christopher sheldrake: 17 posts

Several years ago I walked around an exhibit devoted to Marlene Dietrich’s collection at the fashion museum in Paris, The Musée Galliera. Among her famous pant suits, feather dresses and sexy lingerie (you had to look through a peep hole for a glimpse of her lacy underthings), were bottles of  cosmetics and tanning oils. One was labelled rose, and another–jasmine.  I don’t remember who made them or what the bottles looked like, but the image of Dietrich stretching out her gorgeous long legs, her glistening skin catching the fine granules of sand, is what surfaces in my mind whenever I hear the star’s name. I can almost smell the rose tanning oil and salt on her warm skin.

I don’t know if in creating La Fille de Berlin, the dream team of Serge Lutens and Christopher Sheldrake thought about Dietrich, and I have never visited Berlin to understand their source of inspiration completely. For me though, it’s a perfume that I imagine Dietrich wearing. It’s beautiful and surprising, but with a dark side. A classical Lutens, in other words.

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Serge Lutens is releasing a new perfume in the export collection called La Fille de Berlin. It’s based on an accord of roses and pepper.

Those who love Serge Lutens’s photography will be excited to know that the fragrance launch is accompanied by Lutens’s new book, Berlin à Paris. This book is described as “a 176-page journey through an imaginary world inhabited by striking personalities with bold expressions, in a sui generis of its own. The focal point of each image is the model – the sole subject and true aim of each shot – for whom Serge Lutens designs objects, accoutrements, jewellery, staging, hairstyles and makeup with a view to portraying a desired expression. Taken between 1967 and 2008, the photos in the book transport us to a visit where dreams grapple with fantasy.”

If you’re in Paris between now and December 21st, don’t miss the exhibit of his work at the Galerie Marcilhac. The exhibit includes 30 photographs that appear in Berlin à Paris. Galerie Marcilhac, 8 rue Bonaparte, 75006 Paris, www.marcilhacgalerie.com

La Fille de Berlin Eau de Parfum, 50 ml/€78. It will be available in March 2013, with limited availability at Serge Lutens boutiques in February. The book is €100, and it can  be found at Electaweb.

Via Vogue.

What can one expect from a fragrance inspired by Billie Holiday’s gardenia, called Une Voix Noire (Black Voice) and created by the dream team of Serge Lutens and Christopher Sheldrake? Heady, dark, convoluted, perhaps? Well, Une Voix Noire is none of these things. It has a surprising combination of softness and warmth. Its presence is generous, but it’s not overwhelming. It’s dramatic without being heady or dense. Une Voix Noire feels velvety the moment you put it on, and it gracefully moves from one stage to another. Frankly, if Lutens said that he was inspired by ballerina Maya Plisetskaya’s Black Swan, rather than by Lady Day, I would have believed him.

I admit that this Lutens wasn’t love at first inhale the way Bois de Violette or De Profundis have been for me.  I anticipated the heady, the dark and the bittersweet, and I missed them in this soft perfume.  Nevertheless, I’m glad that I went along for the ride, because Une Voix Noire forced me to take our courtship slowly and to fall in love with it one layer at a time.

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Serge Luten has unveiled his newest Paris exclusive fragrance called Une Voix Noire. “The stars rise in chorus. The night sky is filled with the light of the moon.  It is a tribute to the singer Billie Holiday, a reference to a gardenia she wore in her hair.

The perfume is now available via sergelutens.com, 75ml is 130 euros. Via sergelutens.com

As I described in my post on sandalwood fragrances the other day, I’ve always had a romantic and exotic association with sandalwood. Its perfume of roses and cream–so rich, so haunting, so long lasting–seems like a whiff from some other world. Scheherazade’s palace in the Arabian Night Tales must smell of sandalwood. If so, who would be better placed to create a fairytale sandalwood perfume than the man who made a career out of worshiping beauty–Serge Lutens.

Like a modern day Scheherazade, Lutens weaves one tale after another, with the leitmotif of a fantasy running through the collection. Perhaps it is for this reason that his large range doesn’t feel redundant. Or perhaps I’m too much of a fan of his tales to be tired of them. Whatever the case may be, Santal Majuscule is the latest fragrance to cast upon me the Lutensian spell.

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