Ever since I got a preview snootful in August, I’ve
been utterly obsessed with the new Arquiste for women, ELLA. Not only did it have the oft-namechecked, seldom-experienced
Proustian effect on me, but I believe that, along with its companion EL, it’s the most visceral, exciting
work the Carlos Huber/ Rodrigo Flores Roux duo have produced to date. So that
despite the Parisian intello character
of the notes below, I’m chuffed.
Though it’s customary to compare music and scent, they
differ in a major respect: since the late 19th century, music has been
recorded. The literal moments in which it was performed are preserved to be experienced,
studied, fetishized, or quoted in later pieces. Perfume disappears at it is
experienced. Extinct or reformulated scents only live on in memories, and only
perfumers can voluntarily “replay” them in their minds – most of us are at the
mercy of a random whiff. But like pop music, though to a considerably lesser
extent, perfumery has been driven by retromania since the mid-90s: niche
perfumery founded itself on it both in its discourse (going back to the roots
of the art) and notes (leather, incense, chypres…). And a significant sector of
the perfume aficion focuses on
classics and/or vintage scents.
Historicist in its storytelling, though not in its
actual olfactory structures, Arquiste never came under retromania per se since it didn’t reference moments
within anyone’s living memory. Part of what drives retro is the nostalgic
charge you get from the artefacts of a given period in pop culture. Arquiste’s
new EL and ELLA gave me that charge. Almost a shock, in fact: a punch in the
gut, in fact.
Once I’d read the “liner notes” – i.e. the press
material --, I understood why. Rodrigo Flores Roux has used the 70s
interpretations of chypres and fougères as quotes
in both compositions (interestingly, it is precisely in the 1970s that the
retro sensibility took off). The idea wasn’t to make note-perfect renditions,
but to embed them within a narrative: a day in Acapulco in the glamorous disco
era, from beach club to night club to a tryst in the dunes. So that both scents
needed to feel lived, sweated and loved in; rubbed together so that some notes
would be shared.
In ELLA,
Flores Roux manages to hit a sweet spot that conjures all of the chypre forms of the era, from Aromatics Elixir to Azzaro (which
was a Prunol-type) by way of the greenies (Givenchy
III, Jean-Louis Scherrer I), with
a splash of blindingly white, soapy aldehydic florals like Estée Super et Michel Hy’s original Ivoire for Balmain.
Similarly, the perfumer’s tribute to pornstached Boogie Night love gods, though it mainly
references the era’s fougères, can also easily raise the ghost of Van Cleef & Arpels pour Homme, a
jet-black aromatic leather chypre that my friends and I wore to a man during
the post-punk era.
Catching spectres of fragrances past out of the corner
of the nostril though never a specific one. The honeyed sweat and
booze-splashed haze shrouding both scents mirror the distortions of memory.
Every single person I’ve met who actually lived through those days has felt the
same shock. This goes beyond retro: it is perfume as hauntology.[1]
[1]
The term, coined by Jacques
Derrida, initially referred to the death of Communism. More widely, cultural
critics have used it to refer to “the figure of the ghost as that which is
neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive" (Colin Davis): in
this case, the revenants of perfume modernity.
The picture of Janice Dickinson is by Guy Bourdin.
