‘Millinery, I think is closer to fragrance
than fashion. A hat, like a perfume, is an evocation of something nebulous,
ephemeral, other-worldly’.
Stephen Jones
This revealing quote
from Stephen Jones, one of the most skilled and irreverent milliners of our
time demonstrates the often-neglected abstractions of hats and scent. Both are frequently
perceived as frivolous and unnecessary adornment, but to those that obsess over
them they are the lace, plume, felt, tweed, lacquer, gold leaf, juice, Perspex and
je ne sais quoi that completes an
ensemble. While a hat is more visual and obvious in its intent, fragrance
adorns and subconsciously manipulates just as much in its own passionate and
purposeful way.
Stephen’s influence
on the world of couture is far-reaching. You can see the influence of his
eccentric attention to detail and radial deconstruction of conventional form in
things as varied as spectacles patisserie, the adornment of shoes and book
design. He has landscaped the head. The asymmetry, elegant whooshes, skeletal construct
and use of masking have filtered into countless high street department store
millinery departments. Even the fluttering froufrou touches at the necks of so
many perfume flacons echo the singular eccentricity of his hat making.
Sadly, we have
fallen out of the way of wearing hats. Arguably as our lives have become less
formal, there are fewer opportunities to showcase proper millinery. It has
become something associated with Lambrini-swilling race goers, the faded
aristocracy, red carpet soap stars and the feather and lace-exploded horror of
fascinators decorating staggering hens on the drunken mean streets of our late
night city centres. I love hats, they gild and mask, augment and mystify. I’m admit
I’m not the best hat wearer, I prefer to bleach or silver my hair and beard
instead, twirl my moustache. But I admire those that rock headgear and I mean
really serious millinery, not just nasty beanies and hipster fedoras or cheap
tiaras and scraps of feathers.
There are hat
wearers out there, elegant everyday warriors of millinery; the man I see on
Sundays with his hatted family, all in marvellous bowler adaptations, looking
vaguely Amish and bonkers. I see subversive and sexy denizens of the fetish
scene, burlesque performers, and sexual Vikings, marrying underground style
with the need for veiled and perched magnificence. I see the most amazing
creature on my way to work every day walking though my neighbourhood,
elaborately coiffured, painted and pierced, her black and blue licquorice hair wrapped
around her like armour. And so many hats.. tilted mini-tops and stovepipes,
cascading in waterfalls of lace, circles of darkness pinned carefully to one
side, allowing hair and mauve ribbon to fall like rain. Occasionally she has
her beau in tow, tall and daunting, a silver-topped cane swinging from one arm,
his gothic mistress on the other. He too will be hatted, usually a vintage black
top hat, tipped forward, a band of blood red velvet tied around the brim and
dropped down his back. Together, they look like they could consume the world.
Stephen Jones has
been creating some of the world’s most fascinating and subversive millinery
since setting up his first store in Endell Street, Covent Garden in 1980 with the
backing of Visage singer and Blitz Club owner Steve Strange. His friendship and
collaborations with Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons stretches back over
thirty influential and mutually admiring years. Rei is arguably one of the most
important art and design soothsayers of our time; her undone influences have
become a signature for the dispossessed and threatening hinterlands of our
culture. Atomic shreds, bag ladies, asymmetry, body modification, smeared
battered chic, voluminous parachute fantasy…. All these things and more have
been woven through our fashion lives by Rei Kawakubo’s unerring ability to see
beyond us and the opacity of unstoppable lives.
Six years ago
Stephen released his debut fragrance, a collaboration with Rei Kawakubo’s Comme
des Garçons’ fragrance wing run by House
Creative Director Christian Astuguevieille. The scent was signed off by Antoine
Maisondieu, who also created Noel au
Balcon for Etat Libre d’Orange and Rose
Velours for Van Cleef and Arpels’ Collection
Extraordinaire. Stephen’s eponymous fragrance was described as a violet hit by a meteorite. Notes included
magma and meteorite smashed with violet, rose, jasmine, guaiac wood, black
cumin and amber. It sounds heavy and overwrought but is in fact immensely
delicate, a nebulous smoky violet, with grace and an erotic metallic charge. Like
one of Stephen’s magical millinery creations; it feels so much more than mere
adornment, it endows majesty on the wearer, an indefinable aura that turns
heads.
Now we have the
second collaboration; Wisteria Hysteria,
again a unique artistic process involving Jones and CdG but this time with the
talented and quirky Nathalie Feisthauer (at Symrise), co-creator of Eau des Merveilles for Hermes (with Ralf
Schwieger) and the gloriously porny Putain
des Palaces for Etat Libre d’Orange. Housed in a mini hatbox and nestling
in milliner’s lace, the opaque grey-mauve bottle is stunning. I lifted my
bottle out and watched the lace uncurl like white skeletal leaves. The
attention to detail as always with CdG is immaculate, but Stephen’s feel for something different, an awareness
of impact if you like, makes a world
of scented difference. I hadn’t even tried the scent on properly and was
already lost.
Stephen’s outré headwork
is perfectly in keeping with Rei’s armouring and decorating of the body.
Unnecessary adornment suddenly seems vital, an extension of personality. In
many ways this of course applies to scent when created with wit, care and
subterfuge. The panoply of CdG fragrances is incredibly diverse with its inventive
treatment of leaves, grasses, pigment, incense, religion, glue, tar, water,
ozone, ink, paper, metals and dust. The abstract capture of such esoteric and
arrogant facets seems madness, but the CdG way has always been to subvert,
surprise and ultimately to seduce. I have been wearing their fragrances for so
long, they seem like old friends, the leftfield chemical and industrial
signatures that seem alien and suspect to some are to me like a series of
eternal rooms simply furnished with sparse, key memories.
I have always loved
the oddity of CdG scent, the Bladerunner, cyborg artificiality that hums though
the aromachemical presentations and musings. Yet as with all of Rei Kawakubo’s
work, there is humanity and distorted formality below carefully presented
surfaces. You have to work at wearing them, searching through the twisted
strands of aromachemical DNA in order to understand the complexities of the
formulae. This may sound horribly arch, but to love CdG is to love plastics and
concrete, the antiseptic ink of a freshly minted page, the buzzing scent of
overworked photocopiers, waves against glass, frozen blooms, vast smoke filled
cathedral spaces or the intimacy of a folded sleeve.
I have a huge
passion for the more abstract edges of the CdG oeuvre. Odeur 53 and Odeur 71 are
remarkable pieces of olfactive art. Presumptive, bleak and gorgeously abstract.
I remember thinking I can’t believe my
skin smells like polystyrene and hot light bulbs… Antoine Lie’s 8 88 is a hyper-vibrant rendering of
gold, shimmering with huge doses of Safraleine, molten amber and woods. It
smells like golden samurai armour looks in the dying sunlight of an autumn day.
Lie’s biographical perfume Daphne for
the skeletal, alien socialite on the surface seems like a conventional blend of
heady musks, incense and indolic funereal blooms. But it’s a macabre scent,
redolent with death and empty rooms; a portrait of a life well-lived but also a
desolate and conflicted one. My favourite is Eau de Parfum in the blob bottle, a glue and Sellotape floral,
gummed tape, lilac and rose oxides producing a glorious corsage for a replicant
ball. It smells like science, sexy metallic science.
Even the more
mainstream offerings – Wonderwood, CDG2 Man,
Amazing Green and more recently the rumbling
potent Black are still pretty weird, just
a little less so than normal. They have elements or facets that click with a wider fragrance buying
audience, allowing them to cross over onto department store shelves alongside
Prada, Creed and Aqua di Parma. Black
smells very niche, with its heavy burn of birch tar, liquorice and aromatic
Somalian incense. Yet it manages somehow to echo other successful elements of
CdG scents of the years while showing the high street heavy hitters such as One Million, Le Male and YSL Homme that strength and power can be
suggested in the subtle application of exceptional and exquisitely crafted
materials. Black may suggest high street,
but the street is paved in obsidian and the pavements are flint and fire.
Wisteria Hysteria is a cascade of enigmatic effects that hangs
like frozen turmoil from still white walls. It is a dense insidious scent, full
of oddity and whimsy, but laying itself down on skin with arctic force and
exotic difference. Ostensibly, as the name implies the scent is a portrait,
albeit an abstracted and illusory one, of the highly decorative climbing plants
of the Fabaceae family. The
distinctive hanging bunched blooms that come in shades of white, violet, pink
and vibrant purple. According to Stephen Jones in an interview he did with
Dazed Digital, the hysteria part of the name was inspired by the feverish, high-octane
edge of fashion shows:
‘If you’re a hatmaker you live permanently in
this world of hysteria. It’s like the fashion business turns up to eleven.
You’re always there at the last moment. Hats are the most visible thing and the
most potent and extreme. It’s a hysterical world.’
This sense of
histrionics is an interesting riposte to a bloom I have always considered to be
exceedingly aloof and chilled. Yet wisteria is a tenacious and hardy plant,
living for many years, the vines and branches can grow to wrist and arm width,
crushing weak trellises and strangling trees. On houses they may look
spectacular, flooding brickwork and stone with undulating parures of
eye-catching hues; but beneath the beauty, the walls are being undermined,
mortar choked and bricks smothered.
This dichotomy is
played out ominously in Henry Pincus’ fabulous short film for Wisteria Hysteria, a slow corrupted
fairy-tale where the beautifully strange model Charlotte Tomas comes face to
face with a malevolent night version of herself. Dressed in delicious fitted monochrome
couture by the late L’Wren Scott, the two sides circle and assess one another
searching for flaws, fighting attraction. Tearing veils and bodies they kiss
and devour themselves. The icy Anime mood and wash of gorgeous narcissism serve
only to enhance the enigmatic desirability of the perfume.
Taking the bottle
out of its white hatbox and watching the white lace uncurl around the
opalescent flacon is a constant joy. The bottle is lovely in the hand, a Borgia
flask, swirling with moon juice. The top of the scent is lit with a fizzy blast
of mate, clove/carnation. The clove note must be handled with caution as too much
eugenol will utterly drown a composition, flooding the notes with a rinse of dental
surgery or chew of Dentyne gum. It is the peppery facet of a white carnation,
dewy and shockingly fresh that Nathalie Feisthauer has captured. We have become
immune to cellophane-wrapped garage forecourt carnations; never has a bloom
been more slaughtered by ubiquity. Yet, the true spicy narcotic aroma of deeply
scented carnations is quite shocking and arrestingly beautiful. Our immunity to
this maligned bloom has removed a large floral reference from our olfactory
lexicon. Although this is not a carnation scent per se, the ghost of these
maligned drifts through Wisteria Hysteria
like a bone white omen.
I love the glacial
daunt of Wisteria Hysteria; it chills
the air as it flees the bottle. I have been wearing it obsessively, mesmerised
by the delicacy of spun sugar underpinning the mantle of vegetal dust that
installs itself on the skin as the scent begins to settle. The wisteria note
has echoes of a clean peppery lilac and the phantom carnation, all brutally
white like geisha maquillage. The
trademark CdG transparent woods provide support for the wisteria, a framework
if you like for support and climbing. The mate note in the top of the scent
adds a drip of sap and serves to emphasise the sugared legume characteristics
of the composition that float and thrum throughout the evolution of the scent.
The sillage is luminous, the skin trailing white light and frozen dust. One
does feel veiled and coated. It’s a very odd sensation.
As with many of my
favourite CdG fragrances, Wisteria
Hysteria has that indefinable cyborg skin effect, a certain plasticised
finish. There is a sense of handling skin and
wondering if it is real or not and the frisson of furtive and forbidden sexual
desire. Here the question is one of floral holography; how real is the
wisteria? If you come too close, does the illusion pixilate and fall apart? In
the end, this is surely all part of the CdG ambiance and does it really matter
when the skin smells this austere and astonishing?
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