This is my first real
opportunity to dedicate a full post to the work of Cécile Zarokian, a perfumer
whose work I admire tremendously. She is part of a group of passionate young
noses whose olfactory art in recent years has seduced and dazzled me. Working
within the shifting and evolving restrictions of IFRA’s annual bell-tolling
pronouncements on materials, they choose to see everything as a challenge and
creatively, evocatively produce work that circumnavigates the brouhaha and
still meets Houses briefs or radiates individuality and sensual signature
charm.
I wrote about her work when I
blogged on Masque Fragranze back in December 2014. She created Tango for Riccardo and Alessandro and I
love it, along with Russian Tea, it
is my favourite Masque elixir; it took a few wearings to get there, like
meeting someone you weren’t sure about and then you spend all your spare time
dreaming about them. In my piece on Russian
Tea, this is what I had to say about Tango:
‘The thing that really dazzles me with Tango is
how close the formula smells to being decayed and turned. In my scented travels
I sometimes come across near empty flacons with the syrupy residue of perfumes
lying stickily in the base. These evaporated, reduced, concentrées have strong
vintage odours of creosote, face powder and sweet stale gateau. Oddly this is
what I detect in the powerful drama of Tango…. It’s a tricky balance, the
suggestion of corrosion, whilst surrounding it in swathes of smouldering
ambered ardour. But Zarokian knows her stuff and has produced a scent of fire
and passionate generosity’.
Cécile Zarokian
Cécile’s versatility is
becoming very apparent. She set a very high standard for herself when she
created Private Label for Jovoy, still
I think one of the finest scents in the House’s complex and sensual repertoire
and the personal favourite of Jovoy Creative Director François Henin, who
Cécile credits with sincerely helping and supporting her in the early days of
her career as an independent perfumer. Patchouliful
for Robert Drago’s wonderful Laboratorio Olfattivo is one of the most luxurious
and sexy patchoulis in years, intimate and dangerously addictive. You want to
keep on spraying until you drown in its warm, leathery embrace. The cinnamon
blast at the top is genius, mingling beautifully with the frangipani Cécile
walks carefully alongside the gorgeously rounded patchouli.
Now we have Cio Cio San, the second scent she has
created for Claude Marchal’s rather oblique and mysterious niche house MDCI.
Cécile also made Nuit Andalouse, launched in 2013, a
beautifully constructed gardenia couture gown of a scent with a floating train
of shimmering white holiday drenched salicylates. Underpinning this is a bodice
of violet and orange flourishes that hold the construction together with grace
and delicate pressure. It is a remarkable and perceptive piece of perfumery,
ticking floral and holiday fantasy boxes whilst at the same time demonstrating
an eccentric decorum that is both graceful and alluring.
I say mysterious as Monsieur
Marchal likes to keep a low profile, no pictures of himself and few interviews,
those he does do are very tightly focussed on his beloved House and the
fragrances he is so passionate about. He originally has a background in
aeronautics, but felt strongly drawn to a luxurious telling of scent, informed
by his love of the Renaissance, the de Medici family, the Sun King and a
childhood growing up surrounded by objets
d’art collected by his parents on
their travels.
This obsession with the
beauty of classicism, a preoccupation with the luxury of aesthetics and art
over the vulgarity of commerce led to the creation of MDCI (Marchal Design et Créations Indépendentes)
and the launch in 2005 of Ambre Topkapi,
the first MDCI perfume made by Pierre Bourdan. One of the most important tenets
of MDCI is the quality of formulae, achieved, according to Claude by placing no
limitations on the budgets for raw materials. This freedom of olfactory
expression is honed down through the weighing, balancing and harmonising of
notes as the perfumes are slowly assembled. It is true that MDCI fragrances
have a certain feel, rub and fall through the fingers as it were. They have
weight and texture. After all, the House contains Inavasion Barbare, perhaps one of the finest fougère fragrances
ever created, a sublime mix of herbs, patchouli and vanilla. So damn sexy on
skin, created by Stephanie Bakouche and truly a masterpiece. If she never does
anything else again this will be her Catcher
in the Rye. My favourite to date is Chypre
Palatin, Bertrand Duchaufour’s oddball and subversive attempt to do a
chypré without definitive amounts of oakmoss, to redefine the genre as it were.
It doesn’t quite come off, but damn it’s so beautiful, plummy, warm and packed
full and rosaceous balms and styrax tinted resins that hold the senses in a
kind of heady trance.
Each MDCI scent has a
presence and personality; they demand attention. Patricia de Nicolai, Francis
Kurkdjian, Amandine Marie and Richard Ibanez have all created fragrances for
Claude Marchal’s lovely house. In doing so they have endorsed Monsieur
Marchal’s rather esoteric brand with some singular and off-piste work. The
bottles are well known to perfume cognoscenti for their Limoge tops, modelled in
classical forms of soft white bisque paste. These are ghostly pale and
beautifully rendered busts of two styles of masculine and feminine heads; one
roman style masculine in stern patrician mode and a much softer neo-classical
feminine bust with Empress Josephine style allure.
Claude Marchal has gone on
record a number of times reiterating his strong feelings about perfumery, that
it should be considered more of an art than an industry and that the relentless
focus on commercialism is withering away the beauty of his chosen craft. I
would agree, but let us not forget that a balance needs to be struck, one side
needs the other, art ultimately always has need of some form of commerce, it is
the way of things. There are many perfumers in the burgeoning niche world I
would consider olfactory artists, creating scents that dazzle and manipulate
our senses while still reflecting a pure and deeply personal interpretation of
the creator’s vision. But I respect Claude Marchal’s relative silence and semi-invisibility
in terms of MDCI. His fragrances speak for him.
He manages somehow to entice
or encourage exceptional work out of his collaborative perfumers. Cio Cio San is no exception. It is heartbreakingly
lovely, a scent of petal-thrown lightless and thought-provoking introspection.
There is giddy joy and rainbow light whilst the settling brings a shadow of
sadness, a portend of anguish.
Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly is one of the most well
known operas in the world, the tragic story of Cio Cio San (Little Butterfly) a
beautiful (very) young Geisha in 1904 Nagasaki forsaken by a callous US naval
officer. The standard 1904 version is in three acts. It is many ways an
appalling tale of deception and xenophobia but for some odd reason our
attention is held by the all consuming idealism and rather naïve near obsessional
devotion of the eighteen year old Butterfly.
She has become a geisha in order
to provide for her family who have fallen on hard times. She marries Pinkerton
when she is only 15, secretly converting to Christianity, which horrifies her
family. Pinkerton always knows he will be leaving but tells her:
‘Oh Butterfly my little wife, I shall return with the roses, when the
earth is full of joy and the robin makes his nest’.
She waits. And waits, convinced
of his love for her; that he will return and live with her and the doubters
around her will be proven wrong. I used to find to find this devotion irksome
and weird, but oddly now I find it rather shattering; it’s hard to tell from a
psychological viewpoint how much Cio Cio San believes her own myth-making and
whether she genuinely imagines Pinkerton will return to her and her blond son
Dolore (which translates roughly as pain).
I suppose if she ever let go of her dream, let slip the mask of hope, she would
fall to the tatami and shatter into a cloud of cherry blossom, white makeup and
kimono silk.
When Pinkerton does return,
it is with his American wife Katie. They intend to adopt Butterfly’s baby and
return to the US. It is a dark move, cast into more shadow by Cio Cio San’s
delirious excitement that her husband has returned to her..’The house must be filled with flowers. Everywhere, as the night is
full of stars.’
The soundtrack in my head as
I write this is oddly not quite the purity of Puccini’s opera but Malcolm
Mclaren’s beautiful and ageless Fans
album from 1984, fusing 80’s R&B with opera pieces. It was and is still one
of my favourite albums; the Butterfly track with Betty-Ann White as Cio Cio San
and Debbie Cole as the contemporary Cho-Cho is the standout piece, hypnotic and
incredibly moving. Oddly, McClaren chose to shoot the video in a light-drenched
Turkish Hammam with splendidly sullen models of the days, heavily made up,
lounging, bathing and sleeping as they wait for a mysterious summons. It is a
mesmerising video, sulphurous, overtly sexual and soaked in longing.
Malcolm McClaren 'Fans'
(Silver Fox own collection)
Today's the day when I see clear
A tiny thread of smoke appears
Where blue skies fall upon the ocean
And shake this staid emotion
All the while I sing this song
I see a dot on the horizon
Growing bigger every second
Gleaming white in my direction
Who on earth can it be
Coming up the path for me?
What on earth will he say?
Shall I run to him or run away?
Freaking out he's come to get me
My feet are stuck but just won't let me
Run to him do I dare?
Madam Butterfly don't blow it
Calling Butterfly, Madam Butterfly
That's the name he used to give me
He's my man till the day I die
Oh sweet Butterfly, so sweet Butterfly
She's waiting
, He'll be back,
I have faith in this love track
Malcolm McClaren – Madam Butterfly, (1984)
Butterfly clings to love and
illusion that Pinkerton has returned to her, filling the house and her heart
with cherry blossom and various blooms, despite evidence to the contrary - words
from her faithful maid Suzuki and the shadowed appearance of Pinkerton’s wife
in her garden. The shock of realising who this woman is finally tears her world
apart. She realises the truth that her love is a mirage, fracturing in front of
her weary eyes. The tragedy is terrible to behold. I have always found the
bargaining over her child abhorrent, the conquering of her spirit and
shattering of her heart is terrible. The stuff of grand operatic tragedy
perhaps but painful to behold nonetheless.
Butterfly reluctantly agrees
to allow them to take her child only if Pinkerton come to her himself. After
seeing the lengths she has gone to and the love she still bears him, his
cowardice overwhelms him. Cio Cio San’s final terrible act is to blindfold her
son, place an American flag in his hands and cut her own throat with her
father’s ceremonial dagger upon which are engraved the words "Who cannot live with honor must die with
honor." She dies. Pinkerton rushes in to find her lifeless on the
floor.
As with so much classical
opera, the ending is tragic, the heroine is dead having suffered love and
misunderstanding. And yes it would have been easy to have done full blown drama
in olfactory terms, but Cécile Zarokian is way much too subtle and talented a
perfumer to take that that rather obvious route, instead she has chosen to do
something more subversive: happiness as augur, a presage of things to come. It
is perfection. It would have been impossible for Cécile to have been unmoved by
the terrible pain of Cio Cio San and her movement towards death in her
flower-filled house. The sudden symbolic shift from the scattering and
decorative use of welcoming evocative bloom to sombre funereal offering is both
perceptible and dreaded.
By using the classical sweet
ostensibly pretty motif of cherry
blossom or sakura, Cécile also lays
down more apt meaning for Butterfly’s plight. Cherry blossom in Japan, is
hugely significant, a national symbol of artistic nationhood, adorning
porcelain, kimonos, lacquer, armour and ukiyo-e,
the classical genre painting style popular during the Edo period of Japanese
history from 17th to the 19th centuries. The cherry blossom season is still celebrated
throughout the country with reports of blossom-bloom times being closely monitored
and reported so people everywhere can enjoy Hanami,
a centuries old tradition of picnicking under the trees as the petals fall like
snow.
Silver Fox & Sakura, Edinburgh 2010
In Edinburgh the Meadows as
they are known have the most divine interlocking avenues of cherry blossom
trees and their blooming is one of my most favourite times of the city’s year.
The surrounding green parks are awash in eddies of whirling white and candyfloss
pink petals. As the trees bloom so beautifully en masse, sakura has come to symbolise clouds and in turn the
ephemeral, transient nature of life. Used in scent it is synthesised but
suggests a frothy, faraway candy-floss stained delicacy we seem to be to quite
capable of interpreting on some stereotypical cultural level.
Cio Cio San
is in many ways a classic fruit drenched floral scent, but this would be doing
it a huge disservice. It has immense subtlety and a shimmering vibrancy I found
developed into a potent longevity. The opening delivers a potent, bright shot
of light from a sweet lime note and yuzu,
the Japanese citrus fruit that has a protected national status and only
harvested at specific times. The oil yielded through expression is deliciously
floral and rounded in tone. Its cost is prohibitive and few houses use it,
preferring to cut costs with cheaper synthetic alternatives. The ginger facet
is a palette cleansing addition of gari
it seems to me, the thin slices of young ginger, pickled in salt sugar and rice
vinegar, traditionally served with sushi. Un-dyed, it can be a lovely washed
pale pink colour, similar to that of faded cherry blossom. The smell is a piquant
meld of sharp, saline and sweetly spiced; something I can really detect against
the limey opening salvo of Cio Cio San.
It is the entwining of peony
and lychee, two symbolically far Eastern style notes that form the heart of
this lush formulation. Both accords will be synthetic, but again, created with
great care and attention to the delicate fluttering harmony of the overall
composition. Lychee, pineapple, cherry, coconut, strawberry etc, these have
been for many years the domain of the neon gaudy celebuscent, to add tropical
zing and pina colada come hitherness to generic shelf fillers. But occasionally
they sidle into rather beautiful scents if used with purpose, intelligence and
charm. I was a huge fan of the sadly now discontinued Badgely Mischka original
scent by Richard Herpin, a heady delight of oozing red berries and peach that
reeked of strawberries and caramel. And Juliette Has A Gun’s Miss Charming has a lovely lychee note
mingled with the house’s trademark rose.
Lychee is a very odd fruit,
such a powerfully recognisable scent, encased in its sandpaper casing, wrapped
around it’s overtly large glossy seed. There are rosy, aquatic rubbered
tones to the smell and sometimes, depending on ripeness, a phenolic, burned
facet that some people really hate. Cécile has built a lovely lychee in Cio Cio San, airy, nuanced and blushing
with juice, marrying well with the ephemeral oolong tea she has coolly trickled
around the floral fruity mix at the heart of the scent. Oolong teas are incredibly
varied and dependent on the drying process and amount of oxidisation the raw
leaves are subjected to. In Cio Cio San,
it seems to impart a whisper of floral smoke.
Under the lychee, the peony
has the feel of smudged make-up, a little post-party, still pretty, but in need
of repair. All these floral touches have elegant gradations of chromatic
olfaction, edges bleeding into one another with sweet grace. The woods and
musks are less interesting but still slow down the dispersion rates of the
overall composition imparting Cio Cio San
with some serious longevity. I really love it, the mix of fruity floral
exuberance and blatant plasticity I find just so compelling on my skin. I can’t
stop spraying it. At times the lychee emotes like freshly unwrapped white
plastic vending machine cups.
It is the very giddy nature
of Cio Cio San’s florality that makes
it so tragic; it is the moment when Butterfly defies her own sense of inner
logic and the warning signs around her and fills her Nagasaki home with
flowers, love and joy. Her beloved, long-awaited Pinkerton is back for her and
their son. It is an intriguing moment to capture; generally it is her tragic
suicide that demands attention and terrible though it is, it is after all
inevitable, foreshadowed by her father’s seppuku
dagger in Act 1. There is almost unbearable poignancy in the bright, piercing
happiness of Butterfly’s bloom-laden bower. Despite the ecstasy, the shadows to
fall are terrible indeed.
Cécile Zarokian’s masterful,
sympathetic and let’s not forget, feminine handling of darkening luminescence
and obsessive devotion is divinely executed and demonstrates once again why she
must be considered one of the most versatile and imaginative perfumers working
today.
©TheSilverFox
20 June 2015
Disclosure – Bottle of Cio Cio San kindly sent by MDCI,
opinions my own.
How exquisite, I enjoyed reading. :) Lovely.
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