I am a member of that vast consumer monolith fragrance industries throw their wares at. I wear body splashes, but adore eau de parfum's and toilette's. I cannot be alone in this, nor could I be the only one to have delved into history to claim some pretty special finds. There's something about a perfume from halcyon days that is just so ineffably glamorous-a certain savoir faire that I miss in the scents of today. Don't misunderstand me; I wear Emma Watson's Midnight Rose (released in 2011 for Lancome) all the time. It's only that the story that Midnight Rose tells has had far less time to evolve and grow than the story told by, say, Cuir de Russe (Chanel). Sadly, I have only ever owned a smidgeon of the stuff, and it's long since gone. It's just so interesting to hold in your hands something formulated in a different era, that speaks a different language, and who bats its wily eyelashes at a different class of people. The country, the region, the type of perfume, the year it was made all translates into the pale golden liquid we dab on our pulse points.
I wanted specifically to talk about F. Millot's Crepe de Chine. Sadly, the original has been discontinued years ago,with the exception of the vintage mints floating around somewhere. You could probably hunt one up on Ebay or something, but I'll warn you right now that it'll be mad expensive, not to mention risky. Luckily, there is this wonderful house (perfume brands are usually referred to as "houses") called "Long Lost Perfumes". It is wholly dedicated to replicated vintage perfumes that are no longer with us. It has in its collection Crepe de Chine, My Sin, Bakir, and Ecussion, just to name a few. I plan on getting a couple more, too. Anyways, it's impossible and even ridiculous to expect them to smell the same as, or as evocative as their namesakes, but it's definitely something that I believe is worth owning. For my sixteenth birthday, my darling mother bought me Crepe de Chine, as well as Elizabeth Taylor's Diamonds and Emeralds.
I like to think of perfumes like these-you know, the older classics-as something akin to a very fine wine. It's an acquired taste, if you will. My first impression of Crepe de Chine was that it smelled all musty and grandmother-y. It was too sharp, too powdery, too strong. I was infuriated to think that I might possibly despise it! So I sprayed it every night and forced myself to smell it, thinking that I might grow to like it. Well, I did, and I'm glad, because it's opened my eyes (or my nostrils?) to a wide range of other older scents. To give you an idea of how old this formulation is, C.d.C was release in 1925. Obviously living now means that a chypre like this would seem foreign to me. But, as Yesterday's Perfume points out," Smelling Crepe de Chine is like meeting a beautiful, funny woman with a Ph.D in linguistics who also happens to speak seven languages, knows how to cook, has a way with children and small animals, composes haunting tunes on the guitar, and smiles at everyone."
That's exactly right. When I smell it and close my eyes, I picture someone like the elegantly defiant flapper, Louise Brooks. I see her in her dressing room between filming, sitting at her vanity before an art deco mirror lit by bare yellow bulbs. I see her adjusting her slip beneath her sheer dress, smoothing down her inky hair, and gazing complacently at her reflection from heavily lidded eyes. All this while smoking a cigarette (how scandalous!) and drinking a mint julep (THE quintessential drink of the jazz age, even with Prohibition). Just before Louise leaves to finish her last take, almost as an afterthought, she reaches our and takes up a sparkling bottle filled with a clear, honey colored liquid. It's paper label reads:" Francis Millot. Crepe de Chine. 1925" She unstoppers the bottle and dabs the glass applicator behind one ear, just where her bluntly shorn hair meets her earlobe, and then behind the other. When she leaves, pearls dangling insolently, she leaves a trail of lilac and patchouli.
Oh, how I love the Roaring Twenties!
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| Louise Brooks |
“Most beautiful dumb girls think they are smart and get away with it, because other people, on the whole, aren't much smarter.”
“The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body, but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.”
“If I ever bore you, it'll be with a knife.”
“A well dressed woman, even though her purse is painfully empty, can conquer the world.”
~Louise Brooks~
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