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Notes10/15/2021
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Works like a medicine, behaves like a drug # 3
Spice' or 'melange' is the name of the mind-expanding drug that Frank Herbert's Dune is all about. When Rei Kawakubo smelled a second attempt by the young Mark Buxton, then working for Symrise's predecessor, sometime before 1994 AD, she is said to have said that it smelled like a drug. Although this design, which was apparently hastily dismissed by many colleagues as an accord and not worthy of the full score a perfume probably required at the time, was to be followed by some 90 modifications, Kawakubo insisted on the design, which was released shortly thereafter as Comme des Garçons Eau de Parfum 1994. An advertising campaign, headlined 'A perfume that works like a medicine and behaves like a drug' showed a moth highly concentrated snacking on an orchid in Madagascar. How apt. Buxton's name will always remain for me in the association of the fragrances he designed, starting from this one, for Comme des Garçons. One of the great things about the first eau de parfum was that it didn't use too obvious 90's Japonisms. Although the ingredients could just as easily be located elsewhere, Kenzo's pour Homme or Issey Miyake's first L'eaux played with a Western staging of all kinds of projections of what could be Japanese. The perfume is spicy - spice pure. Mark Buxton is said to have designed it shortly after a sojourn in Morocco, but largely and without any clear amber or labdanum skillfully abstains from too clear an attribution to the Monde Arabe, such as Lutens proposed to a drumbeat the year before. At Buxton, this was to follow in 2002 with Series 3: Incense - Ouarzazate. Apart from Caron's Poivre (1954) and Cacharel's Pour Homme (1981), Lorenzo Villoresi's Spezie, also from 1994 offers an interesting parallel. I preferred the lighter cologne version to the eau de parfum for years, but there's another from Buxton that impressed me at least as much: Comme des Garçons 3.
Leaning farthest out of the spice, wood, incense framework that has characterized many releases over the years in varying intensities, 3 is vegetal, herbal, and ultra-green. Bitter angelica, basil and redcurrant dominate, Buxton, who likes to talk about his fondness for smells from his parents' kitchens, has resorted more to fresh leaves than dry spice here. 3 was advertised as an imaginary flower, a new kind of rose: incandescent, iridescent, electrifying. That's all true; rose here I'd see at most as a green, tart immature rosebud, at least as far abstracted as the recent geranium bristling roses in Rose et Cuir or the geranium modulation from Jardin du Nil. 3 is slow to develop, and always stays close to the botanical, vétiver and cedarwood taking over later, there are moments here where 3 seems smooth as a slightly eccentric vétiver, the dry woody note that should also often follow in Comme des Garçons is highly delicately elaborated. Much like the first eau de parfum, 3 has aged well. Available for almost 20 years, it still seems, just by virtue of its distance from everything sometimes described as Comme des Garçons Parfum's DNA, solitary and unexciting. In the current discourse on new 'green' fragrances, an important, quiet voice.
Leaning farthest out of the spice, wood, incense framework that has characterized many releases over the years in varying intensities, 3 is vegetal, herbal, and ultra-green. Bitter angelica, basil and redcurrant dominate, Buxton, who likes to talk about his fondness for smells from his parents' kitchens, has resorted more to fresh leaves than dry spice here. 3 was advertised as an imaginary flower, a new kind of rose: incandescent, iridescent, electrifying. That's all true; rose here I'd see at most as a green, tart immature rosebud, at least as far abstracted as the recent geranium bristling roses in Rose et Cuir or the geranium modulation from Jardin du Nil. 3 is slow to develop, and always stays close to the botanical, vétiver and cedarwood taking over later, there are moments here where 3 seems smooth as a slightly eccentric vétiver, the dry woody note that should also often follow in Comme des Garçons is highly delicately elaborated. Much like the first eau de parfum, 3 has aged well. Available for almost 20 years, it still seems, just by virtue of its distance from everything sometimes described as Comme des Garçons Parfum's DNA, solitary and unexciting. In the current discourse on new 'green' fragrances, an important, quiet voice.
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