June 7, 2011 |
FROM THE VOLT (SPRING SUMMER 2011)
Perfume begins when you bring your nose to your wrist. You close your eyes and breathe. Then there is a dream. It does not matter if the perfume is part of the luxury-brand business. It is not important why the perfume exists. The dream is the thing. I wear Yves Saint Laurent’s Paris. I bring my nose to my wrist and I see a garden – trailing, layered, delicate. There are roses and a faint, spectral mist. The perfume produces Alice in Wonderland, a Victorian photograph of an aristocratic faerie garden. And this is all that matters.
It has been said the Paris on sale now has been reformulated; that is not quite the Paris released in 1983. Perhaps it has changed. The perfume seems quieter now and less 1980s – or perhaps we just wear less of it these days, just the most careful application.
But Paris is close to Yves’s conception of the perfume. The fragrance would be like the city, he said. “Paris is a nostalgic, grey-blue place.” And the rose in Paris would be “like those in the exotic gardens of Marrakesh that become like beautiful cabbages as they bloom and die… ”
In 1992, when Yves’s partner Pierre Bergé put the company up for sale, looking for $1 billion (he settled for something close to $700 million), the bankers and potential backers weren’t interested in the fashion, or at least the couture end of the fashion. The value and the money were in the make-up and perfume. The money was on Yves’ dream of a melancholic city and fading Arab bloom.
“It would definitely have been easier just to have been looking for a buyer for the perfumes and cosmetics,” said former Edmond de Rothschild banker Jean-Pierre Halbon, brought in by Bergé to work the sale. “That was the part of the company everyone wanted.”
This is probably a given in the modern world – “Oh, the couture exists to promote the perfume. And the perfume exists to make dollars.” And there can be both a connect (and disconnect) between the design house and the perfume. Jean Paul Gaultier’s Classique suggests Tizer and brandy. Prada’s signature amber (Prada) is crisp and beautiful, but it did not break new ground – Miuccia’s perfume is the reworking of a pre-existing and perfect trend.
There is a game: you match the scents with the design and brand signatures of the house. Or the details (if available) of the designer and his or her life. The great perfume writer Luca Turin has noted that Gucci’s Rush, for example, is the perfect fragrance for a night out – cocktails, dancing, casual sex…
Yves Saint Laurent is interesting because we now have information (and also misinformation) about him, stories that were not so public before: a first sexual experience with an Arab boy in Algiers; the heroin, opium, cocaine, marijuana and LSD that edged his social circle (and his own tastes). At night, writes his (unauthorised) French biographer, Marie-Dominique Lelièvre, Yves fell on his knees beneath Parisian bridges to please young Arabs in the shadows.
Yves spent most of his life in either Paris or Morocco. As a young man, his life in Marrakesh looks romantic – with his friends the Gettys and Jaggers he made a myth of Morocco, a luxurious hippie-dom photographed in stoned sunshine on ancient rooftops. Later, the books describe his breakdowns and alcoholism, his isolation, bulimia, suicide attempts, physical debilitation – Yves is barely able to cope, at times, with the pressure of designing. Sometimes the story runs like Michael Jackson’s; there are backstage doctors, sedatives and alcohol, private clinics…
But, more beautifully, at times, Yves would fly (in the YSL company Learjet) to Marrakesh and his palace and gardens, to a life that could be more creative and healing. He could be alone in Marrakesh – make sketches, visit the souks, take tea (by himself) in a hotel, like a character from an elegant novel. Yves cannot do this so easily in Paris. He is too famous.
The books tell us some things (but not much) of Yves’s sex life. But he carefully watches a young Arab man at a party in Marrakesh. There are notes to his masochism in Paris, a night that ends (it is said) with a terrible beating.
So these are the stories I ask you to find in the deep notes of ‘Paris’; something more complex than the picture of the Eiffel Tower on the perfume’s box. Famous lives must be double, especially when Yves was worth so much – he was taking $2.5 million a year as a wholesale royalty from Opium; YSL generated $1.2 billion of sales in 1985. Yves Saint Laurent is very corporate, very powerful and, behind this global financial entity, we have Yves as very human, very damaged (at times) and very creative (at others).
I doubt you can be the symbolic head of a global luxury brand and tell the world all your truth. But in the maudlin nostalgia of Paris and the night of Opium there is just something of his intricacy and his darkness.
Opium is more Eastern than Paris. The perfume is overwhelming; a high dry heat from balsams and spices – the perfume of (imagined) Arabia. In time, this gives way to the bedroom of the French woman: delicate floral trails and the remains of her make-up. Opium is a collision between Deneuve and the almond-eyed boys of Burroughs and Genet.
Helmut Newton, who photographed Jerry Hall for the Opium campaign, got the measure of Yves. “A lot of his clothes are exactly the way I wished my ideal woman was dressed. It is the glorification of the 16th-arrondissement bourgeoisie woman with too much money, too much free time on her hands, and up to all kinds of tricks.”
The Jerry Hall image for Opium was shot in the sitting room of Yves’s Parisian duplex. The deco furniture, black lacquered door, glass sculpture, smoked mirrors, long, low sofas, golden 16th-century Chinese Ming Buddhas, elaborate candelabras – this was how his room looked. There was also the palace in Morocco, an apartment in New York, a chateau in Normandy – all fully staffed. And Yves owned paintings by Goya, Matisse, Géricault and Mondrian.
His biographers say Yves romanticised his depression. He read Proust repeatedly. He shut himself in his Parisian apartment watching the art-porn of Visconti. He may have smoked 120 cigarettes a day. You can imagine the ennui; he is a character from Visconti; fabulously wealthy, operatically sad and ailing in a glittering deco palace.
Anyway, the perfume remains. Both Paris and Opium are powerful, meaningful and have, as we have noted, biographical resonances. Many other “designer fragrances” say little in comparison; they can be sheer and impersonal. Designer fragrances outlive designers. The great perfume halls currently offer up a new Halston (masculine amber), Versace (intriguing aniseed) and posthumous Saint Laurent (raspberry rose sugar). The designers are dead; the perfumes linger. They are either fitting or feckless epitaphs and memorials.
Of course the perfumes are also part of the labyrinthine corporate licensing business, but it is both strange and beautiful how the names of these men live on in the perfume halls. The tiny bottles with their relevant graphics and brightly coloured juices that may, in some cases, carry fragments of memory and meaning, keys to unlock whole decades and rivers of human experience.
DESIGNER FRAGS
JOY, JEAN PATOU: There must be some trace memory of Patou and couture, but it doesn’t feel old-fashioned so much as exquisite, sensual and softly ravishing. Easy to wear and love. Still one of the greatest perfumes of all time.
COUTURE COUTURE, JUICY COUTURE: The bottle is amazing – like Harrods vs Marie Antoinette and all the dreamed palaces of Arabia. The perfume smells like peaches and honeysuckle, then bubblegum. Nice, though.
PARISIENNE, YVES SAINT LAURENT. There’s a love-hate berry-rose accord that is either too violet and too sweet or just haunting and perfect. Stays on the skin like a memory; smells good the following day – and seems to speak of loss.
RUSH, GUCCI: Neon-hairspray-disco-type thing with a more discreet vanilla-stoner drydown. Like removing strappy, kicky clothes to reveal naked, available skin. Which you could say is quite apt for Gucci. Perhaps.
2 MAN, COMME DES GARÇONS: Suggests Christopher Nolan with burning dust and candle smoke against frankincense. Like humourless avant-garde.
DAISY, MARC JACOBS: Apt for Marc if all his clothes were designed for sassy, teenage girls: the perfume says Lolita in cropped gingham with ripe, melting fruits.
OPIUM, YSL:Apply sparingly (these days) and perhaps look for the dialogue between Eastern heat and softer bourgeois femme. The quality of the ingredients underwrites its power. Interesting to wear because it is so different from juicy contemporary scents.
STELLA IN TWO PEONY, STELLA MCCARTNEY: Comes in two parts: a compact of amber solid and neat bottle of sour, bitchy peony. You are supposed to the mix the two. It’s the best Stella, but as to whether it actually speaks of or describes Stella herself…
COCO, CHANEL. Perfumer Jacques Polge said he was influenced by Chanel’s apartment (untouched after her death) – the gilt mirrors, lacquered screens, Venetian treasures – they all said “Orient”. He went for sandalwood, Indian jasmine, Turkish roses, orange blossom and cinnamon.
BOUDOIR, VIVIENNE WESTWOOD: Sumptuous with rich, purring flowers, yielding to a richly creamed amber/sandalwood. Yielding is a good word for this one – it speaks of curves and bedrooms, womanly thighs writhing on clean bed linen.
THE BOOKS ABOUT YVES… The Beautiful Fall by Alicia Darke (Little, Brown & Company), Saint Laurent, Bad Boy by Marie-Dominique Lelièvre (Flammarion) and Pierre Bergé’s Lettres à Yves (Editions Gallimard)
by Tony Marcus
