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What do you wear to the French perfume industry’s biggest event of the year? Killer cleavage, that’s what. More skin to spritz with Femme in the original formula, just to remind yourself and everyone around you of what perfume used to be and can still be when left half a chance. After all, when asked what they consider to be the perfume, Femme is what half the perfumers answer – the others say Mitsouko. Pity the industry isn’t living up to that. The top awards have just been nabbed by two of the blandest launches of the year.
This evening, the Fragrance Foundation France is handing out the equivalent of the Oscars crossed with the People’s Choice Awards (the public gets to vote online), and let’s just say that, if anyone sneezes in the sumptuous Belle Époque ballroom of the Grand Hotel Intercontinental, the industry will grind to a standstill. I’m here because, for the second year running, I sat on the jury of the Specialists Award, given out by journalists, evaluators and bloggers to niche products. My fellow jurors and I have known the result for a week but, when the winner is announced, one of them smirks:
‘Do you realize we’ve just given out the award for a niche perfume to a celebrity fragrance?’
* * *
Unlike the American Fragrance Foundation, which has a specific category for celebrity perfumes, the French have none because there are practically no celebrity perfumes in France. What we have are égéries, the actors and models who front advertising campaigns. The word comes from the name of the Latin nymph Egeria: according to the legend, she secretly advised her lover, King Numa Pompilius, on matters of state religion. In English, it translates as ‘muse’. But although the septuagenarian Jean-Paul Guerlain proclaims that all his feminine scents were inspired by women, there are no muses in the perfume industry, at least none that we know of. What Loulou de la Falaise was to Yves Saint Laurent, Gala to Salvador Dalí, Kiki de Montparnasse to Man Ray, Marlene Dietrich to Josef von Sternberg or Gena Rowlands to John Cassavetes? That’s never been bottled.
There are, however, a handful of European products that do hint at a muse-perfumer relationship. They fit into the celebrity fragrance slot, but barely, because they’re so quirky and original you’ve just got to believe they reflect their namesakes’ decidedly un-Photoshopped personalities – unlike American celebrity juices that give the feeling the stars just slapped their names on the label to rake in the royalties (one of the rare exceptions being Sarah Jessica Parker, a perfume aficionada who had very definite ideas about Lovely). Christopher Brosius’ Cumming for the actor Alan Cumming is ‘a scent that is all about Sex, Scotch, Cigars and Scotland’ – the sex part somehow involving rubber and leather. Miller Harris’s L’Air de Rien for the singer and actor Jane Birkin, a fierce moss and musk blend that ranks high indeed on the skank-o-metre was based, Birkin told Vogue, on ‘a little of my brother’s hair, my father’s pipe, floor polish, an empty chest of drawers, old forgotten houses’. Rossy de Palma, the striking belle laide who graced Pedro Almodovar’s cult Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown, asked for a rose that would also speak of earth, spices, volcanoes and Africa. For good measure, Antoine Lie and Antoine Maisondieu threw in a drop of blood to conjure the rose’s thorns in her Eau de Protection for État Libre d’Orange.
The brand went on to produce a second celebrity scent with the cult gay artist Tom of Finland, but it was their third offering in that line that whipped up the perfect scented storm. For the occasion, the house forewent its provocatively erotic pitches, names and visuals: the scent was called Like This after a poem by the Sufi mystic Rumi. With it, perfumery’s bad-boy brand seemed to be coming back into the fold of serious, artistic niche houses, so all was forgiven by perfume lovers, who embraced it enthusiastically. The composition itself, a burnished, burning essay in tones of orange, was arrestingly original but as cosy as a weather-worn tweed jacket: beautiful enough to stand judgement on its own, which is how it was evaluated by the jury. But it certainly didn’t hurt that it had a red-hot muse to up its cool factor: Tilda Swinton, Oscar winner, fearless actor, style icon and unearthly beauty.
* * *
As Mathilde Bijaoui steps onstage to accept the Specialists Award for Like This, I wonder whether, once the stardust is swept away, her creative partnership with Tilda Swinton couldn’t be the closest thing to mine with Bertrand: a hybrid project halfway between bespoke and commercial perfumery, predicated on an individual’s story but conceived for public release. I’m curious to find out just how much of herself the actor really put into its development so, after congratulating Mathilde, I ask her the question. She confirms: she really did develop Like This with and for Tilda Swinton.
‘I conceived it for her, first and foremost. I wanted it to touch her.’
But the term ‘muse’ gives her pause.
‘I don’t know that I’d call her that. To me, a muse is someone you’re in love with…’
A co-author, then? Mathilde nods.
‘Yes. Definitely.’
* * *
A few days later, Mathilde Bijaoui and I resume our conversation in the sun-drenched offices of Mane on the verdant Île de la Jatte, once a bucolic playground for the Impressionists, now one of the poshest suburbs of Paris.
A slender, striking beauty with her tangle of dark curls, Mathilde owes her vocation to her father, a keen amateur chef who took her to food markets to make her smell things. When she visited ISIPCA on an open day at the age of thirteen, she couldn’t believe there was actually such a profession as perfumer, and immediately set out to get the scientific baccalauréat she needed to be admitted to the school. She wasn’t yet thirty when she was singled out by Étienne de Swardt, the owner of État Libre d’Orange, to make proposals for Tilda Swinton’s scent.
The star’s gender-bending persona would have dovetailed neatly into the house’s iconoclastic stance but she wanted to take another direction. ‘Scent means place to me: place and state of mind – even state of grace. Certainly state of ease,’ she would later write for the press release. ‘My favourite smells are the smells of home, the experience of the reliable recognizable after the exotic adventure: the regular – natural – turn of the seasons, simplicity and softness after the duck and dive of definition in the wide, wide world.’
Swinton, who had been wearing Penhaligon’s Bluebell for so many years she no longer smelled it, was no perfume aficionada, though she quoted the very classic Joy, Calèche and 24 Faubourg as scents she was fond of. More tellingly, she forwarded a list of the smells that most touched her: simple and delicate flowers like sweet peas and honeysuckle, but also lapsang souchong tea, single malt whisky, wood smoke, bonfires and fireworks on Guy Fawkes Day, which happened to be her birthday.
Smoke appeared clearly as a leitmotif, a boon for a perfumer working on a carte blanche brief. A first session introducing Tilda to raw materials confirmed this: she was strongly drawn to immortelle, an oddball note with its burnt, foody facets of curry and maple syrup. Perhaps its name rang as a subconscious call from Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s immortal male-to-female hero and one of Swinton’s landmark roles in Sally Potter’s 1992 film adaptation of the novel? She never said.
Immortelle made perfect sense to Mathilde Bijaoui, whose synaesthesia makes her see the smell in orange. So orange became another leitmotif. It was the colour of Tilda Swinton’s hair; of the dress her character wore in Luca Guadagnino’s I am Love, which she was shooting at the time. It was even in the name of the brand putting out the fragrance. The idea was so impeccably consistent, but so simple, that Mathilde wondered whether it wasn’t just plain simple-minded, but it worked, and she went on adding layers of orange. Over the course of their conversations, Tilda had brought up the fact that she was a ginger, so ginger went in. Ginger called for pumpkin, and a pumpkin accord came about to soften the blend. It worked well with Tilda’s request for something homey; Mathilde envisioned a kitchen where a pumpkin pie was baking. Then she added carrot and mandarin: more orange, more flavours. Again, this echoed what Tilda was experiencing as an actor at the time: in I am Love, her character is a Russian-born Milanese trophy wife who falls in love with a young chef: ‘You have no idea of the match I’m doing between sniffing here and tasting there,’ she told Étienne de Swardt. Using food notes may have also been a way for Mathilde, who discovered the olfactory world with her amateur-chef father, to sneak something of her own biography into a scent where she’d been given such a free hand … After all, she and the actor, born Katherine Matilda Swinton, share practically the same first name: another reflection in the mirror.
Swinton followed the development process closely over a dozen sessions, never missing an appointment and playing the game with utmost seriousness. She appropriated Mathilde’s proposal so fully she once had to call her to get a fresh batch of one of the mods: she’d worn it all. She was also the one to find the name, taken from the title of her favourite poem. She suggested it to Mathilde and Étienne when they came to pick her up at the train station. ‘That’s also when she said that the scent made her think of sex in the afternoon, in her own bed,’ Mathilde recalls. Developing Like This, she says, was a happy experience: no hitches, no glitches.
‘It’s very different from the way we usually work. She trusted me. She never poked her nose into the formula. I’d rather that than someone who tries to understand everything and understands nothing … It was real perfumery.’
* * *
If I’d been looking for a reflection of my own experience developing Duende as seen through a perfumer’s eyes, I’m not sure I’ve found it. Clearly Tilda Swinton, while eminently sensitive to smells and possessed of impeccable taste, was not enough of a perfume nut to delve into the technical details. The dynamics might also be different between two women. I need a second opinion, and I know just where to get it.
The socialite, heiress and fashion muse Daphne Guinness has stated in interviews that not only did she make up her own perfume blends, but that she used to extract the smell of tuberoses herself in a DIY version of enfleurage: ‘I would collect them and put them all on greaseproof paper with a kind of gel, and then you leave it for a few days. Then you’d scrape off the gel and have a sort of essence…’ Therefore, she is clearly one of us, only more chic, richer and more famous: enough to commandeer one of the edgiest perfume brands in the world and the talent of one of Givaudan’s top perfumers.
With his mess of blond corkscrew curls and leather jacket, Antoine Lie could be cast as a cool sexy streetwise cop in an existentialist French détective movie. Though he seems much too mild-mannered to play tough, I suspect he’s got the kind of quiet authority that wouldn’t require raising one’s voice. Nevertheless, when I meet him in Givaudan’s sleekly designed offices near the Arc de Triomphe, it is with the vague hope that the spectacular Ms Guinness has turned out to be more of a handful for ‘her’ perfumer than I’ve ever been with ‘mine’. Antoine admits he wondered what he was in for. After Comme des Garçon’s Christian Astuguevieille had offered him the job, he’d Googled Daphne and, judging from her flamboyant sartorial options, had expected a forceful, eccentric lady.
‘But in fact she was quite subdued. She was entering a world she didn’t know at all. She wanted to learn about it, and she was very respectful of the perfumer’s work.’
Daphne had already sent over the two 80s scents she had blended to create her own signature fragrance, one based on tuberose, the other on patchouli. She wanted something along those lines, but which would be uniquely hers. Antoine liked the idea of working on a single person’s specifications, just like perfumers used to do in the era of classic perfumery; of composing a bespoke perfume that would be commercialized. He couldn’t envision himself doing it for just one person, but with something that was meant to come out, he felt he’d be more in control. What’s more, Daphne’s templates appealed to him: he started out as a perfumer in the 80s and he relished the perspective of revisiting the rich materials and sensuous notes of the era, a welcome change from the panel-tested products he worked on for the mainstream.
Just as Mathilde with Tilda, their first session was focused on raw materials, to find out which ones Daphne preferred. Patchouli and tuberose: confirmed. She didn’t like spices much, but amber and oud conjured memories of her trips to the Orient. Incense she fell in love with during that session, he believes, though Daphne has spoken in interviews of her memories of High Church Masses. But, unlike Tilda, Daphne didn’t talk much about her life during that meeting.
‘She spoke about her olfactory memories, but mostly she focused on the materials,’ explains Antoine.
From what was a very clear initial proposal, he set out to build a fragrance based on overdoses of the main notes, treated as blocks that could be perceived throughout the development rather than as a fluidly evolving scent with small facets, a construction Daphne agreed to. The result is a lush, broad-stroked descendent of 80s floral powerhouses like Poison. I suggest this to Antoine, who hadn’t thought of it but doesn’t deny it: if Poison was, he suggests, ‘Fracas meets Shalimar’, Daphne could be thought of as ‘Fracas goes to India’. I also pick up a rich-bohemian-at-the-beach, tanning-lotion vibe – a result of tuberose’s coconut facets combined with salicylates and amber. Antoine explains – that quite matches Daphne’s childhood memories of her hippie-chic summers at Cadaquès.
But my hopes of finding a more persnickety muse than myself are dashed: the development took all of two face-to-face appointments, two or three waves of mods and the addition of a bitter orange top note to liven up the blend before Daphne-the-muse was happy with Daphne-the-perfume.
‘She figured if Christian had given me the job,’ says Antoine, ‘then she could trust me.’
So much for finding a mirror that can catch the reflection of a muse to meld with mine … Tilda Swinton and Daphne Guinness may have infused their perfumes with their personal tastes, followed their development, inspired the perfumers they worked with to go where they wouldn’t have gone otherwise, but their stories aren’t my story. And it’s not because I’m not famous. Perfume is immediate and intimate; it is blind to limelight. In confronting themselves with it, they had to shed their public personas, so that, whatever they put of themselves in those bottles, it goes beyond image. That is why we can be touched by Like This or Daphne, make them ours, even without knowing the women who lent their image to them. But also why, however many questions I ask, I’ll never know the truth of the story behind each, the unspoken secrets that were told through scent. At least, not beyond the word that struck me. It came up both times.
The word is trust.