It has taken me a little
while to get around to writing down my thoughts on Fundamental Eau de Parfum by Rubini Profumi. I was very kindly sent
a sample by Andrea Bissoni Rubini when the scent initially launched at Pitti
2015 and it fascinated and charmed me then. It is very much an Italian affair,
created by Andrea, in collaboration with Ermano Picco, blogger at La Gardenia nell'occhiello, perfumer Cristiano Canali and renowned designer Francesca Gotti
who created the singular presentation for Nu_be, another innovative Italmian
niche brand. The mix of personnel is quietly and distinctively a family of perfumed immensity and quite
the platform for a debut scent.
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| Andrea Bissoli Rubini |
I have become quite addicted
to Fundamental’s unexpected and
compelling grape note; it smells yeasty, fatty, smeared and indulgent. Shifting
from sparkling party bubbles, the bread and melon hit of prosecco to a more
disturbing lolling, after-hours addiction of vampiric carmine stain; there is unwashed
skin, a whiff of fuck and silence, falling make-up, lipstick, cologne,
tradition and innovation. All of these disparate elements swirl around that
central personality of Soave grape. It is quite an experience.
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| Fundamental by Rubini |
So much time is spent writing
about lost scents and houses attempting to shore up their crumbling
foundations. There are also many faux-vintage olfactory formulae out there,
offering cracked windows into bygone eras with mixed results. Fundamental is a very different
creature. Andrea comes from a line of established Veronese perfume sellers, so
his blood is scented, but he was restless, aromatically fatigued if you like,
looking for something amid the usual flacons that would inspire him. He set out
to create his own scent, an odour that satisfy his vintage cravings but also
represent something modern, constructed and singularly apart from anything he
had experienced to date. Could he build a fragrance that might echo with
history and geography and yet still resonate with a contemporary set of complex
and fickle senses?
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| Ermano Picco (l) & Cristiano Canali (r) |
The name Fundamental is key to this scented endeavour. Andrea’s grandfather
started up a small perfumery business in Verona in Northern Italy in 1937 after
returning from the Italo-Ethiopian war. The word translates variously as crucial, intrinsic, supporting, base or
foundation. His grandfather’s name was Pietro, the Italian word for stone.
His post war perfumery business was literally the cornerstone of the Rubini
family. Fundamental is Andrea’s
homage to his grandfather’s memory but also a way of saying.. ‘This is my foundation, I place this
olfactory object in place and mark a new Rubini beginning..’
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| Verona |
In order to achieve his
dream, Andrea set about assembling a talented and relatively green squad of
collaborators to help him realise his Fundamental
project. La Gardenia nell’Occhiello is
an Italian perfume blog hosted by Ermano Picco, a man who knows a lot about the
history and traditions of perfumery. Andrea consulted with Ermano in order to
create a detailed brief they might start with. Using this, they contacted
Cristiano Canali, a young graduate from the ISIPCA in Paris who Andrea had previously
met at Pitti when he was showcasing a selection of the Osmothèque’s classic
canon of perfumery.
Between them they produced a
detailed blueprint for a picturesque scent that would draw on many influences
including local history, sex, wine, beauty and classical perfumery. An
ambitious project but one with genuine emotion and character soaked into it
every part of its ambitious formula. The result, Fundamental, is one of the most unconventional perfumes I’ve worn
in a while, parts are gorgeously comforting, echoing things I’ve worn before or
smelled on others over many years of wearing so many scents and yet… there is
this whole other facet to the build; an edgy, sexual, smeary quality, hinting
at vintage brothel skin, unwashed, layered in soap and hazy heady musks and
boudoir florals. This is tempered by flashes of masculine cologne, a bite of
cold citrus and pale wet verdancy.
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| Garganega grapes.. |
This is a fertile backdrop
for the main story of Fundamental,
the surprising central motif of grape, the Garganega grape to be more precise,
used predominantly in the production of Soave white wine, a specialty of the
Veneto region around Verona. A lot has been written about the uniqueness of
this grape note. I do however have another perfume tucked away in my collection
that uses a grape note rather beautifully, albeit in a completely different way
and that is Wilde by Jardins
d’Ecrivains. It is interesting counterpoint to Fundamental. I am a big of the eccentric
literary inspired scents from the talented Anais Biguine. I have Wilde, George, Junky, Marlowe and La Dame aux Camélias in my collection,
all of which fascinate and captivate me when I wear them.
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| Wilde by Jardins des Ecrivains |
Wilde is deeply odd, a resolutely effete mix of moribund fig,
carnation, oakmoss and vetiver. The recipe is at once immensely vintage in tone
and yet wildly unconventional, the dance of fig and grape executed with grace
and singular eccentricity. The grape effect smells of Concord grapes crushed in
a stonemason’s dusty hand. It is this distinctly weird vineyard thing that
really possesses the skin. It feels like a note of recklessness in a scent of
studied convention. I like the old-fashioned soapiness that filters through as well;
this must be a heavy dose of white musks in the base or aldehydes dazzled
through the central part of the materials. The thing I admire about Wilde is
that Anais has thought carefully about how to compose her love letter to Oscar
and chose a leftfield motif like grapes to represent wines, excess, Bacchanalia
and the ancient Greeks. Whatever the reason it has been stylishly mingled with
other notes and yet still retains a strong green fruity identity of its own
throughout the settling of the scent.
Rubini’s Fundamental does something different however, setting the iconic
Soave grape note on an elaborate ground of powdered skin, woods, vintage
leather, grasses, wax, velvet and addictive craven body. It is a scent that
begs to be searched out under clothes and deeply inhaled off the skin. The
sophistication of Fundamental is
quite remarkable considering it is a debut scent, but it is obvious the talents
of Andrea, Ermano Picco and Cristiano Canali have combined to produce a perfume
of rare intensity, reflection and personality.
By cataloguing the personal Veronese
history of Andrea Rubini and his grandfather Pietro and drawing an olfactory
line through time between the two men, Cristiano and Ermano have used their
respective technical and historical research skills to illuminate this divine
line with erotic verve and heirloom impact. Fundamental
asks for repeated wearings, to play out its emotive and peculiar aromas.
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| Fundamental by Rubini |
Key to Cristiano and Ermano’s
aromatic plotting is the accord inspired by this distinctive Soave grape blend,
one of the most famous Italian white wines in the world. Soave wines are
predominately made up of the local Veronese Garganega grape variety, which
lends the finished alcohol a strong balance of metallic verdancy and ripened
soft fruits. In Fundamental this odd,
charismatic motif is held up as it were in a metaphorical glass alongside a
more full-bodied luscious red wine, something velveteen, swirling in a nighttime
glass amid laughter and humid glances. The Soave is the wine and spirit of
Verona, an odour of furred gooseberries, apricot compote, damp artesian wells
and brioche to it. If I wear a lot of Fundamental,
especially at night as it floods onto cloth, there are odours of noble rot, botrytis cinerea, the strange benevolent
grey mould that adds a powerful sweetness to certain wines. The smell is very
particular, musty, moreish and atmospheric; I can detect it ghosting in spaces
between the later notes of Fundamental.
The Soave motif is an important theme compositionally and the other elements riff
and bloom off it.
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| Noble Rot (botyrtis cinerera) |
Due to the Italian
government’s brutal involvement in the 1937 Ethiopian wars, the UN or the
League of Nations as it was known at the time imposed strict economic sanctions
against Italy that affected all levels of import and export. This included
materials used in the manufacture of perfumes and other luxury beauty goods.
The result was that many of the perfumes made at this time relied heavily on
natural essences, extracts and resinoids resulting in dense dark, textured
scents with little sense of ambiguity or delicacy. They were strong and bawdy,
perfumes of intent and statement. Pietro Rubini would have known these
fragrances, recognised the power and pull of their necessary allure. He would
have sold his scented wares in the Veronese bordellos after hours to the busy
ladies of the night and their clients. They could afford it. Sex always makes
money. The women always wanted to smell beautiful, it was part of the job; the
honeytrap and the men liked buying gifts to take for their favourite doxies.
This dissonance of flesh,
commerce, hedonism and clandestine fornication was played out against a
backdrop of faded velvet rooms, scattered candles, the scent of fatty rosaceous
lips, powdered décolleté, damp thighs and genitalia soaped and soothed with
perfumed oils, unguents and creams. These tumbling erotic motifs, toasted with
wine, laughter and coin in and out of shadows are the vintage echoes and
foundation stones of Fundamental.
Romantic in retrograde, but faintly disturbing, twisted and off kilter. The
elements however may have been exquisitely abstracted by Cristiano Canali but
the archaeology is there.
Resting at the heart of Fundamental is this incredible grape accord, the Rubini team have
concocted, of course an homage to Veronese oenology but also a heritage echo of
those sexy yesteryear whorehouse salutations as glittering glasses of wine were
clinked and spilled over skin and whispers. I imagine the brothel cellars were well
stocked with local wines to keep clients happy, crates from local vineyards resting
in dark pockets of silence beneath the more gaudy and private performance
spaces.
The intensity of Fundamental is striking, from the zesty,
bright apricot-coloured tangerine top notes down through that startling Soave
accord, shrubby maquis, silvered iris and smeared pollen-scented beeswax down
to the shudder of woods, a surprisingly bracing vetiver insertion and that
vaguely creepy velvet accord. There is a faint yet distinct layer of leather in
the final stages, it seems to need the wax and the iris, the three elements
counteracting the bready liquor spill of the Soave. Each time I wear it, it
feels a little different, I sense small shifts.
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| Francesca Gotti's Glebanite® enclosure for Fundamental |
One of the talking points of Fundamental from the very beginning of
inception has been the innovative and daring presentation of the flacon, held
between two pieces of resinous Glebanite®, a remarkable material resembling
antique stone, but in fact as light as air. It is made from the recycled
fibreglass carcasses of dead boats dredged up from the numerous lagoons
surrounding the Italian coastline. The design of the packaging is by artist,
photographer and designer Francesca Gotti, who created the beautiful, crumbling
enclosures for Nu-be, another one of my favourite brands.
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| Francesca Gotti _______________ |
Her work is ruthlessly linear
and I feel I see everything she does in gorgeous isolated monochrome. Her strata of Glebanite® for Fundamental feel
porous and deceptively mineral to hold; beneath the tips of the fingers there
are tiny pitted tracts, fissures and holes. These are part of the casting
process, but they mimic the surfaces of care-worn stone beautifully. It is
impossible not to handle and play with the packaging, it invites touch. The Fundamental flacon is perfectly rested
between two moulded pieces of this amazing substance, coloured a calm putty
grey. They are not actually fastened together in any real way and form a loose objet, which while rather unconventional
in terms of perfume bottle design have a powerful presence. I find it
incredibly beautiful side on; it resembles a spirit level, echoing concrete and
amber. It is both joyous and unnecessary as so many beautiful things often are.
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| Fundamental by Rubini |
For a debut scent, with a
number of complex talents involved Fundamental
is superbly brave and audacious scent making. So much could have gone awry. But
it has not. In fact, Andrea, Ermano, Cristiano and Francesca have triumphed;
succeeding in assembling a complex skein of emotive, historical and technical
threads to create a perfume of reverential depth and unorthodox fascination.
The Silver Fox© 24th December
2015
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