Cuiron Helmut Lang 2014

Helmut Lang makes art, in both clothes and fragrance. Almost every photograph on the website could hang in a museum. The clothes are funky gorgeousness. So is this perfume. Brought back this year with two others originally introduced in the early 2000's, Cuiron immediately delighted my nose and went onto my wish list, where it won't linger. I suppose I smell its leather and suede notes, the mandarin, too, but soon the notes combine to just say, "Wear me, I am beautiful." It's the kind of fragrance I imagine the fashion icon Marlene Dietrich would have worn. She was art, too, in both speech and appearance. Maybe Marlene, a staunchly anti-Nazi German, inspired neighboring Austrian Lang about how to make art out of a life. I wouldn't be surprised. She was a movie star and cabaret artist, who privately engaged in both short and long-terms affairs with the famous of her day while happily maintaining her husband and his mistress. All this behind a mask of alluring, inscrutable femininity. Life as art, perfume as art. Lang sold 51% of his company to Prada, retired from fashion in 2005 and (no surprise) had his first solo art exhibition in 2008. The sillage isn't super strong, but inscrutability doesn't demand it. Get close, though, and you're sunk.