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04/14/2021
FioreMarina
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Summer Of 1908 Or: Granny Was A Wild Girl
I would like to say a few words on the subject of grandmother scent. Perhaps because I adore violets so much that it makes me quite fuchtig if one does them wrong. Maybe because I have a general suspicion of grandmothers, behind the dignity of age, having a few stories in store that would make our mouths drop open. Maybe because I believe that sometimes there's nothing wilder, nothing wackier or more visionary than wearing a true grandmother scent: one like Après L'Ondée.
To that end, I'm going to take you on a little trip back in time. To Vienna, if you don't mind. It's the summer of 1908, and like a storm, a new era is brewing. Siegmund Freud causes a furore with his psychoanalysis and snubs the world by explaining that it thinks of only one thing day and night. People are outraged. And beats down his doors.
Behind the Naschmarkt, a couple of young artists clean up the rancor of the fin de siècle, and Gustav Klimt paints eternal love into a golden frenzy on the knife's edge in his kiss.
A few streets away, a confused guy sells postcards. He lives in a homeless shelter for men and dreams of becoming famous as a painter. A few years later, he becomes so as a politician - and makes humanity look into its darkest abyss.
And a young woman chases her husband's mistress out of a suite of the noble Hotel Sacher with great publicity, in order to then - deaf to the pleas of her squirming husband - throw her clothes down one by one from the window onto the street. It is not certain whether Freud observed the scene and was enlightened by it to write a treatise on hysteria, or whether the passing Klimt was inspired by the sight of the beautiful sinner in the street to create one of his defoliated canvas beauties.
It is pretty well known, however, that this incident made a lasting impression on the husband and brought his irate wife a reconciliatory gift in the form of a ruinously expensive necklace. I must know this, for I know the necklace; my mother has often shown it to me: The revenge goddess of the Hotel Sacher was my great-grandmother.
When I look at her in the faded black and white photograph, I mean to see the storm gathering in her bright eyes. I feel as if at any moment it could tug at her white long dress, blow the artfully coiffed strands of blonde hair into the narrow face from which the photographer has been unable to wring a smile. As if this storm could at any moment take hold of her whole figure, her whole being, and she was not yet decided whether to withstand it, whether to let it blow her away, or whether to drive it on.
I don't know if my great-grandmother wore Après l'Ondée, but actually, she must have: The fragrance is made for women with fiercely free souls like hers.
I learn that it essentially owes its character to an artificially synthesized aldehyde. And yet Après l'Ondée is exactly not that: artificial. On the contrary, it has an unrelated clear, fresh, somehow unadorned character: the world after a thundershower, the heat has cooled, the wind drives the clouds before the clear sky, the air seems more transparent than usual, the colors wilder, more intense. We breathe in and immediately take in the scent of violets, those unimpressed resisters to any kind of climatic imposition. This time there is no lipstick sweetness, no forget-me-not blue frippery, but a violet in its wild beauty. A little lavender adds brittle spice, and a hint - but really just a tiny hint - of sweetness probably comes from that hawthorn mimosa thing with the unpronounceable name. The violet remains steadfast over time, the scent developing a vibrant, cool rainfall elegance, that may come from the lilies and the orchids. But it never becomes, despite the floral preponderance, an over-flowering miscellany, and even the (hiss)musk fails to soften the picture. Après l'Ondée is after the rainstorm, but in the midst of the storm, and there it remains to underscore the clarity, the courage, the determination of its wearer. Yes, Après l'Ondée is a fragrance of its time. And it is radically timeless. It takes my heart in its hands and carries it away while I wear it I look into the bright eyes of my great-grandmother's image and wonder which of the fragrances of our time will one day be able to make such a claim. Because you know one thing:
It's spring 2021 and like a storm, a new time is coming. We know it, but we don't know: are we in its eye? Or has it just begun? What will my great-granddaughter say one day, about me and my time? And: will there be a scent that bridges from her to me? One like Après l'Ondée?
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