‘..And
my motto is the same as ever -
I
believe in the kindness of strangers.
And
when I'm at war with myself - I ride. I just ride..’
(From end monologue of Ride by Lana del Rey,
lyrics & music by Elisabeth Grant &
Justin Parker)
Pierre Guillaume has recently released two new stylistically different
fragrances, both of which have made their way into the foxy collection. The
first, Metal Hurlant is the latest
addition to his alluringly complex Collection
Croisière, an olfactory exploration of places and spaces, travelling by
air, road, water, bike, boat, foot, imagination and wilderness dreams. The
second is Shermine, the thirteenth
addition to his enigmatic diffusion range Huitième
Art, where the focus on purity of form and relative simplicity of materials
has created a line of honed and minimal serenity.
 |
| Shermine & Métal Hurlant (Foxy Collection) |
Metal
Hurlant is a gasoline patchouli of burning roads, the thrill of hot
bike chrome and embraceable weary leather jackets; a fantasy of cling, heat and
dissonance. It’s sexy, weird, windswept and oddly dislocated. Shermine is its polar opposite in
texture, inspired by the implied cruelty of silvered fur and the aged beauty of
bruised iris rhizome, spiked with piquant citrus.
This pair of luminous creations once again showcases the
dexterity and virtuosity of Pierre Guillaume as perfumer and technical
alchemist. I have been wearing, loving and writing on his work for years. He is
the most generous of men with information and samples, something surprisingly
rare in companies these days. If I had to choose favourites, which is so hard
amid the fifteen or so PG related scents I own, I would err on the side of Musc Maori the ridiculously sexy chocolate
scent which makes me smell like Galaxy bars; Felanilla, one of the best vanillas in the business, tinted with
flambéed rummy banana; Arabian Horse
with its extraordinary equine mane accord; Louanges
Profanes, its haunting white lily notes lit by woods and smoke; Poudre de Riz from Huitième Art, the
most delicious skin–soft porny powder thing that drives me crazy and the Mojito Chypré from the Collection
Croisière, an utterly bizarre collision of decaying strawberries, oceanic fizz
and forest dankness. Each scent released is a further push towards new
olfactory territory. Pierre has never been particularly concerned with safety
and predictability, he likes to throw aromatic curveballs, toy with
aromachemistry and flex the walls of convention.
 |
| Pierre Guillaume |
Above all, he is a sensualist, an architect of olfactive desire,
the fragrances assembled with chemical curiosity and a consummate comprehension
of the skin we’re in. In recent years Pierre has shown signs of restlessness
within his Houses, not in a fleeing sort of way but in a pushing and
questioning direction. His work has always been exceptionally beautiful and
meticulously finished. But he seems to be searching for new ways to express
himself. The attention to detail and desire to surprise and seduce us has always
been part of the Pierre Guillaume way. All of his work has clarity and purpose,
his preoccupation with aroma technologies and symbiosis with naturals makes
each of his launches not only lovely to inhale and wear but also to analyse and
absorb.
 |
| Shermine/Métal Hurlant (cellophane abstraction) |
I’ve been wearing Metal
Hurlant and Shermine together, side-by-side,
mixed and blurred, the textures colliding and weaving like lovers. I wanted to
review both and realised they told a story of lovers, wrapped in escape and
sexual desire, on a Harley, burning over skeletal landscapes and shimmering
shadowed roads. All I could hear was Lana Del Rey, the voice of broken dreams
echoing out over windswept murmured desolation. Her voice possesses a tremulous
quality that seems to haunt the mind.
 |
| Lana Del Rey |
Lana’s dreamy, swirling world of damaged Americana, slo-mo
whores, cigarettes, velvet dresses, lost girls, bikers, Cadillacs, shimmering
pools, daddies, tattoos, manicures, gorgeous menace, glazed boulevards is a
fantasy of erotic aspiration. With a blatantly repetitive and echoing self-reverential
collection of symbols, words and sexual tropes, Lana has assembled her own
yearning mythology of warped and fragile desires. It’s a clever game, spinning
and twisting the age old lost girl/whore scenarios out over lonesome panoramas
and neon-stained motel rooms.
 |
| Image from Lana del Rey 'Ride' video lensed by Anthony Mandler 2012 |
I have wanted to mingle Lana and scent for ages, but haven’t
quite found the right mix. Now, as her new album Honeymoon echoes plaintively around my brain on hazy,
skin-trembling repeat and my skin reeks of leather, tarred mirage, sweet, sharp
fur and vintage dust; I know I have the materials and mood I need. Honeymoon is a 12-track glide of
haunted, hunted woman. I think it’s her best work yet, suffused with sunlit
death and a panoramic aching drive-by of what might have beens…
Something about her music moves me so. I know she is in many ways
entirely constructed; the former Lizzy Grant has created Lana Del Rey to sing
songs of broken dreams and sexual longing in a voice that ripples across the
skin like trembling fire. The voice is everything, I could listen forever.
So with Lana on repeat, a man meets a woman. He is languorous,
on edge, too many drugs, a night-drunk wanderer, beautiful in his monochrome
wasted chic. Delicately pierced, inked with faded cartographic contour lines.
He drinks in flickering rooms after the sun has faded or sits by his Klein blue
pool teasing ice around a glass with a reflective glassy finger. His life is
one of patterns and learned inflections; despite the appearance of louche
laissez-faire, Tariel is a creature of repeated rhythms that provide comfort
and safety. What looked like boredom and the immensity of detachment is in fact
a coping mechanism for a fragile life lived in the shadows of offset cruelty,
fucked up parents and vanished siblings.
On a pungent evening, the chill still air threaded with tarry
road and gasoline drifting in with welcome night, Tariel is sitting by his lonely
pool, legs curled under him, a grey fox fur coat shrugged over his shoulders. A
cigarette hangs loosely from tired fingers trailing smoke upwards in a barely
unwavering plume.
“Can I get a drink?”
He looks up to and sees a thin, tensile woman in black bike
leathers standing at the glass doors of his house.
“I knocked…but here you are.”
Tariel raised his glass, “here I am..what do you want?”
“How about you make something with ice that will wash away the
dust and I won’t blow your fucking hands off baby boy”.
 |
| Mr E's Leather Jacket |
She set a gun down on a table and let dark hair fall around her
face, tucking a worn ribbon into the pocket of her leathers. Tariel shrugged
and went inside, returning with a whisky sour on the rocks, swirling it as he
passed it over. She smelled of chrome, heat, sweat and hard-earned exhaustion.
“Baby, you’re beautiful in your silver skin.” She lit a
cigarette and blew smoke into the glass. Tariel shrugged and pulled the fur
around his face.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, watching her eyes roam his
body. “You lost?”
“Are you?”. She ran an ice cube over her forehead. “I’m outta
gas, so I was walking the night road for fun.”
He frowned. “There’s plenty of auto shit in the garage behind
the pool house..my dumb absent brother left his bikes behind.” Tariel raised
his glass to the moon.
‘I’m Diana, huntress, bike-bitch and wanderer,” she said, ‘Wanna
ride with me?.. you must be dying of boredom here..I can smell the tedium, the
overflowing ashtray and scent of sanitised interiors”, she licked her finger
and ran it around glass’s edge. “Every morning someone minutely and pointlessly
clean rooms for you that serve no real purpose. I sense white under rot under
swab. Are you not exhausted by the repetition?”
Tariel stood, shivered a little and flicked his cigarette into
the pool, his coat and skin unfolding vanilla and powder into the night. “I’ll
get your juice..”
When he returned Diana was lying on a pool lounger, her eyes
closed, golden throat rising and falling in the shifting pool-cut reflections
of moonlight. “Your hair smells of burnt intrigue”, he said.
“That would be the point.”
“Where will you take me?”
“Where do you want to go?”
Tariel closed his eyes and swayed. He tipped his blind eyes back
to a dark gathering sky. “Ok… ….Anywhere that is not here, anywhere where I can
feel blood beat close to mine, anywhere I can feel magnificence and fall.”
Diana took the jerrycan gently from his fingers. “I can’t
promise magnificence but I will lead you into beauty and disturbance.”
She stood and held out her hand; Tariel shivered and took her
white fingers, walking out of his barren house, following her past dark unblinking
glass houses and over roads strewn with forgotten toys. Her black and silver
Harley stood patiently in the shadows under a caring tree, waiting for Diana to
arrive. It seemed to come alive as she whispered and lay hands on its mirrored
surfaces. The scent of leather and fumy diesel was hypnotic. Tariel felt
drugged on the aura of petrolic poetry.
She kissed him in the darkness. “Oh sweet bitch, you feel so
soft…”. Diana bit into an exposed shoulder, ran her hands over his fur. She
climbed on, turned on the beast, revving the engine, screaming it into the
night. “Get on.”
He climbed behind her, surrendering to his sudden shuddering fear. It
made his skin flush and burn. “Hold me or you’ll fall..”. Tariel pulled his fur
close, felt the fluttering texture across his flesh and wrapped himself into
Diana’s lithe, coiled form as she leaned into the oncoming force of the road.
The darkness hurled past them, wind banshee-like as landscapes ribboned into
ink and blood.
Suddenly all was silent, the heat between their bodies was
beautifully dark. Tariel slipped the grey fur off and for a singular exquisite
moment it shrieked in the wind like wild wings and then snatched up into the
slate-blue sky. Diana turned her head; Tariel folded his skin around her
leather, burying his face in her extraordinary neck. Death came like love,
unexpectedly, with force.
This is how I feel and
sense the melding of Shermine and Métal Hurlant, a collision of textures
with scarcely any time to breathe, no space in between. Pelt and fur, cold and
fire, powder and flame, burn and silken caress. As always chez Pierre there is a
sense of velvet technologies at play, deliciously rendered effects and accords
alongside his usual haute qualité
materials. As Lana’s honeyed vocals settle and the sun drops over her desolate
landscapes the full oddity and metallic bloom of Métal Hurlant becomes apparent. This fantasy Harley odour is
ostensibly ‘an aerodynamic leather’ lit by gasoline, chrome, paint and steel.
Everything whipped into odiferous frenzy as a biker tears down Route 66 in the
hot Arizona wind. This overtly clichéd image is subverted by the spatial
dissolve of the materials, the seemingly innocuous shift from buzzy inhalation
to deeply beguiling alloy of animalic stain and creamy ride.
Pierre has built Métal
Hurlant essentially around two opposing dissonances; one between patchouli
and jasmine and the other between lactones and sage. The tensions and balance amid
these distinctive notes gives rise to the elegantly constructed petrol and hot
tar effects that shimmer up as the fragrance settles onto warm skin. The more
animalic notes, the whiff of biker jacket and heated boot come from the use and
manipulation of gorgeous lush Suederol, Corinal, heady jasmine absolute and dry
feral musks. Métal Hurlant feels spacious
and tense simultaneously. The vapourous inhalation of careful perversity is
lovingly distilled. All around the edges are flickers of burning road, heathaze
and introspection. It is a surprisingly quiet scent; yes there is power,
throttle and burn, but the power lies in the ability of Métal Hurlant to inveigle its thrilling way into your imagination
and set fire to the neural pathways.
Shermine, on the
other hand, speaks softly. Like the silvered fur on Tariel’s lost shoulders, it
is a perfume of carefully considered beauty. A scent of protection and studied
miasma. It has undeniable echoes to me of my beloved Poudre de Riz, one of Pierre’s earlier Huitième Art works, a scent
of plundered skin, power and hallowed privacy. The monoï and vanillic secrecy
of Poudre de Riz are divinely enacted
on skin, making the body fuckable yet deliciously chaste. Shermine echoes this desire and alluring white communion while
somehow ramping up texture and tension, effect and rapture.
 |
| L'iris |
Essentially Pierre has conjured irises from a field of lustrous
argent pelt. I love my iris scents, so this had to be added to my collection
and as with all of Pierre’s olfactive work I knew there would be a quirk, a
twist to the iris, a layer that would make a beautiful note that little bit
more intriguing. I am always drawn to texture in scent; it is an ambitious and sometimes-foolish
perfumer that announces concrete, silk, cotton, velvet, tweed accords in their
materials. They are so hit and miss and rely on enormous technical skill first
and foremost but also a unique enough rendering in order to communicate itself cohesively
to a wearer. The perfume collections from Parfumerie Générale, Huitième Art and
Collection Croisière all have fundamental transparency of form and yet they all
slightly tilted, skewed constructions, the materials both natural and synthetic
blended with authoritative and innovative technique. It is the use of the unexpected;
the sophisticated inclusion that often sets Pierre’s work apart.
 |
| Métal Hurlant/Cuir |
The iris in Shermine
is transfigured by a spicy aromatic triptych accord of cardamom, rosewood and lavender
that lends a basmati rice and quietly lacquered effect. Iris is an inherently
powdered, skin-shimmer of a note; it feels privately profound and sombre. The
base of Shermine is reinforced with
smoky guaiac wood, patchouli, a poignant vetiver, vanilla and swathes of white
musks, settling like ash. The key component in this composition is the addition
of Argentine lemon in the top section of the scent; it makes a considerable
impact on the texture on the iris, rendering it brittle in places, almost salty.
It feels like the tips of silver white fur are caught white in moonlight,
dazzling and prickly like needles. It’s a clever piece of olfactory dazzle, the
piquancy of the juicy citrus juxtaposes very chicly and curiously with Pierre’s
fluent handling of his iris theme.
 |
| Shermine/Fourrure |
I can’t wear one scent without the other, I know Pierre didn’t intend
them as an aromatic duality, but the textural coincidences and harmony of the two
perfumes are for me too addictive to ignore. Separately they are of course
perfect illustrations of how Pierre Guillaume likes to play seriously with
precisely refined and ingenious blending. Métal
Hurlant is a bleak essay in road-trip sensualism, riding in an unexpected
and sweetly petrolic haze. I love its rubbered patchouli and blurs of smeared
petals. Mixing it with the drowsy transparency of Shermine with its softly bruised and dusted iris seems to bring
light and shadows to both sides of the olfactory partnership. Leather, fur, dust,
sugar, sweat, fire and road, sun, moon, love, desire and vanishing; these two
singular scents fuck like angels in darkness.
‘Who
are you?
Are
you in touch with all your darkest fantasies?
Have
you created a life for yourself
where
you're free to experience them?
I
have! I am fucking crazy, but I am free!..’
(From end monologue of Ride by Lana del Rey,
lyrics & music by Elisabeth Grant &
Justin Parker)
©TheSilverFox 2015
Beautiful, loved reading. :)
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