Perfume Diary: On Washington Square (RS)

Vilhelm Parfumerie, Fleur Burlesque 

Last week, I went to a book party that felt straight out of 2005. Or maybe it was 1995. I got here in the mid-oughts so that’s as far back as my reference points go, but there was something about this party that felt like it pre-dated me, like it was the set of a Nora Ephron movie, like there was an obnoxious man waiting to scoop up the caviar that was meant as a garnish and pretentiously expound on the nature of capitalism while chewing with his mouth open. It was held in a brownstone on Washington Square Park, which, even by New York City standards, is opulent beyond what really anyone should own. There was a grand piano in the drawing room (this place had a drawing room!) and it was IN USE; a man was sitting there for hours playing through the Sondheim catalog as a tribute to the Broadway singer Elaine Stritch (the party was for a biography of her). I tell you this not as a way to talk about enchanted evenings -- and really, this one was the rarest of rare; far more common are nights where we sit on the couch and eat turkey chili and watch Friends re-runs -- but because I needed to set the scene for a perfume encounter. 

I was standing next to an elegant brunette woman in line for the bar (yes, this was the sort of party with a bar) and I smelled little puffs of scent coming off of her as she swished her pashmina around, a scent I had not thought about for years. All of a sudden, in the middle of this party, in a house that looked like it once belonged to a woman who wore peacock fascinators and that Henry James would have written something absolutely devastating about, I felt the spirit of my late grandmother Estelle pass through me as if she was my plus one for the night. She did love a fancy shindig. Would not have been too much of a stretch. In any case, right after I recovered from the cold chill of a ghost moving through my cheekbones, I tapped the woman on the shoulder and told her I absolutely must know what she is wearing. I almost never do this, at least not to people older than I am; it’s intimate and invasive, and also a lot of women of a certain age will straight up lie to your face because they don’t want to give away their secrets. It rarely yields the result you want. But in this case, in this setting, after a few glasses of cava, I just had to know. And also, Estelle was there guiding my pointer finger, and she could be excessively pushy. 

The woman, who turned out to be a senior editor at a publishing house, told me that she was wearing Fleur Burlesque by Vilhem Parfumerie, a fact that shocked me as Vilhelm is really only a few years old. It was launched by Jan Ahlgren, a Swedish former male model who started a line of leather handbags (because what else do you do when you’ve been professionally hot for years) and commissioned a few custom scents from Jerome Epinette to spray inside his bags for some extra flair. The perfume business overtook the leather business eventually, and soon Ahlgren had a full line. As far as new houses go, Vilhelm is remarkably consistent and surprising. I’ve loved a LOT of their scents: the woody, masculine Morning Chess, which smells like new driving gloves and a sprig of parsley, The Oud Affair, which is milky and soft like kitten fur, and A Lilac A Day, one of the only fragrances I’ve found that even approaches the smell of fresh lilacs (a flower that is legendarily un-distillable and therefore chemists have to recreate it entirely from scratch). But I’d not investigated Fleur Burlesque as I tend to feel like florals are where creativity goes to take a cat nap. And it’s true, there’s not a lot of exciting news in floral perfumes, not since Carnal Flower came out and now every elevator at Saks smells like it now. Houses have to provide florals, of course: there’s a rose, and a jasmine, and a soft vanillic muguet. But they tend to put the weird shit, the deviant thinking, into their leathers and greens and dank animalics. The customer who wants to smell like a rose, they think, is a fixed entity. She conjures a flower in her mind, and wants it to appear on a test strip. It’s linear and less fluid than other categories, which is why I tend to be less curious about it.

And yet! Fleur Burlesque! It does not smell like any other floral on the market, at least that I know of. It only smells like my grandmother’s perfume, which I have to divulge to you was a rare department store vintage and no longer exists and so you cannot buy it. But you can buy this. It’s HEADY. It smells like if jasmine took a bath in coconut milk and then rolled around in dried red pepper, the kind you sprinkle onto oily pizza slices. It’s hot and sweet, like Mexican hot chocolate. It’s a flower dancing through fire. It also smells as old as time; there’s an almost curdled, mothball scent to its base, like the scent has been sitting out oxidizing on a vanity for decades. I know that sounds hideous, but trust me when I tell you it’s so so faint, and only there if you want it to be. It’s really only there if you imagine hugging your grandmother while you inhale this, and if you choose to think of something else, you won’t notice that it’s gone off ever so slightly. It will just smell girded to you, underwritten by something solid. It’s a gorgeous scent, and I rarely say this anymore. It exists just to be beautiful. It sits on your skin like a brownstone on the park; expensive and perhaps unattainable. But oh, how it glows from the street.