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| © Marin Montagut, courtesy RMN |
The picture above is the design of a scarf by the
young artist Marin Montagut, exclusively sold at the Grand Palais boutique during the Jardins exhibition,
depicting one of my two favorite places in Paris, the Luxembourg Gardens. My
other being the Palais-Royal, a technicolour riot of hot-pink magnolias, purple
hyacinths and yellow daffodils these days. It’s hard to resist springtime in
Paris, despite the news being unrelentingly dismal. So I’ll share a few pictures
I took last week along with our seasonal top 10!
The Jardins exhibition at the Grand Palais
Perfumes are our immaterial gardens; and like gardens,
they are ways of framing and dreaming the vegetal world. Last week I celebrated
spring slightly ahead of the calendar -- but the thermometer read 20°C -- by
visiting the beautiful “Jardins” exhibition at the Grand Palais. From Dürer’s
violets to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s herbarium, Gerhard Richter’s hazy, haunting Sommer Tag or Patrick Neu’s obsessively
detailed watercolour portraits of wilting irises (see above), it’s incredibly
rich, and it lasts until 24 July, so if you’re in Paris, book yourself a visit…
Sous les
magnolias, Pierre Bourdon
I wore this bright chewy fruity floral chypre in the
same room as the great perfumer A.M., aka the Human Chromatographer. “Someone’s
wearing a very good Diorella”, she
said. And it is. Sous les magnolias is
as close to a signature scent as I’ve had these past few months. So here it is
again, heading my list.
White song, Dear
Rose
The brand’s co-founder, singer-songwriter Alexandra
Roos, used to wear Poison (much to
the chagrin of her mother, the tremendous Chantal Roos, who worked on the Opium team and created the Issey Miyake
and Jean-Paul Gaultier perfume brands). Fabrice Pellegrin’s spicy almond
blossom White Song is Poison gone cool French rock chick, L’Heure Bleue without the blues.
Le Sillage Blanc, Dusita
Its author, the self-taught Thai perfumer Pissara
Umavijani, named this after one of her father’s poems. Something must’ve been
lost in translation, because it’s hard to think of any scent smelling less “blanc”. This is Bandit’s love child grown up wild in
Phuket: a bracingly bitter green earth brew that connects with the past without
feeling retro.
Totally White, Parle Moi de Parfum
Michel Almairac is a perfumer’s perfumer: the name
that comes up when they have to praise a colleague still in activity. He’s cut
loose in the brand created by his son, not by doing crazy niche-y stuff, but
by giving them cherished formulas he’d never sold, on one condition: no tweaks.
Totally White is a gift to his wife,
who asked for an evocation of the Parc Monceau shrouded in a frothy white
nebula of lilac, hawthorn and mock orange. This is, quite simply, springtime in
Paris bottled. You need it.
Bleu Framboise,
Jean-Michel Duriez
Now gone indie, the former nose of Patou and Rochas
conceived this while crossing the Pont Alexandre III on the Seine, just as
sunset turned the sky blue and red. Hence the name, which translates into a
mouthwatering raspberry accord and a touch of blue chamomile. This is a fruity
floral chypre with a cheerful verdant twist (rhubarb, galbanum, geranium,
oakmoss…) and a hefty animalic kick from jasmine sambac. This smells like Paris
filmed by Wes Anderson.
L’Eau Bleue, Miu Miu
Most things in life can be improved by the mere fact that kittens exist. And few songs
are more empowering than Lesley Gore’s “You don’t own me”. The film for L’Eau Bleue features both. And both make
me feel pretty sappy. It’s the operational word for Daniela Andrier’s second
Miu Miu fragrance though this time in the original sense: a day-glo green sap
dotting the bells of her lily-of-the-valley. Like Diorissimo in its day, this is not “the flower, but an arabesque
around the flower” (to quote Edmond Roudnitska). Dew, sap, and the moist earth
of a Givaudan captive, akigalawood (a mutant patchouli obtained through
enzymatic reaction). And kittens.
Grace by Grace Coddington, Comme des Garçons
You’d expect the flame-haired Ms. Coddington’s rose to
come fully equipped with claws (here be lions). But then, anything that comes
out of a pouch adorned with twee drawings of cats and capped with the kind of
pussyhat a space explorer would wear to land on Planet Claire can’t be too
feral. Twisted with a bunch of basil and mint and tossed on a Cashmeran throw,
Coddington’s rose exudes a playful, I-woke-up-like-this charm.
Parco Palladiano V, Bottega
Veneta
How often do we get to smell aromatic notes outside of
fougères -- and their dread “fresh” men’s deodorant accord -- in fragrance?
Composed by Daniela Andrier for Bottega Veneta’s exclusives line, Parco Palladiano V plucks a bouquet
garni from an Italian herb garden and serves it up as is. Rosemary, laurel and
sage, no longer used as olfactory condiments, reveal their fresh, spicy and
ambery facets. Pity such a simple, embraceable scent should be featured in such
a costly collection. Its salubrious scent evokes the half-medicinal,
half-fragrant recipes that preceded Eau de Cologne as European fragrance
blockbusters, such as the Eau de la Reine de Hongrie. I’d splash it on every
morning.
Woodissime, Thierry
Mugler
You could say this is Féminité du Bois led astray from Morocco -- its notes spanning the
Orient from the Middle-East to China. Here, the violet/pit fruit and
cedar/sandalwood accords are shifted on the scent-map to, respectively,
osmanthus and oud. The principle of Mugler’s Les Exceptions is twisting a
classic form with what they call an “unexpected guest”: in the present case,
osmanthus. Which makes more sense than you’d think: Jean-Christophe Hérault hooks
them up by teasing out the phenolic facets in both (leather, beaver butt, ink,
black olive -- after all, osmanthus, an Oleaceae like jasmine, is related to
the olive tree). The result is what may well be the sole smiling oud on the
market.
For more Spring round-ups:
All pictures are mine, taken at the Jardins exhibition or at the gardens of the Palais-Royal, except the topmost.