“But you, you foolish girl, you have gone home
To a leaky castle across the sea, -
To lie awake in linen smelling of lavender,
And hear the nightingale, and long for me.”
To a leaky castle across the sea, -
To lie awake in linen smelling of lavender,
And hear the nightingale, and long for me.”
Edna St Vincent Millay
For Foxy any launch
by Bogue Profumo and the bearded Maestro Antonio Gardoni is akin to the
completion of a complex and long awaited art installation or the revelation of
a secret building project. All of which is very fitting given Antonio’s day job
as the creative founder of Studio AG an architecture and design studio in
Brescia, Italy where he grew up and went to university. He is currently London-based
but spends a lot of time back and forth to Brescia where he is still a
professor of industrial and interior design.
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| (Image©TSF) |
Everything about
Antonio and Bogue is steeped in alchemical charm. He originally came across a
cache of forty vintage perfumery bases and formulations in the basement of an
Italian property thanks to the timely tip off from an antique dealer. These
redolent recipes had assumed a whiff of dank time and darkness. Antonio
patiently and strategically added modern elements, honing and editing the
results to create workable and intriguing olfaction.
As someone who moulds,
conceptualises and visualises space, Antonio’s journey and approach to perfume
is a little unorthodox to some. His perfumes obey few rules and yet have a
powerful dowager porno ambience, recalling some of the glowering boudoir
wonders of the past whilst as the same time drawing a brutalist line through
these same echoes with the precision of a white-hot laser. I have the astonishing Maai in my collection, a perfume I called the ‘..most
extraordinary of brutal floral constructions …..divine sense of body, genuine
skin, wrapped in indoles and whiffy animalics, a mirror of our own wanton,
hidden desires’ in my review
for Cafleurebon back in January 2015. It
is still one of my favourite pieces I wrote for my friend Michelyn Camen, Editor
in Chief at Cafleurebon.
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| Foxy's Maai.... |
My bottle of Maai smells better and better each time
I inhale its oily sexiness off my skin. The colour darkens in the shadows of my
study. The multitude of resins and flower deaths within the amber liquid make
me giddy when the scent fills the air. The air feels displaced actually momentarily, Maai has that much impact, the notes
spinning like burning dust. I have a 15ml of OE, which I love as well, a strange soapy intensive thing that
hurls its citric herbiness across your skin like an angry fisherman casting for
silvered fish in a mirrored sea.
And Gardelia… sigh… what can I say.. I am
quite obsessed with this extraordinary essay in gardenia egotism. Three types of gardenia absolute make up
nearly 6% of the formula; now this may not sound like much, but in perfumery
terms it is both daring and dangerous making Gardelia at it’s heart a kind of honeyed, indolic bomb. It
penetrates skin and senses slowly like an insistent lover then explodes in a
slo-mo cascade of over fifty ingredients, all them calibrated by Antonio to
ricochet, caress and infiltrate. I only have two treasured samples from Antonio;
Gardelia itself is a pricy limited item,
created specifically for Lia and Giovanni Padovan of Profumeria Sacro Cuore in
Bologna to celebrate their Golden Wedding anniversary, hence the fifty
materials used. Antonio also designed the distinctive blue-shaded flacon topped
off in a unique moulded cap made using the ciré
perdue or lost wax casting process. The design of the flacon was based on a
bottle owned by the Padovans and the tactile cerulean cap resembles a bowl of
fruit and a split oozing pomegranate. Only fifty bottles were made and they retail at €850/£749/$948 so it’s
hardly a cheap buy but limited perfume art like this never is. The attention to
detail, the casing of odour, that hand cast top and the divine, persistent
liquor itself I feel for once, probably justifies the price. I will savour my precious samples until they
run dry and then just remember…
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Now we have MEM, a palindromic name and a scent
theoretically with a cyclical structure. I’m going to just stick a stylish
little pin in that for now above my desk, as I don’t really want to get into a
discussion of that. It’s not really my forte and besides, my repeated wearings
of MEM have demonstrated if anything
a hugely dynamic sense of scene setting, more akin to stage or opera than
perfumery. Antonio has created a perfume
that tells a complex and multi-layered story of a house built for love near
sea, surrounded by purple fire.
MEM
is a roaring lavender thing, an unabashed hymn to one of perfumery’s most
exquisite materials, a note I love and usually find side-lined as vintage old
lady and moth killing. Yet when lavender is correctly adored and surrounded by
notes, accords and mysteries that care and nurture it can burn and buzz, smoulder
and ravish like any rose or jasmine construct. Caron’s Pour Un Homme, Dior’s Eau
Noire and Mon Numéro 4 by
L’Artisan Parfumeur all showcased in very different ways the beauty of
lavender’s aromatic dexterity.
There is a ghostly
vintage bruised mauve in MEM as it slowly settles, nothing dusty and
sachet-like that might suggest said moths or cheap gift shops. Instead Antonio’s four lavenders (lavender,
lavender extract, wild lavender and blue lavender) glow like amethyst fire in
empty flickering rooms. There is
something weirdly animalic in the use of high quality lavender, a certain
verdant herby sweatiness, the body exuding a sheen of grasses, costus, hay and
moist spices. In MEM this is reinforced with the use of civet, castoreum, musks and
Antonio’s beloved indolic heavy breathing of ylang ylang and Champaca.
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| Local street lavender... (image©TSF) |
The unusual and
particular addition of malt is quite noticeable early on; rolling elegantly amid
the geranium bourbon, mint and vanilla to lend a brewed sense of barley and
mash to my nose. Living in Scotland and having sampled a lot of whiskies over
the years I am familiar with a lot of processes and finishes used in the
industry. The more I wear MEM,
especially if my skin is hot, I discern a distinctive boozy vibe as if Antonio
has distilled a lavender whisky flavoured with citrus peel and animal pelt.
I was very
preoccupied with lavender this summer; many of the small street gardens where I
live were foaming with differing shades of purple and alive with thrilled
thrumming bees. I smelled it everywhere that quiet Provençal undertone to the
air, the fallen flowers dusted over pavements. I like to rub and wander, the
oily immediacy of the leaves staining my fingers, pieces of whorls and spikes
scattered in my pockets.
It is a perfume
aroma for my own personal skin that challenges my perceptions of self. It is a
note that comes with some olfactory and visual baggage. As a migraine sufferer
I got weary of people telling me it was good for easing stress headaches,
whereas in actual fact, concentrated exposure to lavender oil or over use in
aromatherapy can precipitate vertiginous migraine. I have always associated it,
as many of us do with aromatherapy and the beckoning of sleep. I cook with it,
making cakes with lemon and lavender and adding it to lamb dishes with rosemary
and marjoram. I also smash it in a food processor with granulated sugar. Sifted
and used sparingly, this gorgeously blue-tinted powder is beautiful cast across
compotes.
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Antonio has not
shied away from any preconceived aspect of his lavenders. The varieties
evidently have different nuances and olfactive tonal qualities or he would not
have gone to the trouble of using them and Antonio does not strike me as a
frivolous man. A lot of reviews have noted the intense potency of MEM; I don’t find it potent as such, I
would say more immersive and demanding. The ask is one of waiting for the
swirling coterie of herbal, minted soapiness to settle their lilac tongues from
wagging to allow the fleshy tease of ylang and Champaca indoles to rise and
bait. It is a quite a struggle mind you, between the deranged royal seethe of
lavender and these lascivious creamy blooms. Then the tones bleed silently into
one another creating I think a rather singular emotion of rippling lavender,
marbled with ribbons of ivory.
If Antonio has a
signature, it lies in his rooty, cellar-caged manipulation of tooth and clawed
asshole disturbance. I once said he was a dangerous perfumer. I stand by that,
albeit in the dark and blindfolded. In Maai,
Gardelia and MEM there is this
fingered, grasping facet that emanates from his particular use of materials
such as civet, castoreum, amber and indoles. Blended with the high doses of
swooning erotic florals and claustrophobic herbs the Gardoni perfumed way is a
one where there is always an expectancy of the perverse in the fading light.
Yet the true beauty of Antonio’s work is realising any sense of tremulous
perversity is to be found purely in the anticipation.
I wanted in some
ways to resist the pull of MEM, I
wasn’t really in the mood for something this complex and to be honest burning
with lavender insistence, I found it hard to resist. After three or more hours
the torn herbal Prince-ness of it has rendered down to those base growling,
pelty reeks. Tiny shards of citrus somehow cling to the vestiges of lavender
amid glorious seared woods, resins and a peculiar minted vanilla vibe that
smells vegetal and vintage parfum at the same time.
A few people have
asked me if Bogue is really skin perfumery or olfactive high art just to be
admired? The answer is both. Antonio is a designer and architect; his approach
to perfumery will be different to others, as will that of perfumer and
photographer & musician Hans Hendley or perfumer & painter John Biebel.
It is art if you believe so. Perfume is no different from any other medium, but
it is a form of performance art that demands of you the wearer engagement in
its show.
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There is no doubt MEM, like my beloved Gardelia, OE, Cologne Reloaded and Maai
are bold, committed odours that echo one another and yet feel like immense
developments of themes within Gardoni themes. Even the hybrid monster mash of Cadavre Exquis, a rather brilliant
collaboration with San Francisco-based perfumer Bruno Fazzolari inspired by the
famous surrealist drinking game of creating sentences and text of mismatched
random words had that distinctive Gardoni civetty ylang tang at the heart of a
slightly misfired, but still intriguing interpretation of the gourmand genre, a
style neither perfumer had explored before. But boldness is to be lauded,
wearing Bogue perfumes requires not bravery per se, but attitude, an awareness
of olfactive aura that the air will vibrate around you and people may glare.
MEM
interestingly ends as it begins, palindromic I guess, faded of course, but with
the same hardcore intent of purpose it opened with. I am lavender. Hear me
roar.
©TheSilverFox
14 November 2017
13 Nov 2017
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