If you
love Asian food and all things Pacific Rim and fusion this fragrance is
perfection. I love making jasmine rice with jasmine flowers from Neal’s Yard,
lime zest and coconut milk. The aromas that fill my kitchen are divine. But the
moment of epiphany is having left the rice to slowly and magically transform,
is lifting off the lid and inhaling (eyes closed of course… )the citrus-sweet
steam billowing out with the bittersoft beauty of jasmine blooms. This physical
moment of vaporous gustatory olfaction is a startling concept for a perfume and
one which only Etat Libre D’Orange have the perfumed couilles to carry off.
Last year
Etat Libre D’Orange announced a new fragrance to be signed off by the talented,
artistic German perfumer Ralf Schwieger, a man who builds scents from seemingly
opposite elements and is very steeped in the aesthetics of fragrance. It was to
be called Philippine Houseboy and
would be built around steam, rice, citrus and animalic accords. After a name change,
we have Fils de Dieu (du riz et des agrumes),
a very original composition released alongside Bijou Romantique by French perfumer Mathilde Bijouai. Schwieger has
two acknowledged masterpieces under his belt, Eau des Merveilles for Hèrmes and the glorious, smudged and erotic Lipstick Rose created for the original
line-up of Editions Frédérick Malle.
Eau de Merveilles (2004) is the fragrance that really put
Schwieger on the olfactory map. Working with the influential Véronique Gaultier
at Hèrmes, he and co-creator Nathalie Feisthauser* played with the oceanic
salty skin sexiness of the sea and modern amber notes. What I like about Eau de Merveilles is the transformative
nature it has on the skin; body heat flips the accords into a second layer of
signals, all of them sweetly animalic and come hither sparkling. A tribute to the
weirdness of real ambergris, Eau de
Merveilles has a wonderful strangeness to it, a sense of being washed in
the ocean and then dusted lightly in golden sugars. It has a central floral
motif of lily of the valley and this is treated with reverence and beauty;
laced with elemi, bergamot, pink pepper, benzoin, warm woods and of course a
synthesised ambergris accord. A quite delicious and rewardingly complex skin
experience and one of the best perfumes in the Hèrmes canon.(*Nathalie Feisthauser
created the magnificently Sadean Putain
des Palaces, also for Etat Libre D’Orange, an aldehydic floral with
incredible boudoir violet notes softened by candlelight, rice powder and
swathes of animalics. It is one of the
most accomplished and truly finished
fragrances in the range).
One of
the most fascinating things about Eau de
Merveilles is of course its beauty on skin but also its wearability on fabric,
fur and wool. I’ve read in a couple of interviews that this was intentional. If
so, bravo! I love fragrances worn on clothes; woven through the actual fibres
around me, on scarves, jacket linings, pocket squares, cashmere and silk. There
are differences in the molecular spread of the aroma and I like the linger, the memory of the scent embedded
in cloth each time I take something from my wardrobe to wear.
Schwieger
was a late starter in perfumery terms, beginning his training at the Roure
School of Perfume in Grasse after training in chemistry in Berlin. His
breakthrough was Lipstick Rose in
2000, one of the original fragrances for Editions Frédérick Malle, a unique and
at the time, groundbreaking selection of fragrances published by Malle, whose
maternal grandfather founded Les Parfums Christian Dior.
Malle had
studied Art History and then joined the Roure School, studying with the legendary
Jean Amic (Opium and Y). In 2000, he launched nine fragrances
by nine perfumers, including Dominique Ropion, Olivia Giacobetti, Edmond
Roudnitska and Jean Claude Ellena. Malle wanted perfumers to be more visible,
more credible. This was rather radical from a marketing point of view.
Perfumers worked behind the scenes and handed on their work; other people, the
Houses themselves took the credit. True, there were some superstar noses, but
generally speaking, like directors behind the cameras, they were content to let
the actors or juice shine for the cameras and press. Editions Frédérick Malle
changed that. Perfume lovers have since become fascinated with the world of the
nose, the men and women who create the world’s vast array of mainstream, niche
and avant-garde smells.
This was
a seismic shift in the attitude toward the marketing and retail of fragrances.
Of course small numbers of aficionados have always been interested in the names
behind the notes as it were, as their personalities flicker through the perfumes
like musical motifs. Talented names were often smothered in mainstream Houses,
working with strict budget and marketing/brand briefs. Yet working for niche and artisan houses like Frédérick
Malle, L’Artisan Parfumeur and MDCI to name a few allowed some perfumers the
chance to really soar and spread extraordinary scented wings. Bigger houses
such as Dior, Hermes, Bulgari and Cartier then started to recognize the value
in having these olfactory artists creating more singular work alongside the
standard big budget crowd pleasers. So big names like Mathilde Laurent went to
Cartier, Ellena to Hermes, and Demachy to Dior. The shift and blurring of
artisan and mainstream has become intriguing and to be honest a little
confusing in the last decade or so. To be truly artisan now requires quite an
effort.
Released
in 2000 Schwieger’s Lipstick Rose
captures that delightful creamy soft boudoir scent of classic lipstick, a mixture
of fatty rose, smudged violet, vanillic skin and talcum. A woman in a haze of
retro beauty, applying make-up in blooming mirrors in a childs’s rose-tinted
memory. But there is a ruthless and animalic streak of modernity ruining
through Lipstick Rose, a lick of pole
dancer. A naughty raspberry note sparkles at the top as the scent opens and
this develops down like a trickle of forbidden liquor through the scent as it
warms through on skin. The rose/violet theme is a classical fragrance accord
that echoes down through decades of perfumery. I love L’Artisan Parfumeur’s Drôle de Rose for its cranberry-coloured
interpretation of nostalgic dressing up and scented nights out. But Lipstick Rose undercuts any melancholy
and sentimentality with the sexuality and danger of aldehydes and a deep, plush
kiss of throaty vanilla.
Etat
Libre D’Orange was started by the iconoclastic South African Etienne de Swardt.
After creating a totally bonkers scent Oh
my Dog! with Laurent Jugeau, he set up Etat Libre D’Orange in Paris, with
the tag line….Le parfum est mort. Vive le
parfum! (Perfume is dead. Long live perfume!). The portfolio of fragrances
is witty and vivacious. The blurb and over-sexualised marketing can be a little
tiresome. Although the recently revamped website is a huge improvement on the
old one. But at the end of the day a brand lives and dies by its fragrances. I
have blogged previously about my beloved Rossy
de Palma Eau de Protection, a gorgeous sensual, dark bloody rose. Tom of Finland is a remarkable porny
leather. Charogne and Rien are the two other Etat fragrances I
like to have in my collection.
So I was
very excited last year when news surfaced that Schwieger was creating a
fragrance for ELdO. At the time the name bandied about was Philippine Houseboy and some rather dodgy looking ethnic publicity
images appeared, masks and totems etc, with references to South Pacific
eroticism. Thankfully the name changed to Fils
de Dieu (du riz et des agrumes) and was launched alongside Bijou Romantique, a sensual rich
oriental style scent, inspired by jewels, decadence and lavish loves. Bijou is not
the most original fragrance. I love a ravishing velvety oriental, but there is
something lacking in Bijou. Bite I think, teeth behind the lipstick. A strange
void of real animalics, which is odd considering ELdO usually drench their
fragrances in every animalic under the sun.
Fils de Dieu is unquestionably a totally original scent
experience. I have never smelt anything quite like it. The harmomising of the
notes and accords is masterly. Essentially a simmering steamed twist on a
classic oriental theme; Fils de Dieu plays
with (and subverts) animalic, citric and vanillic accords to create an updated
slant on Guerlain’s Jicky, with
elements of Mitsouko and Shalimar prowling around the edges of
the scented fire. I caught warped twists of Guerlain’s fabled guerlinade in the
dance of rose, jasmine, amber, tonka and the heightened hesperdiric aspect of
the ginger.
As a
gourmand lover though, it is the beautiful handling of the milky rice notes and
the little dashes of coconut that make this fragrance so beautiful to inhale
and wear. It opens with that glorious, lifting-the-lid-off-jasmine-rice scent I
mentioned at the beginning of this piece and then unfurls layers of greenness,
with shiso leaf and rubbed green coriander, then delicate soft floral notes as
if the petals were themselves steamed on the rice or floating on a broth of
sweetened coconut milk. Then wonderful and I mean truly wonderful clean musks.
The castoreum is superb, inviting, and just a little bit fuckable. All of this
is woven through with cinnamon and that mouthwatering ginger accent. I have
never really liked ginger in my fragrances, it is always far too bath-timey, or
dry-spicy and dull. But Schwieger has really highlighted the beauteous wetness
of the lemongrass quality of this fabulous rhizome. It just sings out of the
composition.
