01/30/2021
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Serge Lutens Search
For this commentary, I use a text written by Serge Lutens himself for underpinning and explanation. It is entitled "Monde arabe" and can be found in the book "Les Parfumeurs: Dans l'intimité de grands créateurs de parfum", Harper-Collins, 2018.
Unfortunately, since no German translation is available yet, I'm doing the job myself. Here I am largely dispensing with the original quotations in French, because this would make the commentary unnecessarily cumbersome. Anyone who understands French and is interested in perfume should pick up the above book. It is a fantastic source of first-hand information. This is because it is not narrated by a blogger or conjectured by a perfume critic, it is always the perfumer himself/herself speaking.
I don't know what facts of Lutens' life you already know, so forgive me if I bore you with some biographical info that was new to me personally. Because, in fact, I didn't know that Lutens grew up in Lille in the north of France and had his first experience with the world of cosmetics in a hair salon, picking up hairpins off the floor and sweeping them. He does not reveal in his text how he then came from Lille to Dior in 1968. In 1980 he joined Shiseido as stylist and make-up director. There he designed flacons, later he was sent to Firmenich for further training, where he received a perfumery education that still enables him to create perfumes today. In the 90s there was a crisis between Shiseido and Lutens. He left the group.
In 2000, he opened his own perfume house, the Palais-Royal in Paris.
"Today we count 80 different fragrances among our collection, most but not all of them developed by me together with Christopher Sheldrake, with whom I collaborate during every single stage of the production...sometimes for years. It took us 12 years to make 'Chene,' for example." (p.135)
How long Sheldrake and Lutens sat on "Bourreau des Fleurs" I don't know.
The pyramid initially suggests a simple fragrance. Only three ingredients are mentioned.
That's a good thing I like it when perfume houses do without to come up with extensive information about the ingredients, because then we, the critics (whether professionals or amateur critics like me) can no longer practice in working off and rehearsing the pyramid, but must align our texts differently.
"Bourreau des Fleurs" is a multi-layered, spicy fragrance that leads back to its roots, which Lutens himself describes as an "imaginary landscape in which he spins in circles." At the heart of his work, he places an examination of "the woman" par excellence:
"All these women are the woman, my invented woman, magical, with magical powers. One might think that my imaginary landscape is going round in circles. For the contempt I take revenge. I take revenge on women. I take revenge on the woman herself. My life is a story of revenge. I am the mistake. I make up for it and I make it worse. Because you can't make up for something without making it worse. I love, I seduce, and at the same time I hate and destroy. Without this violence there is no creation." (p.130)
In "BdF", one senses an almost magical herbal hexenaura at the beginning, a brew of various spices already familiar from other creations by the Lutens/Sheldrake duo.
Something "Ambre Sultan" flashes, a little piece of Marrakech, a place that has great significance for Lutens, since his ethnic roots are there, although he grew up in Lille.
"When I discovered Morocco, I knew that the Arab world had not yet been embraced by French society. Hence my choice. To return. To stay.
I was in permanent contradiction with French society and the violence of this new world I discovered suited me. And I haven't changed. I still find myself in contradiction. So I'm still here. That justifies my loneliness, first in Paris, then here, in Marrakech." (p.132)
The licorice herbal spice potion gives way in the heart to a note that I personally usually find problematic in perfumes, but which seems masterfully crafted in "BdF". It is the strawflower.
"If you manage to get past your initial disgust, then things get very interesting. Disgust plays a big part in my way of conceiving the story of a fragrance. The disgust and the words." (p. 131)
"A perfume isn't a single smell after all, it's not a vanilla cake, it's a whole cosmos. That is literature then!"
Just like a literary text, Lutens sees perfume as a fundamental means of artistic expression.
"My intention is to touch people. If perfumery didn't touch anyone, it would be completely uninteresting." (p. 136)
"I'm not interested in happiness. When I open a book about happiness, I close it very quickly. It bores me. I'm not interested in happiness. What I'm interested in is the process of creating. Creating something." (S.137).
The strawflower is called "Immortelle" in French, meaning the immortal. In "BdF" it possibly refers to Lutens' mother, whose first name was Fleurisse. For him, the mother remains a person he could never grasp.
"The psychoanalysts....they've all gone mad because I can't get better. It's impossible. I need this image of a woman who replaced my mother in the beginning...without a woman, I croak."
Maybe that's why the strawflower seems so soft and homey to me, so fitting in "BdF".
But it weakens toward the end, giving way to a light kitchen smell that reminds me not of charred wood but of an oriental stew with herbs.
The flowers, in my perception, were not trampled or broken (as the name suggests), but slowly cooked.
"I need this permanent image of a woman and I keep reinventing it with every perfume and with every name I choose. The names of the perfumes of my house perpetuate a dialogue with this woman...Death is very present in our conversation, but it never has a sad aspect."
Lutens ends his text with a poem, which I quote in the original French text:
La mort, c'est gai, la mort,
c'est aussi une femme.
Une femme qui vient me dire bonjour.
Elle est tres élégante.
Elle est immortelle.
Elle a de beaux jours devant elle.
And now a discussion from a feminist point of view would certainly not be unexciting.... - rarely has a perfumer so clearly and openly declared his basic theme: "Cherchez la femme!"
Unfortunately, since no German translation is available yet, I'm doing the job myself. Here I am largely dispensing with the original quotations in French, because this would make the commentary unnecessarily cumbersome. Anyone who understands French and is interested in perfume should pick up the above book. It is a fantastic source of first-hand information. This is because it is not narrated by a blogger or conjectured by a perfume critic, it is always the perfumer himself/herself speaking.
I don't know what facts of Lutens' life you already know, so forgive me if I bore you with some biographical info that was new to me personally. Because, in fact, I didn't know that Lutens grew up in Lille in the north of France and had his first experience with the world of cosmetics in a hair salon, picking up hairpins off the floor and sweeping them. He does not reveal in his text how he then came from Lille to Dior in 1968. In 1980 he joined Shiseido as stylist and make-up director. There he designed flacons, later he was sent to Firmenich for further training, where he received a perfumery education that still enables him to create perfumes today. In the 90s there was a crisis between Shiseido and Lutens. He left the group.
In 2000, he opened his own perfume house, the Palais-Royal in Paris.
"Today we count 80 different fragrances among our collection, most but not all of them developed by me together with Christopher Sheldrake, with whom I collaborate during every single stage of the production...sometimes for years. It took us 12 years to make 'Chene,' for example." (p.135)
How long Sheldrake and Lutens sat on "Bourreau des Fleurs" I don't know.
The pyramid initially suggests a simple fragrance. Only three ingredients are mentioned.
That's a good thing I like it when perfume houses do without to come up with extensive information about the ingredients, because then we, the critics (whether professionals or amateur critics like me) can no longer practice in working off and rehearsing the pyramid, but must align our texts differently.
"Bourreau des Fleurs" is a multi-layered, spicy fragrance that leads back to its roots, which Lutens himself describes as an "imaginary landscape in which he spins in circles." At the heart of his work, he places an examination of "the woman" par excellence:
"All these women are the woman, my invented woman, magical, with magical powers. One might think that my imaginary landscape is going round in circles. For the contempt I take revenge. I take revenge on women. I take revenge on the woman herself. My life is a story of revenge. I am the mistake. I make up for it and I make it worse. Because you can't make up for something without making it worse. I love, I seduce, and at the same time I hate and destroy. Without this violence there is no creation." (p.130)
In "BdF", one senses an almost magical herbal hexenaura at the beginning, a brew of various spices already familiar from other creations by the Lutens/Sheldrake duo.
Something "Ambre Sultan" flashes, a little piece of Marrakech, a place that has great significance for Lutens, since his ethnic roots are there, although he grew up in Lille.
"When I discovered Morocco, I knew that the Arab world had not yet been embraced by French society. Hence my choice. To return. To stay.
I was in permanent contradiction with French society and the violence of this new world I discovered suited me. And I haven't changed. I still find myself in contradiction. So I'm still here. That justifies my loneliness, first in Paris, then here, in Marrakech." (p.132)
The licorice herbal spice potion gives way in the heart to a note that I personally usually find problematic in perfumes, but which seems masterfully crafted in "BdF". It is the strawflower.
"If you manage to get past your initial disgust, then things get very interesting. Disgust plays a big part in my way of conceiving the story of a fragrance. The disgust and the words." (p. 131)
"A perfume isn't a single smell after all, it's not a vanilla cake, it's a whole cosmos. That is literature then!"
Just like a literary text, Lutens sees perfume as a fundamental means of artistic expression.
"My intention is to touch people. If perfumery didn't touch anyone, it would be completely uninteresting." (p. 136)
"I'm not interested in happiness. When I open a book about happiness, I close it very quickly. It bores me. I'm not interested in happiness. What I'm interested in is the process of creating. Creating something." (S.137).
The strawflower is called "Immortelle" in French, meaning the immortal. In "BdF" it possibly refers to Lutens' mother, whose first name was Fleurisse. For him, the mother remains a person he could never grasp.
"The psychoanalysts....they've all gone mad because I can't get better. It's impossible. I need this image of a woman who replaced my mother in the beginning...without a woman, I croak."
Maybe that's why the strawflower seems so soft and homey to me, so fitting in "BdF".
But it weakens toward the end, giving way to a light kitchen smell that reminds me not of charred wood but of an oriental stew with herbs.
The flowers, in my perception, were not trampled or broken (as the name suggests), but slowly cooked.
"I need this permanent image of a woman and I keep reinventing it with every perfume and with every name I choose. The names of the perfumes of my house perpetuate a dialogue with this woman...Death is very present in our conversation, but it never has a sad aspect."
Lutens ends his text with a poem, which I quote in the original French text:
La mort, c'est gai, la mort,
c'est aussi une femme.
Une femme qui vient me dire bonjour.
Elle est tres élégante.
Elle est immortelle.
Elle a de beaux jours devant elle.
And now a discussion from a feminist point of view would certainly not be unexciting.... - rarely has a perfumer so clearly and openly declared his basic theme: "Cherchez la femme!"
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