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Message in a Bottle: Luca Turin Reviews the Latest Azzedine Alaïa and Miu Miu Fragrances

ALAÏA PARIS
by AZZEDINE ALAÏA
ingredients: pepper, peony, animalic musk

A piercing regret of my existence is never having flown on a Concorde, despite many travel agents offering to put me, at reasonable cost, on one of these magnificent machines at Heathrow and do a supersonic hairpin loop down to the Bay of Biscay and back. I simply never thought that technology would take a backward step, but it did, and left us stranded this side of the sound barrier. A perfumer friend, by contrast, flew on it many times, mostly to deal with emergencies in New York or Paris. She once mentioned in conversation the peculiar smell of Concorde’s interior, and I made sure to sniff attentively when boarding a G-BOAG at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. She was right: the Concorde had a distinctive medicinal smell, partly engineered—warm insulation and caulking putty—but with faint human emanations of faded cologne and seat leather.

It came back to me when I smelled Alaïa for the first time: the layered smell of a place that has seen many other visitors now gone, a space echoing with odors both intended and unintended, a sort of muted olfactory crowd noise. Alaïa is a surpassingly weird fragrance, one that, like some great orators, starts out very quiet and forces you to lean in to hear the words. The fragrance aficionado, grasping at straws, will probably shake her head and be heard to mutter “leather,” “pepper,” and “lactones” in a vain effort to get a grip on Alaïa’s dark, smooth, slippery surface. As it develops, it feels at times as if perfumer Marie Salamagne has succeed in making time go backwards: the fragrance seems to start at the end and to reveal fresh notes as it ages.

Ultimately, it converges to an enigmatic, dry, salty accord, less a drydown and more a poignant memory of fragrance, as if you were smelling it on your clothes days after an extraordinary evening. The title of this column is Message in a Bottle: Alaïa does let out a scroll when sprayed, but it is covered in runes. Marvelous.

dark place

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