This post is
dedicated
To the memory of
Mona di Orio,
1969-2011
The death
of Mona di Orio at the young age of 42 following surgical complications was a
tragedy for all who knew and loved her. A part of the perfumed world had suddenly
gone dark. I listened to her recently on YouTube, describing in her beautifully
enunciated French her apprenticeship with her maître, the mighty Edmond Roudnitska. Her vibrancy and ability to
communicate her passion for fragrance, to philsophise and romance the complex and
often pretentious world of perfumery will be sorely missed. She was a rare
presence in perfumery; sociable, accessible, modern and yet delicately classical.
Mona was an obsessive perfectionist applying this ruthless desire for finish and detail to all aspects of her
perfumed work. For someone so preoccupied with the concepts of light and
chiaroscuro in perfumery, the extinguishing of so bright and sensual a light is
particularly poignant.
Mona was
a direct link to Roudnitska (1905-1996), one of the world’s greatest perfumers,
the man who created Diorissimo for
Christian Dior in 1956, perhaps the
finest example of a white floral ever known. Christian Dior was captivated by
the beauty and simplicity of the classic muguet blanc. At his lavish and moving
funeral at Saint-Honoré-d’Eylau in 1957 his casket was laden with sprigs of
lily of the valley and the church was awash with the extraordinary white scent
of them. Mourners were overwhelmed by their perfume.
It is
Roudnitska’s rendition of muguet blanc,
or lily of the valley that will ensure his name will be remembered as one of
the true artists and innovators of the fragrance world. Lily of the valley
cannot be extracted therefore Roudnitska had to build up layer upon layer to
create a painstaking portrait of the flower that captured its beauty, its
magical lemony pepper freshness and its almost ethereal shimmering fleetness of
presence. It is not just the portrait of a flower, but also its surroundings, a
spring dawn, dew and the soft uniqueness of the southern French light. He often
referred to it as his ghost flower as
he was haunted by his search for its scent. He planted it below his window in
Cabris near Grasse as he formulated his masterpiece for Dior. Today’s version
of Diorissimo is different as it must
be in the light of time moving and reformulation and shifts in taste. The
underrated François Demachy has been quietly tweaking the classic Dior scents
and sending them back out into to face the world. On the whole they are rather
moving, a tribute to times gone by and artistry that will never be seen again.
I have been sampling them recently and was very taken with the re-working of Diorama; it smelt astonishing on my
skin. I never wear anything like that normally, but all day long I just kept
returning over and over again to the crook of my arm. The delicacy of the
original was hovering inside a more robust casing of modernity, but it still
smelled remarkable.
For me
however the re-orchestrated Diorissimo
has lost a lot of the creaminess and flow of the original. This was inevitable,
but in the spaces between the notes, as the fragrance meanders a little from
its mission statement of creating the purity of Roudnitska’s Cabris muguet, you
can still detect tiny flashes of tremendous beauty and you realise that Demachy
is a talented and instinctive chronicler of these archive classics.
I had a
friend who was always given Diorissimo
by her mother for her birthday. She used to moan it was too old for her, yet is
always swathed her in a glorious smoky green wrap of clarity and nostalgia. I
have a photo of her sitting on a bench sullenly smoking in Benetton cashmere
and you can actually smell the tangy white notes and green squeak of soft
floral muguet roll out of the frame.
Roudnitska
also created Eau Sauvage for Dior, a
hedione drenched feral citrus that still smells timeless, Eau d’Hermes, Cristalle
and the elegiac Le Parfum de Thérèse,
a melody of white notes and passion that Roudnitska created especially
exclusively for his wife Thérèse Delveaux. He eventually allowed Frédérick
Malle to publish it as part of his Perfume Editions. This has allowed the rest
of us to experience its poignant personal majesty.
Roudnitska
was a true master of perfume. He understood the way women wanted to be scented,
the relationship of nature to skin, the way we wanted fragrances to work in
harmony with our inner heat and desires. Above all, there was glamour and
mystery, a sense of another time, an echo of something past, lingering on the
skin, dancing to life in the air. Try wearing his elegiac Parfum de Thérèse; I defy anyone not to be moved to smiling sadness
by the shimmering accords of jasmine, rose and plum bathed in light and underpinned
by Roudnitska’s masterly use of leather and cedar. There is a hint of melon
like a steady candle flame beckoning in a window which I love as the scent
settles on the skin. To love someone this much and create a masterpiece for her
is a startling, Wuthering Heights thing. It never fails to move me.
This
understanding of scent was instilled in a young Mona di Orio during a sixteen-year
apprenticeship alongside Roudnitska in Cabris, learning how to read nature and
understand the beauty of great perfumery. She first met him in July 1987 when
she was just 16 years old. He told her to wait, study and learn. This rencontre would have an impact on her
perfumed psyche and oeuvre that would last until she died. She read and
absorbed his influential work L’Esthetique
en Question, still an important work in terms of reflecting how we view fragrance.
Roudnitska argued that fragrance has a role as art, as a creative force, moulded
with aesthetics, capable of moving us like great music, painting and
literature. There is also a practical side to bestowing a cultural status on
fragrance, protecting by law formulae, bottles and packaging in both niche and
mainstream fragrance production. This would essentially help in the battle
against fakes and plagiarism that has long been a problem in the fragrance
world.
Interestingly,
in January this year, the French Government, at the behest of the Ministry of Culture
and some not so subtle maneuvering by Frederick Mitterrand, has acknowledged
perfume as a form of art and a major contribution to French culture. The
Société Française des Parfumeurs has been lobbying for this for many years.
Five perfumers were inducted as Chevaliers
des Arts et des Lettres. Diplomatically they each represented the five big
fragrance and flavour companies. They were Daniela Andrier of Givaudan,
Françoise Caron of Takasago, Olivier Cresp of Firmenich (and brother of
Françoise Caron…), Maurice Roucel of Symrise and Dominique Ropion of IFF.
There is
a lot of symbolism and some tokenism is the selection. However the recognition
of perfumery as art must not be underestimated. It subtly enhances the industry
with a veil of stylised power that did not exist before. Something Edmond
Roudnitska has been fighting for all of his perfumed life. It was touching that
his son Michel, was present at the ceremony, as a perfumer in his own right and
taking pictures of the important day.
So this
deeply argued and passionate belief in perfumery as art was installed in Mona
Di Orio very early on in her apprenticeship with Roudnitska. She would have
been exposed to his aesthetic rigours as she studied alongside him for 15 years
in Cabris, near Grasse, the spiritual heartland of French fragrance. Surrounded
and profoundly influenced by nature and above all the beautiful natural light
of the South, Mona learnt her craft from one of the true aestheticians of the
perfume world.
Mona’s
perfumed oeuvre was formed by a search for balance and perfection. This again
was inculcated in her by the rigour of her training with Roudnitska. A lot of
contemporary perfume training involves reverse engineering, students studying
what is in existing scents and attempting to deconstruct or unravel the twist
and turn of notes. Roudnitska did things a little differently, he would set
Mona an exercise where she would pick a flower from the extensive parkland
surrounding Cabris and analyse it. She was however expected to describe the
essence, the soul of the natural
flower. This unique and deeply connective approach is more akin to life
drawing, compelling a more detailed and scrutinising examination of the
subject. I watched a documentary recently on Lucien Freud. While not his
biggest fan, it is true his portraiture is incredibly compelling and seems to
reveal truths about the sitters that are buried beneath the surface. A lot of
his work is uncomfortable and full on, however there is now denying the power
and flayed honesty in his work.
Mona di
Orio had trained as an art student and would have understood this detailed and
scrupulous approach to studying a flower or scented source. She carried this
delicate and precise attention to detail into her own work and you can see in it
for example in her passion for jasmine and its indolic magnificence and her
later robustly sensual and feral rendition of oud.
Her perfumes
have both delicacy and robustness of line, and examine the interplay of notes
and the all-important movement to drydown. There is poignancy, character and
above all truthfulness. This is in part Di Orio’s talent and personality shining
through her work but also the spirit of her master, Roudnitska, guiding her
hand and her heart. It is hard to entirely shake off the imprint of a maître. Arguably Di Orio never really
reached dizzying heights as a perfumer and certainly never produced anything to
rival Roudnitska’s classic creations. This was in her future and her Nombres D’Or Collection was an
indication of even more beautiful things to come.
Beautiful, Thank you
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