I tumble in and out of bed with Guerlain. It can often feel a little licentious. I flirt with the counters, fantasise about the vanillic rollercoaster filth of Double Spirtueuse Vanille , the haunting rosy-hued drydowns of Nahéma, the fire and ice eroticism of Jicky or the vast thrumming expanses of Derby. I imagine my skin lacquered in the legendary Guerlinade base, laying down spoors of chypré-tinted desire in a hundred imaginary nights. So many nights, rooms, hotels and sheets, so much skin scented with Guerlain. I can smell fingers and shoulders, echoes of Chamade, Insolence, Parure, Attrape Coeur and a tumble of mingled names and sly and fevered meetings.
Over the
years however, I have occasionally wondered where this noble House was going.
There have been good years and lean, sterile ones. There seemed to be an on/off
sense of olfactory and stylistic schizophrenia at play. Sometimes rarified and pretentious
scents were released with limited distribution and without any real thought to perfumery
or effect. These ran alongside mass market and weakly executed fragrances that
seemed to be mere reflections of other contemporary heavy hitters. Guerlain
seemed to be playing catch up and then when in doubt, like many other brands to
be fair, the prestigious House would fall back on their archives or iconic scents
and tweak or re-orchestrate a classic or two and hope their loyal clientele
would still dip their noses deep into the Guerlain myth. Yet, occasionally,
amidst the darkness there was always something burning, the myth made real, a
flame of beauteous love, a sense of real
perfumery, sensual, connective and waiting to burnish a million skins. It is
this potential and magic that binds followers loyally to Maison Guerlain.
Some
houses are not really made to be too contemporary.
Dior, Caron and Chanel also fall into this category, their attempts over the
years to more blatantly follow trends or appeal to the fickle late teen/early
twenties age bracket have come unstuck. Grand Houses need loyalty and to be
honest the whole point of youth is disloyalty and fickleness. Everyone knows
someone who has worn Mitsouko, Dioressence, Chanel No 5, the Garboesque drama of L’Heure Blue or the shimmering insouciance of Vol de Nuit. There is so much prestige and tactile luxury behind
Maison Guerlain. The brand drips history like a comb oozing honey in the summer
sun. Many brands go a little awry when attempting modernity. I mean…I know Dior Addict is successful but it is a horrific
scent that sits awkwardly at Maison Dior. And what were Chanel thinking with Coco Noir? It is a dull, airbrushed
confection with little merit. The bottle is beautiful (the only real Noir thing
about it really…), but the juice could never claim to be anything other than
generic. On the other hand Dior’s La Collection Privée and the Chanel
Exclusives are very beautiful and have raised the bar in terms of archival
reissues. A little restraint may be in order now though, they have been in
danger of being over-stretched in recent years. There is only so much
referencing of Chanel’s possessions and influences (Jersey, Cormomandal etc)
and Christian Dior’s weekend pied-à-terre (Milly-La-Forêt)
before it begins to sound a little arch and contrived. Sadly Caron have been
over the place for years now. Their fragrances have been eroded by
reformulation, strange, inappropriate launches and the resolutely old-fashioned
tone of their PR and marketing.
I think a
lot of big names were startled by the sudden and starry success of the first
raft of Tom Ford Private Blend fragrances, which appeared all at once and
offered men and women a sizeable scented whack of uber-glamourous alternatives
to high street and more traditional established
names. Ironically Ford basically paid homage to many of these iconic house in
his own lacquered high fashion way, but I think it made many perfume houses realise
that they could start charging more and customers started wanting something
more than just relentless attempts to capture elusive perfumed zeitgeists. Ford’s
trick was to make everything bigger, glossier and bolder. Sexy advertising and
slick packaging dazzled the weary consumer eye. Essentially Ford sold his soul
to the spirit of Studio 54, re-visited some great perfumery hits along the way
and demonstrated how much he learnt at YSL and Gucci. Marrying it altogether
with lashings of sex and of course himself at the hirsute centre was the icing
on the cake. His fragrances have sold spectacularly well.
The
lustre started to come off Guerlain as reformulation crept in. The sudden
realisation that Mitsouko, one of
Guerlain’s most iconic scents, was going under the knife triggered panic buying
among perfume lovers across the world. Their benchmark Vetiver is a shadow of the vibrant original I wore in my teens and now
smells tinny and hollow like a washed out aluminum can in comparison to the
savannah depth of the original. Many of the eaux de parfums strengths have
started to feel oddly synthetic in the background and some of the eaux de
toilette formulae are beginning to smell suspiciously thinned out. I have really
noticed this in Samsara, one of my all
time favourite Guerlain fragrances, a glorious milky blend of sandalwood and jasmine.
Jean-Paul Guerlain added a beautiful and deliberate overdose of sandalwood.
This meant he had to recalibrate the levels of the other notes to compensate
for the rush of woods, so Samsara
originally smelt startling new and 3D for its time. Over the years I have noticed
the woods becoming more stretched out, a kind of olfactory deforestation at
work. Samsara now smells more aerien,
the fabulous density that once oozed out of it, the boozy Guerlinade, smelling of
spiced rum casks has now started to whiff as fake as boxed cake mix. The last
bottle I bought felt a little screechy in top levels like an aging soprano,
failing to reach her upper register.
The highly
publicised problems with Jean-Paul Guerlain bruised and tainted the image of
the brand and raised the ghosts of France’s colonial past at a time when the
country was trying very hard to make peace with its tumultuous political
history. The revered and humbled Monsieur Guerlain was quietly removed and
Thierry Wasser moved centre stage. Wasser had been working with Guerlain,
alongside Jean-Paul since 2008. He trained at Givaudan and joined Firmenich in
1993. He is an eclectic perfumer, his oeuvre includes many of the Aqaba scents,
Sweet Dreams 2003 for Lab on Fire, Diamonds for Emporio Armani and Jill Sander Man. However, his work for
Guerlain has been a little hit and miss so far.
I liked his
Quand Vient La Pluie from 2007, a
delicate rendering of heliotrope and jasmine with a strange roasted rosemary
and praline drydown. This was a subtle fluttering homage to the bittersweet masterpiece
Après L’Ondée. It achieved the near
perfect effect of feeling like silk being teased over skin. Serge Mansau’s
sculptural flacon was elegantly designed, reminiscent of Japanese calligraphic
ceramics. Mansau also designed the bizarre and lovely Insolence tilted sci-fi bottle, which is one of my all-time favourite
contemporary flacons.
Wasser’s Myrrhe et Délires (2012) was delicious
too, a heavy-hitting balsamic rendering of woods, smoke, osmanthus and rose. I
loved the dried fruits effects and resinous licquorice-tinted driftings as it set
on the skin like the aftermath of a nuclear winter.
Less
successful was Guerlain Homme (2008),
much anticipated, yet blatantly generic. A minty woody mouthwash mash-up, with
a shrill lime note shot through it with no real attention as to how the actual
construction might smell on human skin. I hated it. It smelt formulaic and had no
discernible Guerlain atmospherics. The recent Boisé flanker was better, but still a little meh…..
I always try
and visit Guerlain counters in whichever city I find myself. (You never know if
you’ll stumble across some discontinued or pre-reformulation gem…..). When I
went to Moscow for work a couple of years ago, the women on the Guerlain
counters were very passionate; in love with the brand and its ornate history.
Something about the decadence and sensuality of the perfumes matched the sudden
wave of desire for a sense of personal history and memories buried amid the
colder Soviet years. Obviously Paris is the Guerlain spiritual home, the
gleaming, scented temple on the Champs Elysées, but I often think of the
beautiful Russian girl with dark green eyes extolling her passion for L’Heure Blue on a chilly January morning,
her dark red nails, touching the bottles with due reverence.
Now, I
have worn La Petite Robe Noire before
in one of its previous incarnations. This new version is in fact the third. The
original exclusive edition was released back in 2009 and then another tweaked
edition appeared in Spring 2011. This new incarnation is a purportedly more mass-market
scent for all of us to slip into and gad about in. Supported by a fabulously orchestrated
chi-chi campaign by Kuntzel+Deygas, La
Petite Robe Noire has become a rather iconic presence on counters already.
The Little Black Dress Girl, with her flowing flirty lines and tilted hat
hiding her mysterious face is the perfect image for such a shape-shifting
scent. There are echoes of different fashion ages in her lines and curves, her
little boots, frilled skirt and joie de vivre. She could be a 60s chick,
Parisian demoiselle or a naughties Russian art babe cavorting at a Venetian vernissage on the arm of her billionaire
tycoon boyfriend.
Kuntzel+Deygas
were responsible for the stylish opening credits for Spielberg’s frothy Catch Me If You Can and reworked the
iconic Pink Panther for the (sadly feeble) 2006 film reboot with Steve Martin.
Their delightful work on La Petite Robe
Noire has been well received and has proved to be quite persuasive, garnering
as much attention as the fragrance itself. The overall swish and very French
flirtiness of the line and feel of the
concept to the use of Nancy Sinatra’s These
Boots are Made for Walking will I
think become a very recongisable brand image, and easily transferred into a
whole range of associated products for years to come.
It is
interesting that Guerlain has chosen to develop a different style of marketing
with a broader appeal, it seems both timeless, youthful and modern. The young
ingénue could
be Hepburn in Funny Face, Jesssica
Chastain or beautiful Bérénice Bejo in L’Artiste. Choosing
not to use a celebrity in a celebrity-saturated world is a frankly refreshing
move. Indeed the young perfume ingénue recently gave a playful and typically coy
‘interview’ for Wonderland magazine. So the carefully arranged image of the scent has become as pervasive as the scent
itself. The two factors have created a potential cult bestseller for Guerlain.
This
latest incarnation of La Petite Robe
Noire by Thierry Wasser has however received mixed reviews across the
blogosphere. A lot of people critising its safety and overt overtures to the
more mainstream side of the high street consumer perfume market. But you know
what, haters are always gonna hate. I really wanted to like this version and I
ended up loving it. I wasn’t expecting anything superlative or on a par with
the great Guerlain classics. I have always had a real passion for the darker
more concentrated version of Insolence,
all hairspray hysteria and space age berry dust. When I first smelled LPRN, I
smelt this fabulous hazy Elnett accord again, buzzy with cherry, almonds and
iris. It is chic and classic, simple and just a teensy bit frivolous. And with
all things classic, there is an element of safety. Hence our hankering for
objects that fit all our moods and stand the tests of many times.
I have to
admit to liking the slight Guerlain naughtiness in ‘borrowing’ la petite robe noire, or the little
black dress, a silhouette classically associated with Chanel. It’s akin saying you may make it…..but we can wear it. The campaign has really focused on the LBD, the
bottles have three different variations on them and many launch sites across
the globe have used oversize and flamboyantly eye-catching versions of the
black dress. Chanel have never actually had ownership of the LBD, it’s just
been one of those subtle things that has seeped into our style consciousness
over the decades since Coco Chanel started cutting away at the female
silhouette.
It is a very
playful and simple fragrance to slip into. Thierry Wasser has decided to sweeten
darkness if you like, layering up the Bulgarian and Turkish roses with licquorice,
smoked tea, a gentle aniseed facet and lovely rounded velveteen tonka, iris and
vanilla notes in the base. I really like the dancing top notes of berries and
bergamot, the smeared cherries and marzipan surround and the way the fragrance
spins like a giddy tot in a candy store before settling into something smoother
and more adult. It never loses sight of its gentle frivolity, the shortness of
its skirt…. But at the same time, the colour palette is balanced enough to
allow little shots of plum, burgundy, blood and smoke to filter through the gothic
princess tones. I smell little truffly echoes of Veltol as it settles on my
skin, the lovely melancholy fairground note beloved of Mugler in his
transcendent (and divisive) Angel. This
new Guerlain feels cleverly arranged, a
comfortable contrivance, but above all tremendous fun to wear. By no means
a masterpiece or return to the glory days of Haute-Guerlain, but nonetheless an
interesting exercise in Vampire Diary playfulness.
Portrait of Rachel Fowler by Liam Dickson. For more info on Liam, please click link below:
For more info on Guerlain, please click link below:
For part II of this post, please click here:
http://ascentofelegance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/beauteous-lovefalling-for-guerlain_5.html
Bravo! You convinced me to resample LPRN.
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