Intermission: Bal à Versailles EDT (vintage)

I'm kind of dreading sampling those last three Fueguia 1833 scents, so I'm taking a breather for a week.

One of the reasons the Fueguia scents generally aren't working well for me is that they're too simple: most of them have no body. They're generally thin, bloodless things with but a single thought on their minds. But it didn't used to be like that. Once upon a time (and not even that long ago, as late as the nineties), nearly every fragrance worthy of the name, with the usual exception of colognes and deliberately simple eaux de toilette, was constructed according to a framework, the olfactory pyramid, in which multiple elements, often a great many of them, were balanced and layered to create a perpetually evolving whole greater than the sum of its parts. Nowadays, all too many perfumes are based on a much simpler template, still nominally a pyramid but more like three Lego blocks: synthetic fruit that lasts a few minutes, a vague floral that lasts two hours, woody vanilla musk that lasts a few more, each a discrete object with no development, no complexity or shape.

Even if you don't consciously experience all the notes in a classically constructed fragrance (and you won't), they matter. They add overtones and complexities: they fill out the composition. This is yet another way in which perfumery is like music. Each individual instrument in an orchestra has its own set of overtones: no instrument makes a pure tone. When you mass them all together, you get an effect that is much larger and more multifarious than any single instrument (or even a grouping of the same instrument) could be by itself.

Bal à Versailles by Jean Desprez was launched in 1962, but it feels like something out of the thirties, in good company with 1932's Tabu, 1937's Shocking, and other gorgeously raunchy fragrances.

As Bal à Versailles shows, sexy-times perfumes didn't end in the thirties: even in the mid to late eighties, perfumers were still creating such amazing odes to carnal delight as Montana Parfum de Peau in 1986. The late eighties through the early nineties were a struggle between 1980s power scents and the new watery perfumes such as Calvin Klein Escape in 1991, L'Eau D'Issey in 1992, and Bulgari Eau Parfumée in 1993, and we all know which side won. If Angel in 1992 wasn't the last of the oversized kaboom orientals, it was the sign of a genre on its way out, not that Angel had anything to do with the sexy orientals of earlier decades: it was about as desexualized as an oriental perfume can be, meant to evoke the comforts of childhood rather than the pleasures of the boudoir. Big complex orientals and chypres weren't quite dead, but they were increasingly relegated to the back of the shelf (or drastically reformulated, as Opium was, to fit modern tastes), and I think that's the point at which the zeitgeist shifted and there was no looking back.

As a consequence, Bal à Versailles is going to smell hopelessly perfumey and old-fashioned to anybody born after about 1980, 'cause it's built — holy cow, is it ever built, like a Maserati. Civet may be a base note, but it has a way of making its presence known right at the beginning of a scent — there's no way to hide it — and so in addition to the herbal (slightly minty, to my surprise) and hesperidic opening, there's already the intimation of smutty sex, which continues throughout the life of the scent. The middle is a great mass of flowers, all the usual suspects such as rose, jasmine, orange-flower, and ylang, and still wonderfully thrumming with more and more of that dangerous, dirty civet. Eventually comes the climax: plush vanilla and suggestive leather tussling with that dense animalic base, for hours and hours. It's beautiful, but never for an instant is it just beautiful: from its first moments on your skin it's enticingly corrupt.

I wish I could be more certain of the date, but I think my little half-ounce bottle dates from some time in the late seventies to mid eighties, which means that it might have lost some of its top notes (I can't find any evidence it ever had aldehydes, though I feel as if it ought to have, for some reason) but is otherwise intact and probably very close to the original 1960s formulation. Bal à Versailles is still in production, but as usual, I have no idea what changes might have been made to it in the last sixty years: probably it's been madly tinkered with to appeal to today's tastes, but perhaps, contrarily, it's exactly what it used to be, a celebration of the animal in all of us.

Alexander McQueen: A Belated Appreciation

Whatever I said about Lady Gaga before, I take it all back.

Well, not all of it. She is a flesh-baring neo-disco chantoozy, but she isn't "modestly talented". She's got a gift for promotion and for wearing clothes, she has an interesting mezzo voice to go along with her interesting looks, and she made this video.



"Bad Romance", indeed: the heartwarming story of a couture-clad innocent who is captured, stripped, drugged, bathed, and taught French by a battalion of latex-clad pod people, then sold into sexual slavery to the highest bidder, whom she kills with her tits. Genius. Dazzling.

Pretty much every stitch of clothing she's wearing in that video (I don't know about the underpants) is by Alexander McQueen, a designer who, you may have heard, killed himself a couple of weeks ago, and what a tremendous loss that is. I don't pay much attention to clothing, but I after I saw the Gaga video, I wanted to know more about his work, and here is what I found: the spring 2010 show, visionary and mad and breathtaking.

In 1997, McQueen launched a scent called Kingdom that was just as forward as those clothes. I am wearing it right now, and it's all I have, literally; I just used my very last drop, and pumped the sprayer until it was gasping for breath. That's it. There isn't any more. You can't really get it online (although I know a private seller who might have a bottle for sale, and I am sorely tempted). Ebay has a few bottles for, of course, insane prices if you must have some. But there isn't much left out there, and when it's gone, it's really gone, because all the interesting things get discontinued while companies just keep on turning out more and more crap.

Let's look at that bottle, shall we?

First off, it looks like no bottle you've ever seen. From some angles, it looks like the ice-cold heart of a robot, beating with some inhuman ichor



or a biomechanical sea creature tucked away in its gleaming chrome shell

It also frankly looks like a stylized vulva, especially the limited-edition armour-plated bottle

which closed up like the Batmobile. (I'm not really sure how that works: I never held it in my hand.)

But mostly it is a heart
which is true to the essentially romantic nature of the scent within. Not pretty-romantic. Not dreamy and lovely. This is sweaty, naked skin-on-skin romance.

The top is a big shot of citrus: bergamot and orange, and lots of it. Hard on its heels is something deliciously filthy; dark, almost decaying rose and jasmine laden with the musky, spicy-sweaty smell of cumin. So much cumin! It's a courtesan's boudoir full of flowers from admirers. It's a carpet of petals you've just had sex on.

Later on: dirty-earthy myrrh, softened with a bit of vanilla.

Kingdom suggests a few other scents; it immediately calls to mind Nu and Black Orchid a little (bedroomy lush floral plus dirty), and the smuttier elements make me think of Muscs Khoublai Khan. But there's no replacement for it. It's one of a kind, I'm all out of it, and if you don't mind, I'd like to be alone with it for a while.