Azzedine Alaïa's First Fragrance: Radically Abstract, Deliciously Feral

In the 80s there were two ways of dressing to show you had both brains and curves. Gaultier’s corsets were quotational and ironic, as tightly tied up in arch references as they were cinched around your waist. Alaïa’s stretchy dresses somehow redesigned your silhouette into Jessica Rabbit’s while allowing you to move; but the only story they told was the one you’d live out in them… 

 In the tradition of Madeleine Vionnet or Cristobal Balenciaga, Azzedine Alaïa works on form rather than narrative. Echoing this aesthetic stance, his first, long-awaited fragrance is strictly abstract, fiercely un-Oriental and based on the merest glimmer of an anecdote, more of a sensation, really: a childhood memory of his grandmother splashing cool water on hot walls in Tunisia.

During the monthly work sessions that brought together all the members of the creative team, the perfumer Marie Salamagne explains, Alaïa gave few specific indications. But he did know what he didn’t want. And one of the things he definitely didn’t want was for any note to stick out so that it could be identified. When describing her composition, Salamagne says she prefers to speak of sensations: the coolness of water, the velvet of petals, the warmth of skin. So: mineral, floral, animal.

Alaïa manages to be an oddity, fitting neither niche nor mainstream codes, while – even more oddly – feeling deeply familiar. It does smell of cool, mineral water and warm skin, but also of the wall and even of dust.

As for notes, if one must: the aquatic effect is rendered through Transluzone, a Firmenich molecule which, unlike calone, smells neither of melon nor of oysters and egg whites, but acts rather like aldehydes. Coolness: pink pepper. Certainly enough lemon to produce the same sensation on the tongue that you get when you squirt a couple of drops in a glass of water. The peony and freesia accords included by Salamagne to brighten up the blend add a velvety petal freshness tinged with fruit in a tropical sunset palette of orange and apricot. Warmth: a creamy powdery musk accord – among which Firmenich’s Exaltenone, said to be fairly animalic and close to Tonkin musk. The fatty-inky-mineral castoreum base picks up the mineral accord from the top notes, holding up the vertical axis of the scent. Another way of reading Alaïa, as did a perfumer standing next to me at an event, would be: blood-rose-castoreum.

I’ve often thought that if I didn’t wear my pre-80s fragrances more often, it was for the same reason I didn’t wear my vintage dresses much: no Lycra, which is to fabrics what musk is to fragrance. Alaïa-the-fragrance wears like Alaïa’s curve-enhancing dresses. Like his trademark perforated motifs, it lets the scent of skin seep through. It isn’t particularly gendered, yet it hints at sex -- a compliment-grabber that’ll unfailingly draw noses to necks.

Alaïa will launch in France in Alaïa boutiques as of June 1^st, then at the Galeries Lafayette in Paris on June 22^nd. It will be globally available on July 6^th.

Le premier parfum d'Azzedine Alaïa: radicalement abstrait, minéral, animal

Dans les Eighties, il y avait deux manières pas cruches de revendiquer ses courbes. Post-modernes, ironiques, citationnels, les corsets de Gaultier étaient aussi entortillés dans le second degré que ne l’étaient les corps dans les lacets desdits corsets. Et puis il y avait ces fourreaux stretch d’Alaïa, qui nous ondulaient sur les courbes pendant qu’on se déhanchait au Palace. Là, pas l’ombre d’une référence, pas la moindre citation à l’horizon : la seule histoire que racontaient ces robes, c’était celle qu’on allait vivre en les enfilant. Alors Azzedine Alaïa, dans les Eighties, les filles qui avaient des rondeurs – que dès lors on a appelées « pulpeuses » -- lui ont dit merci.  (La sœur de M. Alaïa veillait sur le showroom de la rue de Bellechasse : c’est elle qui m’a choisi ces robes. Je les ai encore toutes les deux.)

Dans le droit fil de Madeleine Vionnet ou de Cristobal Balenciaga, Azzedine Alaïa travaille sur la forme plutôt que sur la narration. Son premier parfum reflète ce parti-pris : strictement abstrait, radicalement dénué d’orientalisme, partant de ce qui est à peine le reflet d’un souvenir, plutôt une sensation : la grand-mère du petit Azzedine, en Tunisie, aspergeant d’eau fraîche des murs de craie brûlants.

Hormis cela, peu d’indications spécifiques, racontait le parfumeur Marie Salamagne (Firmenich) lors de la présentation à la presse organisée par Beauté Prestige International dans les locaux du couturier. Mais M. Alaïa savait ce qu’il ne voulait pas. Et ce dont il ne voulait surtout pas, c’était d’une note qui dépasse assez pour être identifiée. Aussi, pour décrire sa composition, Marie Salamagne a préféré parler d’impressions.

Fraîcheur, chaleur. Eau, fleurs, peau. Minéral, végétal, animal. Pas forcément un parfum, en somme. Plutôt une somme de sensations primales. Un sillage hors des clous, c’est-à-dire hors des codes de la parfumerie féminine mainstream. Sans pourtant adhérer à ceux du niche, puisqu’il se soustrait délibérément tant au récit qu’aux aspérités olfactives, tous deux caractéristiques du genre.

On tient aux notes ? Soit. La fraîcheur, c’est le poivre rose – unique suggestion spécifique du couturier, qui adore en mettre dans ses plats. L’acidulé d’un citron quand on verse deux gouttes de jus dans un verre d’eau sans sucre -- parce qu’il n’est pas sucré, Alaïa, MERCI Azzedine. Régime radical, pas un micron de glucose, ce jus carbure à la Volvic sans pour autant découler de la famille des aquatiques. Car la Transluzone, molécule de Firmenich utilisée pour susciter l’impression de l’eau, tiendrait plutôt de la cascade que de la bourriche d’huîtres ou des cucurbitacées, contrairement à la calone et à ses sœurs marines. Tout en agissant un peu comme les aldéhydes.

C’est ce mur minéral, inattendu dans son rôle de note fraîche, qui donne de la tenue aux froufrous floraux plantés là pour l’éclairer. Azzedine Alaïa refusant toute référence orientaliste, la fleur d’oranger a été écartée. Pivoine et freesia sont revendiqués, mais franchement non-figuratifs. On serait plutôt dans de la crème de pétales fruités – orange, abricot, bref des couleurs de soleil couchant sur fond de rose sanguine, sale et salée mais encore une fois, si abstraite qu’on n’en voit pas l’ombre d’une épine. Elle se contente d’agir.

Lesdits froufrous floraux voilent à peine un fond qui, s’il n’est ni masculin ni féminin, n’en a pas moins mauvais genre. Une base castoréum cuirée, grasse, aux relents d’encre de Chine, rattrape l’effet Volvic des notes de tête, créant un axe minéral vertical -- de quoi mettre du plomb dans l’ourlet… Et le musc étant au parfum ce que le Lycra est aux étoffes, c’est un maillage de muscs poudrés/animaux, parmi lesquels l’Exaltenone de Firmenich réputé proche du musc tonkin, qui sous-tend Alaïa tout en lui donnant son sillage suivez-moi-jeune-homme.

Comme les motifs perforés dont le couturier a fait sa signature, ce parfum laisse sentir la peau. Et donnerait plutôt envie de s’en rapprocher  – de tous les parfums que j’ai testés récemment, c’est celui qui m’a valu le plus de nez sur la nuque…

Alaïa sera disponible en France dès le 1^er juin dans les boutiques Alaïa, puis à partir du 22 juin en exclusivité aux Galeries Lafayette Haussmann, avant une distribution internationale le 6 juillet. 

Photo du haut: Sortie de défilé d'Azzedine Alaïa en 1986, par Arthur Elgort. 

Photo du bas: Publicité du parfum, par Paolo Roversi.

Belle Haleine, the Scent of Art: Nosing around the Museum Tinguely in Basel

The scent of pink oleander, roses and hawthorn wafted from disheveled gardens, blending with wisps of barbecue smoke and cooler whiffs of river water that carried hints of waterlogged, decaying plants. On that muggy, hazy late-spring afternoon, Solitude-Promenade, the walk along the Rhine on the Right Bank of Basel, yielded a vibrant smellscape. And one that was, oddly enough, more vivid and memorable than most pieces I’d just experienced at the Museum Tinguely… Perhaps some of it was captured in Anna-Sabina Zürrer’s Solitude 2014, a glass vial containing 27 ml of essentials oils distilled from three cubic meters of plants from Solitude Park. Since the vial was locked inside a case, I’ll never know.

The first installment of a series of exhibitions dedicated to the five senses by the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Belle Haleine, The Scent of Art brought together works by modern and contemporary artists focusing on smell. It was, of course, named after Marcel Duchamp’s eponymous assisted ready-made (previously part of Yves Saint Laurent’s collection, its current owner remains anonymous, so that it was not shown).

When artists use smells, what smells do they use? To what end? How do they produce the smells – what substances do they emanate from? How is their long-lastingness, i.e. the integrity of the piece, ensured? And if there are many odorant pieces, how can they be shown together? When I poked my nose into Belle Haleine three days before it closed, it had been running for three months and the technical issues struck me first.

Scents leak. They mix and cross-contaminate. They “wear out” since to be experienced, they must self-destruct. The curator, Annja Müller-Alsbach, partly solved the contamination issue by placing most pieces behind closed doors. Which didn’t prevent Ernesto Neto’s monumental Mentre niente accade (“While Nothing Happens”) from taking over most of the airspace. The piece is a “tent” suspended from the ceiling, shaped like a gigantic upside-down mutant Casablanca lily and hung with spice-filled Lycra pouches. These colossal pistils/punching balls leak ground turmeric, black pepper, ginger and cloves, compelling visitors to experience smells from the point of view of the bee, as it were, in a full-body immersion. 

The smaller smelly pieces were shown behind Plexiglas windows equipped with a cylinder capped with a “sieve” (such as spice bottles have) which could be opened with a flap. However, snorting at an open can of Piero Manzoni’s infamous Merda d’artista (1961) was useless: whatever odorant molecules the 54-year-old turd might have given off, they’d long flown away. A blessing, no doubt.

Not all pieces were smelly. Some – videos, drawings, paintings – contained no odorant materials at all. Others were meant to contain something smelly, but being sealed, you had to take the artist’s word for it: the seminal work in that category being Duchamp’s Air de Paris, an ampule containing 50cc of Parisian air. Except that the replica of the 1919 piece, produced under Duchamp’s direction in 1964, was made in Milan.

Whether you could actually smell them or not, the “smellies” could be split up into two categories. Those that either smelled, or were literally made up of human “byproducts”. And the rest (mostly plant-based). Within the former category, a number of pieces dealt with odor as identity. Among the things that couldn’t be sniffed, Peter de Cupere signed his Olfactory Art Manifest (to read it, click here) with an ink distilled from his body odors. For Concrete 2.3 g. Duft Selbstportrait, Claudia Vogel forewent washing for several weeks while wearing gauzes on various parts of her body, whose odorants were then extracted by a perfumer. 

The result remains in a sealed bottle, as does Clara Ursitti’s Eau Claire, a blend of the artist’s vaginal and menstrual secretions, alcohol and coconut oil (produced in 1993, it precedes by nearly 20 years the designer Marc Atlan’s similarly-themed La Petite Mort, by Bertrand Duchaufour). Ursitti’s Self-portrait in Scent, Sketch n°2 was, however, made accessible through a clever Plexiglas blotter dispenser. The blotters must have been soaked well in advance. I think they were meant to smell of the artist’s nether regions, but they didn’t give off much more than a whiff of something faintly metallic.

!Achtung! Starker Geruch (“Beware! Strong odor!), warned a plaque at the entrance of the room where The FEAR of Smell – the Smell of FEAR was shown. The installation, by the Norwegian artist Sissel Tolaas, features the cold sweat of 11 phobic men, analyzed and reproduced by IFF via headspace technology and micro-encapsulated within the wall paint. To smell the fear, visitors must rub the walls in a giant game of scratch-and-sniff.

Three months into the exhibition, the 11 cold sweats had leaked from the walls to form what should have been a huge funk of fright, but to my nose, smelled as though someone had knocked over a shelf of aromatic ingredients in a perfumer’s lab while working on a generic male fragrance. When I leaned closer to the various parts of the walls, I picked up dill, the pissy-ness of cassis bud, cumin, musk and metallic notes… I was surprised to find that one “sweat-patch” smelled distinctly of fresh cilantro (at least three other visitors identified it unprompted while I was there). Another was reminiscent of buttered popcorn. 

Museum employees told me they had witnessed strong reactions to Tolaas’ installation, but while I was inside, the general attitude was curious and thoughtful (Baslers are rather tolerant, level-headed people). Visitors seemed similarly unruffled by a piece that played on the invasive, invisible and potentially harmful nature of smells, Carsten Höller & François Roche’s Hypothèse de grue: a spectacular dragon-like structure belching steam purportedly laced with “pheromones” and “undeclared neurostimulatory substances”.

Reactions to Kristoffer Myskja’s Smoking Machine were somewhat stronger: as it name indicates, the apparatus chain-smokes cigarettes, so that the room where it was displayed smelled of ashtray (but not of smoke, smoking being forbidden within the museum – perhaps some kind soul wheels the machine outside every now and then for a puff?). The fact that the real “smell of fear” was given off by Smoking Machine tends to disprove the most commonly traded trope about fragrance: that reactions to it are purely “subjective” and “personal”. Few people would have reacted to the smell of cigarettes as though it were the very reek of the Antichrist during the Mad Men era – or even the 80s. The aversion is an acquired, cultural reflex.

Since the point was not to claim that “perfume is art” but to explore the use of scent in art, there were no perfumes per se in the exhibition, unless one counts the French Pop artist Martial Raysse’s 1970 Démocratie pour homme and Démocratie pour femme, packaged like commercial fragrances but meant to smell of “the people’s sweat”. 

In fact, in a stance that hinted at some sort of reverse puritanism, most pieces selected for Belle Haleine gave off deliberately unpleasant odors. One rare exception was Valeska Soares’ Fainting Couch, a perforated stainless steel bed containing hidden Stargazer lilies: even so, the exhibition booklet warned us that “here, seduction and intoxication by means of odors lie closely side by side.” Poison, anyone?

None of the artists represented worked on olfactory form – i.e. fashioning a shape out of smells. Even when the analysis and composition of scents was carried out by a perfumer, as in Ursitti’s self-portrait or Tolaas’s cold sweats, reproduction trumps aesthetics (at least in the artist’s intentions that were communicated to the public).[1] In the selected pieces, smell was used as an idea – for instance, the distillation of identity/essence through B.O. – and/or for its effect, leveraging the emotional, invasive, transgressive potential of odor.

Long exposed to the likes Sécrétions Magnifiques and used to discussing the finer nuances of human cumin or poopy musk, hardcore perfume aficionados may not quite be as shocked by this as “civilians”. Whether you’re an artist or a perfume lover, embracing skank is a way of pushing back one’s boundaries, sprinkled with a delightful dash of épater les bourgeois, never a bad point for the avant-gardes or the geeks. Odor is primal and penetrative; a love-hate medium that may elicit the strongest possible reactions (except, perhaps, with the neutral Swiss?). But does it have to stink to be art?

Belle Haleine, Der Duft der Kunst

Museum Tinguely (Basel) from February 11^th to May17^th 2015

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[1] Frustratingly, there is no exhibition catalogue: the free booklet handed out to visitors does not cover all the pieces, and includes no other critical apparatus than a press article from the cultural supplement to the Swiss daily Die Zeit.