. Etat's "sense of humor" makes a practice of poking fun at such B.S., and I can't thank them enough.

I think people are mistaken in viewing this as shock value. Let's be honest. These days, shocking is a great bottle of perfume, as good as its hype.

Carolina Herrera: CH Man

I'm glad I gave this one a chance, because when I first smelled it my nose was probably exhausted, and it barely made an impression. It seemed to be one of those dread skin scents, the kind that whisper across your skin like the sound of a leaky faucet somewhere in the building. I'd been at the mall for an hour probably, shocked I could spend more than thirty minutes there. I was smelling perfume at the Russian kiosk, which is located smack dab in the middle of the place. I hadn't visited in a while and there was catching up to do: Michael Kors Very Hollywood, Shiseido Zen for Men, Queen Latifah, Marc Jacobs Lola, Cacharel Scarlett. They'd just received a shipment, too, so I was hanging around to see what might have come in.

Among the new arrivals was CH Men, and my first impression, based on the packaging, was that someone had put some time and thought into the thing. The bottle is one of those that make people who love fragrance happy: a big block of glass, half of which is covered in embossed leather. CHCHCHCHCHCHCH. It feels great running under your fingers. A metal CH pendant has been attached to a deep red grosgrain ribbon and knocks against the leather like a little drum. Still, after CH Women, whose bottle was tricked out in the same bells and whistles, I wasn't expecting much. Too bad, I thought, after spraying CH Men. What a shame the cologne doesn't carry the same weight as the overall first impression.

The sales assistant assured me that something was there, but I couldn't smell much of anything on my wrist. At first I was reminded of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab's Zombi, with its dirt, rose, and violet notes. That was pretty thrilling. Would a mainstream masculine really make something that smelled of moist, flowered soil? Who could say. It was certainly gone before I could. Weirdly, as I looked at other things, I kept getting faint whiffs of that first spritz, convincing me that maybe I just couldn't hear CH through all the cacophonous Friday night noise and the bombastic tuberose of Very Hollywood. I bought some and brought it home. Just in case.

I'm glad I did. CH does indeed smell like damp earth and flowers, with some spice and stewed fruits thrown in. The notes are listed as mandarin, bergamot, grapefruit peel, saffron, nutmeg, jasmine, violet, wood, ambergris, vanilla, moss, burnt sugar and leather. I smell none of the first three, nor vanilla and ambergris. The impression of soil must be created by the saffron and violet, I've decided. Jack Black Signature for Men has a heftier dose of saffron and smells only vaguely similar. There the saffron is coerced by cedar into traveling in a very different direction. I smell date, too, but nothing in the literature for CH confirms this.

CH Men is the best mainstream masculine I've smelled in eons. It isn't a skin scent after all, though it doesn't exactly scream its way through a room. I wouldn't call it subtle, but I'm not going to accuse it of grandstanding either. I find it pretty addictive. There isn't a marine accord to be found. There's no patchouli, clean or otherwise. No cardamom. The leather is somewhere in the background, complimenting the violet and saffron in ways which bring to mind Serge Lutens. CH Men, unlike its feminine counterpart, isn't aiming to be all things to all people. It's wonderfully idiosyncratic, and this too places it in the company of niche lines like Lutens, Etat Libre d'Orange, Diptyque, and Parfum D'Empire, among others. Any one of these might have produced CH Men. It's more likely than Carolina Herrera. Then again, I'm a big fan of Herrera for men, and once I study it, I see a link between that fragrance's use of immortelle and the employment of saffron in CH. Like Herrera, CH has good longevity. It smells nothing like anything in the department store, which is, alas, probably why you won't find any there, short of a Russian kiosk.

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.

What's in a Name: More on Etat Libre D'Orange

Whenever my good friend Bard is over, I present him with a selection of fragrances to smell, hoping to hear wildly detailed descriptions. Bard is a writer and always has something interesting to say about even the most ostensibly thoroughly uninteresting subjects, so my hope each time is that he'll describe what I'm smelling in some way which will support my conjured vision of it.

He always disappoints me. Actually, I'm often frustrated, if not inwardly furious. Rather than give me elaborate narratives he offers cryptic, inert, one word summaries. "Play-doh," he says, handing the bottle back to me, or "Astro-turf." Sometimes he gets a little wordier. "I'm reminded of a cat doing a dance on an umbrella," perhaps, or: "This one is hamster cage--with a trace of hamster pee." I'm convinced he does this to annoy me, to short circuit the carefully wrought fantasy life I've built around the perfumes I like and perfume in general, but I'm also willing to concede that he might just see fragrance differently than I do; not as a procession of florals and leathers and orientals and gourmands but as an amorphous stream of wildly diverse associations and abstractions.

I thought of this today because a few more Etat Libre D'Orange perfumes arrived in the mail. In the past, I enjoyed Jasmine et Cigarette and Rien, but I've resisted buying any more of the line's creations until now, and I'm not sure why. I suspect it might be all the bad feeling around them, which influences me more than I realize--though now that I'm aware of this I want to look at them even more intently.

I find the discussion revolving around this line and its aesthetic more than a little perplexing. While enough people appreciate the perfumes, many more don't, or do only grudgingly, scoffing at the advertising schema or the florid copy, closer to old purple prose porn like Lady Chatterly than something describing the pyramid of your average fruity floral. We perfumistas say we're wise to the way fragrance companies talk about their product, able to discern between reality (what it smells like to us) and fantasy (what they say it conjures), and yet Etat Libre D'Orange, which gently mocks this way of selling and looking at perfume, is taken so seriously by some of the most ardent among us that you often wonder what exactly they want: the truth, or a more skillfully worded lie.

I would wager that Etat, like Bard, knows that you can describe fragrance in any number of ways, if you liberate yourself from the comforting straitjacket of perfume convention, and that in doing so you can expand your fantasy life exponentially, liberating it from the ad copy to which it adheres so closely into some terra incognito of pleasure and impulse. Many people take umbrage with the company's bold pronouncements, the whole "revolutionizing perfume" posture assumed by the ad copy, and, holding that up to the silly pop art erotic playfulness of the ad imagery, they (I think) mistakenly assume that Etat must be full of it, a clueless company unwittingly contradicting itself. How can you assert that you're the most radical thing to come along in modern perfumery and expect to be taken seriously when you package your product in ridiculously infantile parodies of sex and gender? Well, exactly. Almost every perfume house known to perfume lovers does exactly that, in a more meticulously evolved way.

People act as though Etat is celebrating the iconography of porn, and to an extent they are, but they're also poking fun at the way perfume is sold to us, showing us, in the process, how even the most jaded among us demand this approach. We demand to be sold sex like we're impressionable children--and so what, anyway. We want our fantasy world supported and indulged, however childish, and perhaps it should be. Perhaps we should embrace that rather than pretend it doesn't exist in the more evolved. What if Etat weren't trying at all to take perfume advertising all the way but to show us that it's already there and we just don't see it, if only because, for the most part, we choose not to? Could we then look at the perfumes for what they are, and maybe acknowledge that when Etat says they want to revolutionize the world of perfume, they mean the way it's perceived more than the way it's sold or composed?

People complain. The perfumes aren't all THAT. Snap. They aren't so very groundbreaking or unusual. Snap snap (Oh no I didn't!) But of course they are. Compare them to anything at the mall and you see that it's true, that even when they tweak pop formulas just the tiniest bit, they're showing how rigid mainstream and even niche perfumery typically is. That isn't to say that some of these perfumes aren't thrillingly strange. Secretions Magnifiques certainly is. It's mostly to say they needn't go very far to show up contemporary perfumery for what it is: afraid of its own shadow, chicken when it comes to taking even the smallest, subtlest risks. "Subversive"? "Disturbing"? Oh come on, now. Have a sense of humor. What's the difference between Etat using these words to describe Secretions and venerable Guerlain saying, of Insolence, "The irreverent scent of youth, daring, and freedom"? Oh REALLY. Freedom from what, exactly? The difference, perhaps, is one between tongue in cheek and head so far up own ass. I'm pretty sure the one, openly cartoonish, is having a laugh at the other.

Vraie Blonde is a comic vision of succulence and fizz, and at the same time a refined construction which sits interestingly beside fragrances like Mitsouko and Yvresse, chatting up a storm with them. Encens et Bubblegum is what the name says and more, and the unusual combination of words, rather than restricting you to reductive associations, encourages you to make new ones. These are playful, skillfully done, often gorgeous juices--and remarkably consistent in vision. They participate in the history of fragrance even as they assist in ushering us into its future. It's clear to me that nothing whatsoever about Etat Libre D'Orange is crass or obsessed with the bottom line. The pictures of spurting penises and Dali lips blowing nippled bubbles might strike you as obscene. They might strike you as shameless attempts to get your attention or your money. But what Etat is doing has nothing to do with cutting corners or selling short.

It's hard to imagine any other company, even Comme des Garçons, releasing Secretions Magnifiques, though it makes sense that the perfumers behind Etat do so much work for that company. Comme des Garçons, like Etat, is interested in expanding and exploring what it means to enjoy or appreciate perfume. What should--what can--perfume be? How should we talk about it? Does it HAVE to smell like this or that? If so, who says? What's the lingua franca, or can there be one? Maybe it's too personal. Maybe we call it flowers and fruity gourmands because this shorthand, however shy of the truth, is the readiest common barometer. If that's the case, who's pandering to the bottom line? The angrier or more indignant people get about Etat's methodology, the more interested I become in their project and perfumes. It's clear they're touching nerves--and with such wonderful prods.

To me, Secretions Magnifique is conceptual art applied to perfume, and to smell it is to engage with the phenomenon of fragrance in unusual, even exceptional, ways. If Secretions Magnifique falls, to some, or even all, just this side of unwearable, so what? I get tickled and fascinated when people start talking about wearability. Bandit, even now, is considered not so very wearable by some, and it troubles me not the least. Perfume doesn't necessarily have to be about wearability, and in fact, when I smell Mitsouko and my mind starts racing and the synapses start firing, I'm not thinking about how good it will go with my shirt or my suit. Hopefully, I'm beyond the restrictions of such thinking. I'm simply fantasizing, in some dreamy netherworld of mood and sensation. To me, Etat Libre D'Orange speaks to THAT kind of liberation: the enjoyment of perfume for enjoyment's sake.

Put another way, why should Bard change his vocabulary to fit my limited imagination?

Rooms With a View: Jasmine et Cigarette and Rien

Set two Etat Libre D’Orange boxes back to back, with their red and blue, semi-circle logos, and you get a bulls-eye in the middle, an interesting sight gag for a niche line whose compositions tend toward the oblique. The names, too, sidle up to you coquettishly: Delicious Closet Queen; Encens & Bubblegum; Don’t Get Me Wrong Baby, I Don’t Swallow; Secretions Magnifiques. Quirky, however well done, is often taken to indicate overcompensation, distracting from a chronic lack of substance. But, pace Luca Turin: “Never underestimate the French gift for refinement.” Turning a phrase, you might say that Etat, who have the intelligence and imagination to back up most of their various thematic conceits, are tongue in chic.

It’s slightly misleading to say they specialize in conceptual perfumery, as all perfume is conceptual, yet Etat do spin the concept of conceptual on its head. Your average perfume begins with a brief—a proposal, let’s say. This document presupposes an aura, at the center of which is a mysterious, as yet ill-defined woman. What does this woman feel? What does she look like? The clothes she wears, the places she’s been and the experiences she’s had, the way she cocks her head when you catch her attention, the glint in her eye when she thinks back to the last time she felt the searing gaze of an admirer: all contribute to the refinement of this hypothetical what if. A perfume represents the distillation of such a woman. And when another woman, likely dissimilar in every imaginable way—chiefly, by virtue of being flesh and blood—sees an advertisement for this elixir, it appears to her, its manufacturers hope, like a specialized emotional mirror. Looking into it, she sees a fantasy image of herself.

Etat too sets out with a proposal, and the perfumes just as arguably aspire to a state of mind. The difference is that woman. It isn’t that she’s not there. Someone, man or woman, most certainly could be. It isn’t even that great pains have been taken to keep whoever this person is unspecified. It’s just that the people at Etat, like those at Comme des Garçons, are more interested in place and thing than person, per se. Where is this place? What does it feel like? What does the air smell like? What are the objects in the room, or building, or landscape? What just happened here—or might if you stick around? The mood is not that of a woman in her element, whatever that might be, but of the elements themselves.

Let’s say one of the above boxes contains Jasmine et Cigarette. The other, let’s say, contains Rien. The two are very representative Etat fragrances. The packaging is strictly minimal. What you have to go on is the fragrance and the enclosed copy. It’s worth quoting the latter. The folded note contained in Jasmine et Cigarette mentions “smoky black and white ambiance” and “hazy atmosphere”. The fragrance is the “reminder of a fantasy” in the form of a smell which has been left on one’s clothes or in the mind of another. The movie star fragrance recalls the refined ennui of Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, seen through wisps of smoke. To be sure, the prose is overblown—isn’t most ad copy?—and specific mention is made of a woman, but her features are left to your imagination, and the emphasis remains decidedly on setting. Jasmine et Cigarette puts you inside an old movie, making you both director and star.

What this means is that the experience of Jasmine et Cigarette isn’t mediated in quite the same way as, say, Dior Addict, whose model persists in your mind as you wear it the way the figure on a book jacket stands in for your image of the character as you read, and perhaps forever after. Even the pyramids of Etat fragrances are kept vague. A ‘smoky’ jasmine with tobacco, hay, turmeric, apricot, cedar, amber and musk is about all you’ll get on Jasmine et Cigarette, and shouldn’t it be? What does a pyramid really tell you? Ultimately, when rose means gerianol and various other aromachemicals, the notes proffered for most perfumes are yet another kind of fantasy, a filter through which to enforce someone else’s intended image.

As for Rien: the word translates into nothing, so don't expect much help there, either. If Jasmine et Cigarette presents you with the black and white room of a 1940s Hollywood movie, Rien shuts you in the leather suitcase near the bedside table, inviting you to find your way out. Be sure: there’s a wad of stolen cash in there, and a story to be told. While Rien is no Bandit, and its nose, Antoine Lie, is no Germaine Cellier, the perfumes share a certain sensibility, and Rien could be viewed as rebuilding a room from memory. It has some of Bandit’s lonely aloofness, that smoky, animalic veil which smells deliciously of bittersweet melancholy. Antoine Maisondieu’s Jasmine et Cigarette brings a bit of cheer with its flowers, but they’re feint enough to remind you of someone’s absence, creating a mood of longing and expectation. That is to say, if someone gave this bouquet to you, it was intended as a good-bye.

In a world where almost anything is accessible, the Etat line remains, as of now, difficult to obtain. Apparently, Henri Bendel stocks them. Harvey Nichols carries them but don’t expect a return call when you can’t figure out the US equivalent of postal code. Little information exists on the perfumes. Are they of good quality? Yes, and worth the time it takes to track them down and the money they’ll cost. They’re EDP, and true to Turin’s word, exquisitely refined. Part of what makes the two in question so evocative is their lucidity. They are exceptionally smooth. There’s a gravity to these fragrances which the sense of humor belies. Go to the company’s website and see for yourself. Etat wouldn’t have it any other way.

The Joke's on You: Moschino Funny!

There was a time when the humor and irreverence of Moschino (not just its line of perfumes but its fashion and its founder) were not entirely lost on its intended audience. There was a time when Moschino in fact had more of an audience on which to lose something. Who could forget the chocolate drizzled handbag—or the Teddy Bear dress? Plenty of people, it would seem. The Olive Oyl bottle of Moschino’s Cheap and Chic perfume was a statement at the time. Now, people tend to dismiss it as unintentionally tacky. Moschino injected the humorless, self-absorbed fashion scene of the eighties with wit and intelligence. While it’s true you wouldn’t actually often have occasion to wear a stuffed animal-infested dress out in public, couture has never been about reality or practical application. Moschino laid bare the central dichotomy of fashion industry practice; of course it was absurd that a collection never intended to be worn should conduct itself as soberly as a tax audit. It was as if Jerry Lewis, as the Nutty Professor, had started a line of couture dresses and sportswear, issued from a headquarters stationed in his lab. Unfortunately, the Italian fashion establishment felt Moschino was laughing at them, not with them, and denounced the designer as a talentless hack. This only made him more popular, his point more legitimate.

Moschino's aesthetic was exuberantly youthful and decidedly adult simultaneously. He was raised in a small town on the outskirts of Milan, perhaps shaping him from the beginning as an outsider with a close proximity to the heart of things but enough distance to view them objectively. His background was in illustration and (for Versace) publicity, so it was perhaps entirely logical that his approach would merge the surrealist audacity of Dali with the slapstick, crowd-pleasing sight-gags of Tex Avery. Moschino founded his line in 1983. Five years later, his Cheap and Chic range was introduced. In 1994, he launced what he called an Ecouture line, featuring clothes made from environmentally friendly fabrics and dyes. It might just be that the laughing stopped when Moschino died the same year, at the age of 44, the victim of that quintessential buzz-kill, a heart attack. His line has persevered, albeit with less fanfare and less imaginative marketing. His perfume line releases new product frequently. The fragrances are more interesting than they’re given credit for. Cheap and Chic itself is a brisk fruity floral, truly cheap and chic, making it, of course, exceptional and a play on words, a happy contradiction. Eponymously titled Moschino (1988) is a floral oriental which smells like Grasse by way of a headshop, another, more refined play on words. Cheap and Chic has had several flankers, as has Moschino.

The bottle for Funny! mimics the one used for Moschino Couture, extending a joke across two releases separated by three years and seemingly contradictory high/low designations. Moschino Couture is a warm, fruity floral with haughty gold cap, high-class scotch-colored juice, and velvet red ribbon sash. Funny! is literally its polar opposite, cool, fresh, and exhilarating, with silver cap, ice blue juice, and frayed satin ribbon, the cheerful country cousin to its big city counterpart. Funny! was created by Antoine Maisondieu, whose work with Etat Libre D’Orange (Jasmin et Cigarette, Encens & Bubblegum, et al), demonstrate his own refined sense of humorous elegance. He was the nose behind Burberry Brit London, Gucci eau de Parfum II, and Comme des Garcon’s Luxe Patchouli, all interesting, all arguably wonderful. Funny! combines Seville orange, red currant, and green tea, possessing an aptly curious spiciness (something of a punchline, a la pink pepper) and a resinous base which contrasts ingeniously with its effervescent attributes. It shares with Gucci II a rare quality in feminine construction, where buoyancy doesn’t mean vapidity. It is bold and declarative rather than timid and insipid. It has humor and a positive outlook on things. It’s cheerful without being air-headed, dense without being a dumb blonde. Most impressively for a citrus-focused scent, it persists, giggling in the face of summer heat. Funny it hasn't gotten the attention it deserves.