Dandy of the Day: Kristen Wiig

“I invented air so you owe me 10 cents every time you breathe.”

It was simply a matter of time before Kristen Wiig was our Dandy of the Day.

Now that our beloved Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have left SNL, Kristen Wiig is suddenly the veteran female cast member. Time has flown past so quickly it’s hard to believe that Wiig (pronounced “Wig,” as in hair piece) has been on SNL since 2006.

Wiig plays numerous hysterically funny characters. She’s a masterful comedienne and impressionist and is also unusually beautiful for a goofball. Wiig plays a character named Penelope on SNL who makes me laugh so hard tears roll down my checks. Penelope is a compulsive braggart who needs to one-up everyone around her. The skits have Penelope interrupting people to boast about not only having done every single thing they’ve done, but ten times better. Penelope’s claims are so exaggerated they barely make sense – as she twirls her hair around her finger and trails off every third sentence with “…so….”

I like to imagine Wiig is every bit as nutty and irreverent as her characters. A person who plays the female half of the “A** hole” couple, Target Lady and screams “I said WE!” with reckless abandon must be a dandy offstage, too.

Kristen Wiig likes to wear delicate white floral scents. For the past year, she’s been enjoying Kai perfume, paired with Kai body butter (which she read was one of Oprah’s favorite things).

Dandy of the Day: William Shatner

“I was built for the long run, not for the short dash, I guess.” – William Shatner

William Shatner has been acting for half a century. Shatner is best known for playing William T. Kirk on Star Trek. Recently he won Emmy and Golden Globe awards for his portrayal of the wonderfully eccentric Denny Crane on Boston Legal.

Shatner is one of those rare actors who is able to maintain his artistic credibility while poking fun at himself and giving campy comedic performances.

“We were basically one and the same, although Jim [Kirk] was just about perfect, and, of course, I am perfect.” – William Shatner


Givenchy Gentleman would suit William Shatner quite well. Gentleman is uber-masculine and potent with a pronounced citrusy-patchouli aroma. Givenchy Gentleman is a ‘square-jawed’ stylish and handsome man.

Shatner is also considered a musician. He began his musical career with the ‘spoken word’1968 album The Transformed Man. Shatner delivered an exaggerated, interpretive recitations of "Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” which became instant camp classics. In 1978, Shatner performed a reading of the Elton John song “Rocket Man during the Science Fiction Film Awards. Dressed in a ruffled tuxedo with a hand-rolled cigarette in hand, he spoke with Captain Kirk-esque delivery against a synthesizer-laden backdrop of the song.



“All in all, Kirk's character is something I am very proud of.” – William Shatner

Dandy of the Day: Crispin Hellion Glover

Some find it easy to dismiss him. He certainly gives them a headstart. To many his name has become synonymous with a litany of those adjectives reserved for the terminally idiosyncratic. Years ago, he took aim at David Letterman's head with his platform shoes and kicked his way out of the mainstream and into the margins. America knew him as the mesmeric goof-for-brains in Back to the Future, and the idea that he might not have been acting, might in fact be a genuine loose canon, made his mainstream audience more than a little uncomfortable.

Crispin Glover is one of the more fascinating actors to come out of the past few decades, mainly because he seems so out of step with the times. After various character roles throughout the eighties and nineties, he came to his own in parts which seemed to have been tailor made for his gifts. Willard, Bartleby, small but atmospheric bits for David Lynch, the Thin Man in Charlie's Angels. Ultimately, he came full circle, reuniting with Robert Zemeckis, the director of Back to the Future, in Beowulf.

He played Grendel, a role which in many ways presented a fascinating inversion of his painfully dweebish turn as Michael J. Fox's young father. Both were outcasts; each made a monster by his inability to fit in or gain control of his impulses or navigate the trecherous signposts of his destiny. Whatever you think of the movie as a whole, you can't say Glover isn't absolutely electrifying in it. During the course of his career he has written books, directed films (first What is It? More recently, It is Fine. Everything is Fine!) and traveled for speaking engagements which play more like vaudeville than book signings and question and answer sessions. Glover has smuggledthe avant garde into mainstream cinema and through mainstream cinema into the American living room.

Like his image, his cologne should be vintage, something from the fragrant yellowed pages of an out-of-print book. At night he might wear Etro's Messe De Minuit, a slightly oily incense recalling the damp stone walls of forgotten cellars and the ghostly suggestion of flowers once worn by the missing. He wouldn't pass up an opportunity to wear Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab's Zombi. Cinnabar, with its dusty cinammon (a crimson velvet pillow for the nose), would be a more arresting choice. Something about its spicy rich hypnotic quality, its fragrant whiff of port wine, slightly turned, seems in perfect keeping with his image.

Dandy of the Day: Count Alfred D'Orsay

Count Alfred D'Orsay was one of the most celebrated Dandy's of his day (1801-1852). During Count D’Orsay’s time, a particular kind of gentleman, such as Beau Brummel, aroused admiration among the upper crust through their witty remarks and outlandish clothing. They were eager to be noticed and imposed a certain life and dress style in this bored bourgeois society.

Alfred D'Orsay was one of the most famous Dandies of his era. Count D’Orsay was talented in the arts as well as being a witty conversationalist and extravagant dresser.

Count D’Orsay’s more exceptional talent, however, turned out to be that of creating perfumes. His interest was sparked when his mistress Lady Blessington could not find a fragrance she enjoyed. In England, the fashion of the day was intensely musky perfumes, which did not suit Lady Blessington.

And so began the life long ambition of the Chevalier. Alchemist of luxury and love, D'Orsay rapidly developed a growing passion for perfumery. It’s said that in each of his homes he dedicated a room to the creation of fragrances. He continued to dabble in perfumery for the rest of his life.

Parfums D’Orsay was established after his death and named in his honor. Count D'Orsay's original "Eau de Bouquet" was reportedly "reworked" into the line's Etiquette Bleue fragrance.

I recently fell in love with D’Orsay Tilleul, which is the most gorgeous linden fragrance I’ve ever smelled.

Parfums D’Orsay website (click)

Dandies of the Day: Jim Jarmusch, Tom Waits

Seeing this picture when I was in high school made me want to dye my hair gray. It also made me want to smoke. It definitely validated my penchant for Goodwill clothing, and Tom Waits' posture even made me a little less defensive: obviously, you could be a little feminine and still perfectly masculine, too.

Neither would immediately strike you as a dandy, yet with their offbeat, even Maverick sensibilities, their highly individual styles and points of view, Jim and Tom represented an alternative version of the dandy ethos particular to the late eighties and nineties, something you might call Grunge Dandy, turning the rarefied concept of dandyism on its head the way goth culture had.

I like to think both would wear something retro and egalitarian. Before putting his shirt on in the morning (or let's face it, the early afternoon), Tom might take the large white bottle of Tabac and splash it into his hands, patting his arms and chest, paying special attention to his throat. All day, the sickly sweet aroma might waft up from his open collar, flavoring his cigarette smoke, which would float about him in great lazy circles. The leather of his shoes would waft up to meet this half way. Jim would apply Old Spice in much the same manner, emitting a worn-in fragrance of smoky cedar, cinnamon and cloves, electrified by aldehydes and the cologne's signature everything but the kitchen sink approach to construction. Both would smell like a million bucks by way of a parallel universe.

Dandy of the Day: Jane Bowles

Wife of Paul, and famously lesbian, Jane Bowles was a fascinating anomaly. How to explain the relationship between these two authors; both equally queer? Jane's writing was often (and even now) overshadowed by Paul's (The Sheltering Sky, et al), yet in some ways her work was perfectly comfortable in the dark. Her wryly comic characters smuggle ferocious idiosyncrasies. In "Camp Cataract", a woman comes to remove her deranged sister from the clutches of a rural retreat which has taken her imagination over the edge, with disastrous results. In Bowles' single novel, Two Serious Ladies, Christina Goering is a wealthy spinster in pursuit of sainthood who ends up as a high-class call-girl, while Frieda Copperfield leaves her boring husband and heads for Panama where she falls in love with a prostitute. Jane Bowles was as complicated and unlikely as her characters and the situations they found themselves in. Writing was an arduous ordeal for her, and in her lifetime she published very little; along with Two Serious Ladies, a play and a body of short stories. She eventually followed Paul to Morroco, where he chased boys and she fell in with a local woman named Cherifa who some believed poisoned her, hastening her early death. She was under-appreciated by the public at large, and chronically insecure, yet critically revered. Poet John Ashberry called Bowles "one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language." Truman Capote considered her "one of the really original pure stylists".

An obvious choice for Bowles would have been Bandit. The contradictions embodied in Cellier's constructions are perfectly in keeping with Bowles' askew outlook, apparent in almost any line from her writing: “She was torn between an almost overwhelming desire to bolt out of the room and a sickening compulsion to remain where she was.” A more unexpected choice might be Heeley's Fine Leather. Fine Leather, too, is a contradiction: it smells more like hay than hide, evoking the sickly sweet aroma of an evacuated horse stall. Underneath this, a honeyed sweetness. Some people think of Chanel's Cuir de Russie when the word leather comes to mind: of sweetness and the supple, well maintained car seat of a Bentley. Others, like Bowles, go into the barnyard, lifting the saddle to find the smell it left on the horse's perspiring back.

Dandy of the Day: Sarah Silverman

Sarah Silverman is to satire what Julia Child is to cooking.

Sarah Kate Silverman is an American Emmy-Award nominated comedian, writer, singer, guitarist and actress.

Sarah is a gifted satirist who relishes exposing controversial societal issues such as racism, sexism, religion and homophobia. She’s so good at satire that I think there’s a whole segment of people that just don’t get her; they think she’s a jerk. Sarah is especially good at potty humor and nearly anything that one might consider uncouth. While Sarah is quite pretty, even beautiful, she doesn’t seem to emphasize this, or capitalize on it at all; she prefers to wear jeans, sneakers, tee shirts and her hair in a ponytail most of the time. This casual, carefree appearance didn’t stop Maxim from putting her at #29 in their 100 Hottest Women of 2007 issue. Sarah was even on the cover of Maxim (and, of course, she didn’t allow the photos in Maxim to straight-jacket her into any sort of sultry sex pot imagery, her satirical comedic charm was captured instead).

Sarah Silverman has openly admitted to battling depression and thanking Zoloft for her current emotional health. She’s such a funny seemingly outgoing and gregarious person that it’s hard to imagine her depressed, but there are so many people; actors, comediennes & writers in particular who are dealt the depression card.

In my mind, Sarah wears 3 different perfumes for 3 different moods. When she’s working, acting, socializing and “on” I think she wears Comme des Garcons Red Carnation. Red Carnation is hot, spicy, unusual and yet floral and pretty. This is Sarah’s public personae.

When Sarah is at home in her pajamas, writing, meditating and being alone, I think she wears Aqua di Parma Iris Nobile. Iris Nobile allows her to be introspective, to write, to relax and concentrate.

When Sarah is out with family, friends, running errands, going out to dinner or the theatre, she likes to wear Dawn Spencer Hurwitz’ American Beauty. American Beauty is the most beautiful pure red rose. Sarah is, at heart, a person who cares about other people and the world enough to write comedy aimed at breaking cultural stereotypes and helping people see the ugliness of sexism, racism, etc. She is an idealist and she loves the aroma of a pure and innocent red rose.

Dandy of the Day: Christopher Walken

Born, Ronald Walken, changed his name to Christopher.
Mr. Walken has said that his adopted name of "Christopher" sounds "like a sneeze” and he prefers to be called Chris.
He has different-colored eyes (one blue and one hazel). This is a condition known as heterochromia.

You're surprised you say? Don't be. Walken is a total dandy. Just look at him, listen to him speak, and reflect upon his acting career. The man is a gifted actor, and all the while, with that hair? That odd dialect that seems from a country all its own – I think it’s called Walkenland (near Greenland or Queens or something). Walken doesn’t seem to take himself very seriously. He’s won an Oscar and a best supporting actor award. Just for a moment, reflect upon his wildly diverse assortment of films ~ Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter, Biloxi Blues, Joe Dirt, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, Catch Me if You Can, Communion, The Prophecy, The Funeral, Poolhall Junkies and on and on. Walken is known for his darkly calm yet maniacally unstable monologues that verge on humorous. Walken is also a fantastic dancer. He’s studied dance and manages to work a little jig into nearly every film he’s in.

Walken flaunts his, some might say, worst features. He gussies up his hair, makes it as big and pompadour-ish as possible, he prefers to stay rail thin, even while playing tough guy characters. What sort of fragrance is the embodiment of Walken you ask? Walken seems rather comfortable in a ten thousand dollar Italian suit, doesn’t he? I imagine he would enjoy a cologne called One Man Show by Jaques Bogart. Never heard of it? Well, that’s the way Walken wants it. One Man Show is a dry woodsy cologne with hints of oakmoss and tobacco. It’s sophisticated and classy, but still manages to dance to the beat of its own drummer.

Dandy of the Day: Tilda Swinton

Actors are vain, needy creatures. Do they look okay? Are you sure? Should they do it again? They could do it louder. They could do it with more enthusiasm. They could do it as if they were a woman who's just lost her dog. Do you like them? Do you really like them? Most actors need to know. They need to be at the white hot burning center of your attention. If they can't be, they might die. We all might die. What actors do is of world importance: more important than war, famine, sickness, crime. Actors cure all those things just by speaking out--about their views, their experiences, their favorite colors. They want you to know: they're special. They want you to know you're special, so you can thank them for pointing it out to you. It goes without saying: without them, you wouldn't be special at all. It goes without saying but they're saying it anyway. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there, who hears it, unless the actor is present and can then report it through various actor-y techniques. It's impossible to watch most actors on screen without wondering how many people they've thrown hairbrushes at, but there are exceptions among these exceptional beings, and one of those exceptional exceptions would seem to be Tilda Swinton. She doesn't play lesbian serial killers, true, but packing on pounds is a little excessive, if you ask her, just to show you aren't afraid of looking homely, especially when it's vital to you that everyone knows you're truly not. She shows up on the red carpet in Issey Miyake, looking like origami. She has no shame. She'll play man, woman, whatever. She leaves you to figure it out. She works with small directors, odd little films, and big budget headliners, even blockbusters. She speaks out without patting herself on the back. She doesn't pretend to be self-deprecating. In her personal life, which is mostly, blessedly, personal, she's her own person. Still devoted to the father of her ten year-old twins, she is also with actor/artist Sandro Kopp. Don't ask if you don't want to know; otherwise, she'll tell you. It's not like they're robbing banks or something. They're all together, though not in that Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Ashton Kucher way. Swinton is our dandy of the day for this unfussy candor and many other reasons, and judging by her fashion forwardness, which is practically futuristic, we suspect she would wear something niche. We suggest Iris Silver Mist or Tubereuse Criminelle, if she doesn't know about them already (if she does, she likely heard of them long before we did). Both are nearly avant-garde in their strange interplay of pretty and potent, angular and full-bodied, dirty and petite. Some would encourage you to wait an hour or two after application before entering out into the world. Use caution with these two, they'd say. Tilda would say those first two hours are the very best.

Dandy of the Day: Vintage Mick Jagger

Well, no, certainly not now--but for a time, some time ago, briefly, during the sixties. When you look at Jagger these days, even in older pictures, it's difficult to see what he was; just as, when you smell L'Heure Bleue, it's hard to ascertain what exactly its impact would have been around the time it was released. You're told it must have been a phenomenal aberration in 1912, truly unusual, yet the overriding association, now, is a fussy elderly woman with a pink suit and a hair rinse to match, such that you don't really smell what the fragrance is, only what it recalls. In the sixties, Jagger specialized in a subversive renovation of the dandy aesthetic. Yes to ruffled shirts and Edwardian jackets. Yes to stovepipe pants and pointed shoes. Yes to long hair, yes to make-up on men, yes to painting vintage interiors with psychedelic colors, cultivated androgyny, easy virtue, yes all around. For many people, tearing down the boundaries of an established conservatism wasn't just a kick but a serious form of civil disobedience. A man can look like many things today but wearing make-up, as Jagger did in Performance, is still asking for it. Dancing as if a woman has possessed you and desperately wants out, as Jagger did on stage (see Gimme Shelter), is flaunting your perversion in a way that even gay men and maybe even women would find offensive today, because it frightens the horses, and gives the wrong idea, and no one will get anything, certainly not equal rights, if they don't work overtime to act like everyone else. Just say no to yes, in other words. Jagger hasn't helped things. On a good day, he looks like the establishment he once set about to overturn. On a bad day, he looks...rode hard and put up wet. Our dandy of the day is a snapshot from the near past. Try to see it clearly, without the goggles of conditioned disdain. In this photo, Jagger might be wearing Loulou, by Cacharel, the bottle of which, like the juice, recalls a practically ancient deco excess of style and luxury, beauty for beauty's sake. All yes, all the time.

Dandy of the Day: Isabella Blow (1958-2007)

Isabella Blow was an English magazine editor and international style icon. The muse of hat designer Phillip Treacy, she is credited with discovering the models Stella Tennant and Sophie Dahl as well as the fashion designer Alexander McQueen (she bought his entire graduate thesis collection). Blow often said her fondest memory was trying on her mother's pink hat, a recollection that she explained led to her career in fashion. She worked with Anna Wintour and Andre Leon Talley at various points. As with Talley, half her work seemed to be expressing and asserting her personal aesthetic. In a 2002 interview with Tamsin Blanchard, Blow declared that she wore extravagant hats for a practical reason:

"...to keep everyone away from me. They say, Oh, can I kiss you? I say, No, thank you very much. That's why I've worn the hat. Goodbye. I don't want to be kissed by all and sundry. I want to be kissed by the people I love."

Toward the end of her life, Blow had become seriously depressed and was reportedly anguished over her inability to "find a home in a world she influenced". Other pressures included money problems (Blow was disinherited by her father in 1994). On May 6, 2007, during a weekend house party at Hilles, where the guests included Treacy and his life partner, Stefan Bartlett, Blow announced that she was going shopping. Instead, she was later discovered collapsed on a bathroom floor by her sister Lavinia and was taken to the hopsital, where Blow told the doctor she had drunk the weedkiller Paraquat. She died at the hospital the following day.

Images of Blow, in which her inimitable spirit is abundantly apparent, remain iconic illustrations of committed individualism. We at I Smell Therefore I Am believe that Blow might have worn any of the following:

Robert Piguet's Fracas - tuberose softened in butter.

Frederic Malle's Carnal Flower - the exact moment of
orgasm, bottled.

Ava Luxe Midnight Violet - a bed of violet glowing under the moon, the smell wafting upwards with each step taken through the woods.

Annick Goutal's Sables - a bonfire in the field, its smoke surrounding you, leaving with you on your clothes.

Thoughts?

Dandy of the Day

At the ribald age of three he was, already, inordinately preoccupied with twill and velvet and satin and brocade. By Six, he was reciting poetry--first Dr. Seuss, then Yeats. He wrote to Dear Abby at sixteen: "Why does the world at large seem not to care about the color red?"

"Specifically, Brick Red," he added.

Dear Abby did not respond.

He believes great, even obsessive care should be taken in one's dress and the dressing of one's friends. Enemies can fend for themselves, but he gives them enough rope. His appearance outside people's bedrooms at the break of dawn is not altogether unheard of. From the window, he makes discreet, attentive suggestions. Do not please inflict yourself upon the nylon green blouse, his eyes sigh. Even nylon deserves a better hue.

He wears Guerlain--specifically, L'Heure Bleue. It reminds him of a dense, textured sky. Over which: a field. Wind eddies through the grass, creating elaborate patterns. Birds fly overhead with the common sense to recognize that they are purely decorative. The rodents stay clear of the picture, out of common decency. There is a torte in the field which has not yet been discovered by the ants. He decides to eat the torte, the freshly-baked scent of which wafts in filigreed vapors up to his nostrils and straight back to his childhood, where a bed bedecked in twill and velvet and satin and brocade awaits his arrival.

Dandy of the Day, Defined

The poet Charles Baudelaire described a dandy as one whose interest in aesthetics approaches religious devotion, if not fanaticism. However, dandy means all sorts of things. The connotation is that of someone whose passion for art and beauty (and fragrance) is unrealistically devout. The dandy's adherence to beauty beyond the strictures of date, place, and time is out of step with modern standards, which are considered mere nuisances. Here at I Smell Therefore I Am, we view as a dandy anyone whose style and/or taste/and or overall outlook and presentation is decidedly bold and individually extravagant. We applaud, by singling out, people whose outlook is visionary. Fancy dressers, arch intellectuals, perfume connoisseurs. The woman at the corner deli who wears her hair high and her perfume loud. They like what they like, and whether or not you like it too is of no significance to them. They wear it or say it or pursue it regardless. In an era of conformity and marketed identity, we seek out those who persist as individuals, against the grain, until the grain finally, if ever, catches up with them.

Don't think only men can be dandy. Women are dandy too. They even had their own term for it. Several terms, in fact. Quaintrelle, dandyess, dandizette. Famous courtesan Cora Pearl was an early quaintrelle. We use the word dandy to mean both genders. We use it to mean beyond gender; rather, a state of mind and a state of being. We use it on this blog to celebrate the unusual and to speculate what kind of perfumes would best befit these particular forms of maverick individualism.

Dandy of the Day

This young man, in our humble but, you should know, widely esteemed opinion, is wearing a cologne which hasn't been invented yet.

Dandy of the Day: Patrick Petitjean

Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you the Ted Kaczynski of contemporary fashion: Patrick Petitjean, aged 25, of France. Patrick is versatile. He is Grizzly Adams, the man on the street who just asked you for a dime (you refused), Godspell revival, and Abe Lincoln. He is man, woman, and wolf, all rolled into one. He crosses and confuses gender boundaries and preconceptions. He's the perfect fashion model, we believe, because you can't look at him without imagining he must smell. He brings fashion down to earth, literally, rubbing it in the dirt. Here are the scents we suggest for Patrick Petitjean:


Kenzo Air: all peppery vetiver and arid grit

Comme des Garcon 2 Man: citrus smoke and a singeing incense vaporousness

Baron, The Gentleman: pungent, ever so slightly dysfunctional lavender

Kolnisch Juchten: charred leather and delicious, pickled wine barrel cork

Body Kouros: a slightly sexualized wrestling match with eucalyptus, and the plant is winning

M7: Look what happened to that glass of Coke you left on the table--for twenty years.

Hermes Equipage: Let's take a ride on my horse's saddle. Please sit on your face.

Knize Ten: Welcome to my studio. Sorry about the smell. I've been cleaning my paintbrushes.

Bond No. 9, Broadway Nite: What did you expect me to smell like--armpit?

Fine and Dandy

Trevor Dandy, 1970s gospel singer extraordinaire (here pictured on the cover of his album "Don't Cry, Little Tree") inaugurates I Smell Therefore I Am's "Dandy of the Day" Poster Boy. We imagine someone of Trevor's refined sensitivity might wear L'Artisan's masterpiece Dzing! He would like Dzing! because it smells of wood and sawdust and smoke and animal, and Trevor, consummate tree hugger, could wrap his mind around that. Trevor might also tend towards Byzance, which is sufficiently baroque, its tuberose incense-laden. The women love Trevor, but not as much as the trees.