The Nose Knows
In which I am charmed by a classic french fashion house and a movie star, not in that order. And the usual other delights!
So, look, sometimes I take too long to write one of these and the longer I wait the harder it is to start, because nothing feels important enough to break the silence, because silence can be such a blessing these very loud days, where it feels like everywhere you turn someone is caterwauling for your time, money, or attention. And then I have a fun sit down with someone terribly interesting, or something I worked on comes out, and I join the clamoring chorus. So here I am: clamoring!
I sat down for excellent martinis with Florence Pugh (above) a few weeks ago. She was a total joy and delight and I clearly wasn’t the only one who thought so, as evidenced by the some of the friendliest restaurant service I’m ever likely to witness. It’s always funny who people get excited over, especially in a “cool” restaurant—it’s not always who you’d think! The shoot, at Tony Duquette’s iconic LA estate, Dawnridge, is also pretty glorious. Anyway, come for the stories about walking off of the world’s second tallest building nine times, stay for the insights on fame, the feeling when Hollywood decides you can do whatever you want, and the freakshow that is the red carpet as someone who got into this business to, you know, act. (WhoWhatWear).
AND NOW, A MOMENT WITH CHANEL:
Olivier Polge is Chanel’s house perfumer, otherwise known as a Nose. His father was Chanel’s house perfumer, too. This is not always the case, “noses” running in families, but it’s not uncommon, either. Part of this, Polge says, is due to his growing up in Grasse, where perfume is from, and where, as he says, “you cannot not know about perfumes.” (But “I don’t know,” he told me with typical humility, “sometimes I wonder if I lack imagination.”) Polge was in Los Angeles to celebrate the launch of Chanel’s newest addition to the Chance family, Chance Eau Splendide, and took the time to patiently explain to me a little about how it all works, as much as anyone can explain perfume, which is of course, a temporal and deeply subjective art as much as it is a science.
“When I speak about perfumes, I'm always hesitating,” Polge told me when I sat down with him in Beverly Hills.1 “There is always a certain level of complexity and the nuances are things on which I can build so many different fragrances, but I don't know if I should go towards those type of explanations or the opposite, which is as true as the opposite. At the end of the day, the contact and the bond we have to create with the scent has to be very simple.” Meaning, of course, that like that old maxim about writing about music, talking about fragrance is like dancing about architecture. At the end all that matters is the truly subjective: people have to love the way it smells.
Polge studied for five years before becoming a nose, focusing mostly on learning how to smell, rather than relying on any inherited olfactive talent. “I'm not sure that I can smell better than you can,” he said2. “It's more training your memory. I'm sure we all have a very good nose, but unconsciously—I'm sure you experience this situation where all of a sudden you smell something that you didn't smell for a decade, and you realize that you have it in the back of your mind. Training to become a perfumer is more about getting conscious, and rediscovering all the library of scent that you have stored somewhere in your mind. Once you do that you become more conscious about all the scents that surround you. Then you learn exactly what are the tools you can play with, the materials themselves. And then you learn how they combine to each other. And you realize that you have certain scents that will bloom right away, but maybe fade very quickly. Certain ones that you barely smell but when you come back a couple of hours later it smells a lot, and there is a temporality in that sent.” Applying perfume to pulse points, places of higher body heat, helps magnify the effect: “It’s what makes perfume come alive.” (The preternaturally quotable Gabrielle Chanel always said to put perfume where you want to be kissed. I swear the woman thought in slogans.)
Eau Splendide builds off the previous Chance editions—“there is a common spirit, or state of mind,” Polge says, which I would define as feminine and optimistic—but he began it in the opposite way that he usually would, building out from the top note (raspberry) first, adding notes of fresh, herbal geranium, and a soft, clean cedar as the base. “Something I really like in perfume,” Polge told me, “is this opposition between something completely immaterial, that is the scent that we smell during the day, and the very down-to-earth making of a perfume, which at the end of the day puts you in relationship with farmers that grow in very specific soil, climate, and even techniques that might have an effect on the scent, because in the end, the result is what is important. I like that it touches opposites.”
Gabrielle Chanel was the first fashion designer to create a perfume, he reminded me. She did not approach it as a perfumer might, trying to build from an existing fragrance like jasmine or rose. She wanted something specifically hers from the start, “something much more abstract.” He describes the Chanel view as taking raw natural materials and “cutting them into pieces” to make them something uniquely theirs, to exaggerate one aspect, or exclude another. For example, his favorite ingredient is iris, which is both painstaking to produce, not exactly natural—the fragrance is not from the (largely odorless) flower, but produced from drying the roots of the plant, which takes around six years start to finish—and hard to pin down. “It is difficult to qualify. It's slightly floral, powdery, woody at the same time. Often it often has a discrete role in a perfume,” he said. “It's very rare that you have perfume where you can clearly identify iris, but it plays a very, very important role.” In a world where everything is increasingly available and classifiable, this made me want to start wearing iris fragrances immediately, even though I had no real notion of one.
For the record, Polge says to take your time when trying a new fragrance. “In a perfect world, you’d have two days” to test out something new, he says. Only you can know how you like the way something wears on your skin, and time is as big a factor as anything.
If he wasn’t a nose, Polge said he’d like to be a musician. There are the obvious comparisons: the interplay of notes, the instinctively emotive quality. “Also both are completely immaterial. They flow in the air without you being able to see it,” he said. “This is also one of the ways I try to explain why I became a perfumer. I think that probably both must speak to the same side of your sensibility.”
Olivier Polge’s Top Chanel Fragrances (Not Made By Olivier Polge3): Chanel No. 19 (“it smells like iris, and is one of the few scents where iris plays a major role”), Chanel No. 5, Allure, Égoïste (“my first perfume I wore as a teenager”).
READING:
Oliver Sacks wrote a beautiful travelogue about flying to see ferns in Oaxaca that I came across while trawling Los Feliz bookstores a few weeks back with a friend. It’s a totally soothing, light escape and a look at the world of people who love ferns (they are apparently legion!). Everytime I read something by Sacks I just think, what a wonderful man. It’s pretty much him and Maurice Sendak I feel like that about. That’s it.
I am very into this excellently written Substack by August Lamm wherein she is undertaking a project to free herself from technology and pursue an otherwise full and meaningful life. (I miss my 2007-era Razr.)
I have been reading about Edith Rockefeller, for reasons that will possibly become clear at a later date, and her Time obituary (headline: “End of a Princess”[!]) is really something:
Edith McCormick fed her guests off Napoleonic gold plate. She brought grand opera to Chicago, spent $5,000,000 keeping it alive. When her eldest son died of scarlet fever she gave the John McCormick Institution for Infectious Diseases. The scarlet fever germ was isolated there. Upon retirement of beauteous Mrs. Potter Palmer, Mrs. McCormick with her $2,000,000 string of pearls became Chicago’s social dictator. Before the opera she served 35-minute dinners, timing each course by a jewelled clock beside her plate, allowing the men ten minutes for coffee & cigars. She opened conversation at her table by asking someone : “What has been interesting you lately?” After the opera she drove home always by the same route. Her chauffeur had police orders never to vary the route and to drive last. She was the first woman in Chicago to wear an anklet.
Her story ends less well (Swiss health spas, an obsession with Jungian analysis, divorce, barnacle-like romantic entanglements with likely charlatans, familial estrangement, etc.):
Back in the Lake Shore mansion, Mrs. McCormick never spent a night out of it until she went to a hospital in 1930. No guest ever spent a night in it. She became more imperious, more eccentric. She practiced astrology, celebrated Christmas on December 15. She believed in reincarnation, decided she had been King Tutankhamen’s child-wife Anknesenpaaten. “Then they opened the mummy chamber and when I saw the pictures of it, I knew. There was my little chair.” She wrote the words to a Love Song Cycle and a play in Italian, collected Persian rugs. She took daily walks, always over the same route. When someone suggested another route she said: “It doesn’t matter. I am not really here.” She developed phobias, kept six detectives in the house. She feared water, seldom bathed. Like Anknesenpaaten, she was not buried. Her body was put in a receiving vault next to that of her son John, which had been there for 31 years, the cemetery people never having had any instructions what to do.
WHAT TO WATCH/LISTEN TO:
Dying for Sex (Hulu) is poignant and raunchy and moving and funny. I found the media push around it annoying at first (true of generally all media pushes!) and so avoided it, but got there eventually and am glad I did, not least because it led me right back to the great Sharon Horgan series Catastrophe (Amazon). Rob Delaney should be in more things. Now we are finally catching up with The Agency (Paramount+) which is diverting, clever, expertly acted. Spies! Romance! Intrigue! Perfect lead into summer. The terrific Panic World podcast explains the internet and what it has wrought better than anything else around these days (and it doesn’t make you want to die). Oh and Wolf Hall is back for season 2. Subscribe to PBS! It is the only streamer I never ever cancel or regret. Remember Mr. Rogers!
TO EAT:
Did you know most soba is not solely buckwheat? I didn’t! Until I had lunch at Sobar in Culver City, which was, unlike many competitors, the real deal, perfectly delicious, and came with a bit of friendly education about the delicious, fresh, chewy noodles we were slurping down. Highly recommend.
Bar Siesta, the new tinned-fish focused boîte from the geniuses behind Botanica, is a total delight. Close your eyes, get some sherry and some perfect small plates, and you feel like you’re in Spain, rather than Silverlake. (This is a very good thing.)
My friend Rachel brought me a gold foil wrapped candy from a company called Oregon Bark. It’s called “Tom Bumble” and I regret to inform you that it’s like an all-natural Butterfinger from heaven, and they sell them online in boxes of 50. Sorry.
I used to have to wait in that mortifying line at Community Goods to get a hojicha latte within reasonable distance. No longer! I have been freed from trying to camoflage myself amongst the hypebeasts complaining about the line while adding to the line (/ filming the line). CAP’s hojicha is delicious, nutty, toasty, organic, perfect, just a smidge of caffeine for those of us trying to get that monkey off our backs. And if you prefer your tea solely herbal and very effective, Dr Stolberg rest and digest tea is the anti-bloat. The bloat antidote? Whatever, it works.
TO OTHERWISE CONSUME:
Holly Tupper of Cultus Artem’s jewelry line is very appealing to me in the way that I’ve always wanted to look like I stepped out of a Klimt painting. Perhaps you will feel the same? Perhaps you’d rather start off with some of her excellent body milks. They bring to mind words like “luscious,” and smell divine.
It has been early spring weather in Los Angeles, warm in the day and thin and cool at night. It’s good weather for great hosiery. Allow me to introduce you to the world’s best: Swedish Stockings.
Merlette makes lovely simple things that are always a little too special to ever seem basic. I am excited to wear this dress this summer, which gives just the right tinge of like, milkmaid of a Grecian isle? Hard to explain, but a very good thing. It’s very gauzy, perfect for summer dinners en plein air somewhere coastal with flat sandals. (If you want to capture this vibe too, I won’t blame you. Use the code ALESSANDRA15 for 15% off.)
Matteau does summer right. This little buttercup yellow linen shift dress from their new Moda collab is perfect for kicking around in the sun.
Otherwise, I have not been shopping too much but I love the fit of these leather pants from Saint Art, which are loose enough for any season and the perfect color, the Abbode embroidered tank I got with my own initials in two pierced hearts (self-love is important), and Nyud’s workout wear, which has mastered the most flattering cut I’ve tried in recent memory. I did also have fun plotting summer party dressing here. (Slam dunks abound—seriously.) Could be helpful if you’ve got wedding guest duties coming up! I can’t stop envisioning places to wear this outfit in July. Or this one, come to think of it…
That’s all for now. Thank you for being here! I hope you’re happy and healthy and smell perfectly wonderful. More soon.
xx ATC
When we met, he had been in L.A. for not very long and had already tried pigs in a blanket and the Hailey Bieber smoothie at Erewhon. This probably says more about Los Angeles than anything.
This was a relief, as I had resisted the urge to ask him if he thinks everyone he encounters (including me, who had walked to the appointment) smells bad. I guess this is a reason to buy good perfume!
This was at his own insistence: “it’s complicated to judge your own work.” He’s not wrong!