My perfume course at the London College of Fashion, and other vignettes from the UK…

Knackered doesn’t even begin to cover it. Between my two-day, ten-hour intensive, dinners every night with my London friends and sundry business appointments, I didn’t even have the time to drop by Avery, a new perfume shop, or Amouage, which I’ve never checked out, but I did manage to bookend my stay with two unscheduled visits…

The first was when I went to drop off my luggage at my friend Laurent’s gallery on Savile Row. It’s three doors down from Norton & Sons, the tailor which provided the inspiration for Penhaligon’s Sartorial, so on my way to the LCF at Oxford Circus I decided to drop in and have a sniff. Fortunately, the unflappable and very charming young man who greeted me didn’t think I was off my rocker when I explained the reason for my errand : he amiably ushered me into the workshop. To say the place is smelly would be a far stretch, and teasing out the dominant notes truly does require a bit of imagination. Apart from the very noticeable ozonic/aldehydic smell of iron steam on cloth, and a smudge of bees wax on old wood, you really have to stick your nose on the various smelly items – the sewing machines, the waxed thread, the leather seats and wooden fixtures – to pick up the effects Bertrand Duchaufour exploited in Sartorial, but they’re there all right. And, not that I doubted his word for an instant, I did get independent confirmation of his visit, which the tailors had found quite hilarious. I ended up improvising a mini-lecture on the subject, whilst they continued stitching and cutting…

My second visit required every last drop of my energy on Sunday morning: I wanted to catch the Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and it was well worth it, with several of Leon Bakst’s spectacular costumes on show, as well as those designed by Picasso for Parade. Though there was a bottle of Mitsouko in a glass case – it was a scent Diaghilev was fond, apparently, of spraying on his room curtains – the main olfactory hallucinations that came to me were of Coty Ambre Antique and L’Origan, with their saturated, almost barbaric facets echoing the vivid colors and erotic forcefulness of the costumes, music and choreography…

However, as I exited through the gift shop, what caught my nose was a whiff of something that smelled suspiciously of Mitsouko… but wasn’t. The Ballets Russes perfume commissioned by the V&A to Roja Dove is more than a tribute to the legendary impresario’s favorite fragrance: it is pretty much a clone, with added spice. So much so that I spent the whole afternoon in a state of distraction, after having sprayed it on my hand (there were no blotters), as though I’d met an old flame who’d had some kind of cosmetic enhancement… I didn’t particularly expect "the world's only professeur de parfums" to come up with anything groundbreakingly original: he’s been very forthright about his source of inspiration, and most of the fragrances he offers in his shop (the ones only a single person can buy) are pretty much clones of classics, with more expensive materials. Still, I couldn’t help but feel upset: however tweaked it’s been, Mitsouko is still around and it’s still recognizably Mitsouko. What’s the point of coming out with a twist on it? Needless to say, my stash of vintage Mitsouko being quite sizeable by now, I didn’t make the purchase. A tribute to the Ballets Russes could’ve been so much more imaginative… But there you go. 

As for my course, this time around it was for young fashion students of the LCF’s study abroad department. Americans, Indians, Brazilians, one Japanese girl…

Unlike my course for adults, this type of shorter intensive is much more lecture-oriented, since the students are neither perfume aficionados nor industry professionals, and are basically discovering not only raw materials, but most of the classics. But I’m happy to say that several were quite good at recognizing notes and facets. Of course I’m always careful to pick things that they might be familiar with in real life – fruit, spices, the more common floral notes… The associations are often interesting: the point is not to recognize raw materials, but to link them to words and experiences. For instance, indol, which I present when we “dissect” jasmine, elicited “old clothes in a chest” (i.e. mothballs) and… “old people” (who do give them off). Unsurprisingly, ethyl maltol sparked off a chorus of “cotton candy!”.  Jasmine was instantly recognized by the Indians and Japanese – but the Japanese student was the only one to detect a tea effect in the combination of ionones and hedione, which I’d decided to test to see if Jean-Claude Ellena’s olfactory illusion in Bulgari’s Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert worked out when reduced to its most basic accord… She said the smell could be found only in the very highest quality teas. She was also the one who said that Mathilde Laurent’s incense-laden L’Heure Mystérieuse reminded her of several places in Japan…

But as a whole, all of the students were most sensitive to the memories and expressive power of notes and perfumes: it was the first time they fully realized that these could be used deliberately by perfumers to conjure a mood or an atmosphere. Touchingly, when I did an associative writing exercise with them based on Cartier’s Les Heures de Parfum, what came up were memories from home – after all, they’ve been away from it for a couple of months now, and I keenly remember the homesickness I felt when I went off, like they have, to study abroad… One young woman spent the two days, she told me, on the brink of tears because discovering this new olfactory dimension connected so deeply with her soul; one young man, after smelling Ambroxan, dreamt of an ex. 

It was a pity to leave them after only ten hours: the door had begun to open, and once they’d started talking, I’m sure they wouldn’t have stopped. That’s what scents do to people: they open up a new avenue for language. Connecting smells with words, using smells as we do words… That’s the whole point, isn’t it? And these young people got it.

P.S. Melina, you've just won a magnificent... photocopy of Jean-Claude and Céline Ellena's recipe. Email me and tell me if you'd rather I scanned it...