Deleted Scenes from The Perfect Scent

Part 1. How I became the New York Times' perfume critic

I wrote this section for the first draft of the book for obvious reasons: given that this would be my first book written as The New York Times perfume critic, I logically assumed I would want to explain how I became that critic. I liked it; my editor, George Hodgman, didnt. He felt it distracted from the two central narratives, Herms and Sarah Jessica Parker, and that this degree of detail wasnt necessary in The Perfect Scent. With some reluctance I agreed to take it outI think ultimately George is correct and if I ever write a book about my adventures as the Times critic, itll go in there. *** A few weeks before the Herms piece came out in The New Yorker in March 2005, Francesca Leoni introduced me at a party to Stefano Tonchi, head of fashion at both The New York Times Magazine and T, which is The Times' fashion magazine. Francesca had already mentioned me to himboth she and Stefano are from Florencehe was very welcoming, said, "Oh, yes! You! Come see me Friday in my office." That Friday I went to see him at The Times' run-down old building at 229 West 43rd Street Friday at 10am, took the elevator up to the 8th floor. "So!" he said, "you are a specialist in perfume!" I said, Yes. What else was I going to sayI'm trained in Asian political economy? "So I'm interested. What would you want to do for us?" I had thought about this. The New York Times has a critic of architecture and of books, I said. You have critics for food, movies, culture, painting. Perfume is an art, but almost no one realizes it. A very commercial artI think I said to him that movies are the best rough equivalent; both are created primarily by large international conglomerates launching multi-million-dollar would-be blockbusters, small independents produce art-house product for niche consumers, a hit perfume does approximately the same box office as a hit movie, and the processes are similar mixtures of suits, visionaries, and techniciansbut it's an art nonetheless. (In other ways, the best analog is cuisine, and in others, music. It's said that music is the purest art form because the least material. It has virtually no physical aspect; I don't mean the page with treble clef, quarter notes, and so on. The music itself has a physical presence only as soundwaves that travel invisibly through air. While the bow is on the string, you hear it; the bow stops moving, the music vanishes, no remains. Perfumenot the bottle, which has ultimately no more relevance than the alto's dressis transmitted via invisible molecules in the air. It blossoms on your skin, you smell it, it evaporates, and disappears.) I'd like to be your perfume critic. Stefano looked at me. I sat there. He thought about it for a second. "I love it!" he said. And then immediately, he added evenly, "We'll do a year from now." And that was that.

I would first become the New York Times' perfume reporter. Why? Two reasons. First because he wanted me to establish myself with The Times' readership and with the industry both. I'd need to

demonstrate that I knew something about the subject. Second because when I became the critic, "You will," he said directly, "have to tear things apart. Otherwise there's no point and you won't be a Times critic." Andy Port became my editor at T, Alix Browne at The Magazine. I started reporting. As we were preparing the first column I had a conversation with Kara Jasella, one of my T editorsthey chose the name Scent Strip, we decided we'd do a four star system, then switched it to fivewho noted that for some bizarre reason, perfume had never been criticized. Kara was into it if for this reason alone. Cathy Horyn could take apart a Chanel collection with a few choice words, and Guy Trebay could massacre Armani's fall offering, but Christ Himself forbid that even a complete piece of crap from Calvin Klein or Davidoff have a single negative word written about it. I figured, and said, that there was a simple syllogism: perfume, if you're going to take it seriously, is art, art has a critical apparatus applied to it, ergo. And we were taking scent seriously. The Times press release announcing that I would be the first Times perfume critic went out in August 2006, and I was asked constantly by the media (I realized during the column's launch process that I'm a big hypocrite; I want complete openness from people I'm interviewing, but I get pretty rigid about being interviewed, and in The Times' communications dept Pat Eisemann and Diane McNulty were doing an excellent job, which meant we had quite a bit of media interest) if this was not just a gambit by The Times to attract ad pages. I always found this question amazingly weird until Kara made this observation to me and underlined, again, the degree to which what we're doing has, I think literally, never been done before in any mainstream publication in the United States. And, given the millions of dollars in perfume ad pages in The Times, is a risk; in the third column I saidI don't think this is much disputedthat Comme des Garons' Odeur 53 was "basically unwearable" andand this is very much disputed, given that it's one of the best-selling perfumes of all timethat Azzaro's Chrome "is the smell of the empty electric soul of an assembly line robot." It was even weirder in a sense that The Times was and has always been not supportive but adamant that I call things the way I perceive them. That I be serious and not slam anything lightly or gratuitously, obviously, and that I keep my nose completely cleanI got a call from John Hyland at The Times gently reading me the riot act on The Times' Standards & Practices and was taken to lunch at one of the Theater District standbys by Jim Schachter so that he could, in the friendliest but clearest of manners, reinforce and elaborate the message. (Gotchya.) No free lunchesthey gave me a generous budgetno gifts, no press trips for The Times, etc., etc. But this big concern people on the outside had was less than a nonissue on the inside. What was interesting to me, actually, was that despite a few warnings from other journalists, there was no pressurenonefrom the industry at all. Nerves, yes. I had some rather tense meetings at Este Lauder, Coty, Firmenich, IFF, and so on where people were trying to figure out what this creature was going to be. To get information. Which was entirely logical, and I was trying to help them get it, although I myself wasn't sure about everything. It's The Times' newspaper, and they determined a lot of it. "Wellso, you're going to say perfumes are bad?" (I'd look at them for a moment, a bit baffled, and then say as gently as I could, Uhyeah. I'm going to be the critic, you know, as in critical. They blinked and sort of thought about that for a moment.) I'd add, And good, obviously. Look, you read The Times. (They nodded, still dubious.) The Times restaurant critic praises one place, gives a mediocre rating to another, the Times movie critic pans

a musical, the art critic loves a modernist show. It's treating perfume like an art. OK, they got that, sort of, but still one time after I'd said this a marketing person leaned in and, obviously trying to comprehend this weird project, frowned and said, "So, waityou're going to be saying bad things about our perfumes?" One executive, at lunch in midtown, said very calmly to me, "You know, of course, that if you give a new perfume of ours a bad review in The Times you could destroy a $5,000,000 launch and the work of a hundred people over a year." Although actually I don't have that kind of power. My column has actually a greater percentage of objective content than any except perhaps the automotive criticsit's a relatively straightforward call on whether the car fishtails when you hardbrake at 80mph, and perfume has several important, technical, empirical aspects of performance: 1. Does it diffuse or just cling deadly to the skin? (sillage) 2. Does it last for hours or rather vanish in a few minutes? (persistence) 3. Does it do what the perfumer intends, unfold in scenes that each compliments the others, or alternately give you one consistent story like a singer holding a single exquisite note (performance)? The art critic generally isn't going to write about whether de Kooning used oil or acrylic, especially if there is no distinction registered on the retina, and The Times' movie critics couldn't, in artistic terms, care less if Warner Brothers puts Scorsese's latest on digital projection, but Christine Nagel's choice of citrus molecule is going to have a direct, substantive impact on your experience of the piece of art. I felt responsible. Jim Schachter, Deputy Managing Editor of the New York Times magazine, told me, a bit pointedly, there are two kinds of critics at The Times, those who completely isolate themselves from the industry they cover and those who plunge into its center and live there. I'm the latter. Not only do I have no interest in splendid isolation, A, it's not possible for me for the simple reason that I also report on that industry and so axiomatically am in the middle of it (Michiko Kakutani doesn't report on publishing or do profiles of editors; she just reviews the books), and, B, even if I didn't report on the industry, I'd be spending time with the perfumers. Why did you mate X with Y? How did you get that raw angle? I found some of them so spooked it was impossible to talk with them about it. Others were warily cool, still others cautiously warm. One who took personally even the possibility of a negative critique said to me, "If you attack something of mine, I'll have to see how I feel," and I made it clear that he could indeed see how he felt, but whatever the feeling, it wouldn't change the outcome. He changed the subject. Someto their great creditbypassed any emotional reaction to the column whatsoever and, detached, saw it from a purely professional point of view. I was simply one more variable in their equation. Pamela Baxter, LVMH's CEO for North America, and Alain Lorenzo, President of Parfums Givenchy (one of LVMH's brands), showed a particularly shrewd approach. It was Pam who, when I wrote something favorable about, I believe, Givenchy, sent me an email saying, "Both articles" she meant the reported piece and the column"were fantastic," and adding how wonderful I was. "Yeah," I wrote back, "until I say something bad about an LVMH perfume." Pam is the popular girl in high school, the sardonic corporate hipster, and she coolly replied, "I'm not soooo clueless as to think there won't be a time when you won't love one of our treasures." Naturally Pam would prefer that I not giver her perfumes zero and one stars. Obviously. But she hasn't drunk the Kool Aid. The Great Revolution-style marketing is for the

consumers; they know when they're putting out garbage. And at breakfast at The Four Seasons, one of the marketing women, after interrogating me on was I really going to be criticizing, shrugged her shoulders and said, "You know, in the end all publicity is publicity." Which I think is sort of true. In the press release they put a nice quote from Stefano. 'I am extremely excited about the launch of Chandlers column in T,' said Stefano Tonchi, style editor of The New York Times Sunday Magazine and T. 'The Times will be the first to cover the fragrance industry and perfume in the way it does movies, books, and theater.'" It's always interesting to hear your boss talk about you in the third person. I wrote a quote for them to use ("Every other true art has a serious criticism; I believe perfume should as well") and we were careful to put in a caveat that I knew would make the industry people more comfortable ("My opinion is, of course, just my opinion") and the appropriate context ("given The Timess weight I take this responsibility quite seriously"). Our first column appeared on August 27, 2006.

Scent StripT Women by Chandler Burr Darkness, when it is crystalline and somewhat luminous, may be the most difficult quality to capture in a perfume. It was recently achieved when Sylvaine Delacourte, the Creative Director of Guerlain, went shopping for a new rose perfume. Some might have argued that there is a surfeit of rose scents, but Francis Kurkdjian, a 37-year-old French perfumer at the top of his game, went to work and created for Guerlain the astonishing "Rose Barbare." Kurkdjian produced it by brilliantly reengineering Jacques Guerlain's 1919 "Mitsouko," one of the greatest chypres ever. Where Guerlain put into "Mitsouko" jasmine and a then just-discovered synthetic called aldehyde C-14 (it gives the delicious aroma of ripe peach,) Kurkdjian took this idea and spun it forward, exchanging the jasmine with a $2,608/pound Turkish rose absolute. The result sweeps over you like the silent, massive shadow of an Airbus 340, a tactile component that makes you narrow your eyes as if watching the approach of evening. If it fades slightly faster than one might hope, the aesthetics are pitch-perfect. There are other gorgeous rosesYves Saint Laurent's "Paris," l'Eau d'Italie's "Paestum Rose"but "Rose Barbare" is a crepuscular rose-inflected darkness suffused with a luminosity that floats on skin. Jo Malone's perfume genius is light. Not light as the antonym of heavy, but light as photon radiation. Think about "Grapefruit Cologne," or "French Lime Blossom"that radiant glass roof sensation. This is what makes "Pomegranate Noir" such a departure for Malone. This is the scent of the darkness that inhabits a Rubens, a warm, rich, purple blackness; "Pomegranate Noir" is a like a box of truffles with the lid on, sweet bits of darkness, waiting.

Because of the way Malone composes her scents, each built to accommodate others, no single scent will ever reach the level of artisty of a single scent by Kurkdjian, whose robust, complex compositions are meant to stand alone. By design, "Pomegranate Noir" merits only two starsbut two lovely stars; this scent is like spraying a layer of twilight on your body. Frdric Malle's uniquely strange outfit, Editions de Parfums, has created a perfume collection in the running for the best in the world. Malle's method is simple: he invites brilliant perfumers to create their dream scents for him. The result is outrageous. L'Eau d'Hiver by Jean-Claude Ellena (now Herms' inhouse perfumer) is a small revolution; Dominique Ropion's Carnal Flower is a blossom with the impact of a baseball bat. But it is Ellena's Bigarade that plays brilliantly with darkness. Bigarade smells like a person in the summer in a complex weather system, a wonderful scent of a guy's armpit and a woman's humid skin washed in fresh rainwater and ozone (Malle doesn't waste time gendering his scents, and Bigarade is for women and men both). It is a masterful juxtaposition, and smelling Bigarade is like looking down into a well of cool black water. Your retinas expand from the pure, strange pleasure of this scent. Rose Barbare | Guerlain *** guerlain.com Pomegranate Noir | Jo Malone ** jomalone.com Bigarade Concentre | Editions de Parfum-Frdric Malle **** editionsdeparfums.com

Q&A with Chandler

What's the average Joe's reaction, when you tell people what you do? Youre kidding. How did you decide on the fragrances you reviewed for your first column? Did you spend that year you had to wait working on the line-up? No, I didnt spend it working on the line-up at all, and then when it was time to launch the column I thought, Oh, Christ. What perfumes do I review? I chose the Frederic Malle (Bigarade Concentre) because its one of the collections I admire the most. I chose the Guerlain (Rose Barbare) because I loved it, and I chose the Jo Malone (Pomegranate Noir) for some very specific reason that I dont remember now. And I thought, Whoa, these are my first perfumes! And then it was done and we were off and I was a little let down. Its a pretty big psychological deal starting your own column in The New York Times, and you think the worlds going to stop, but it tends not to. And then there you are with the column to feed.

Are you surprised by the lack of uptake of perfume critics in other mainstream press? Not at all. First, Im not that well-known yet, although thats going to change very soon, at least within the media world: The New York Times Syndicate is syndicating my column starting in a few weeks, so lots of editors will know about it. But also I simply dont think most editors think of perfume as art. They think of it as product. Andanother important reasonto give credit where I think it truly is due, only The Times has the guts to piss off LVMH, Este Lauder, and Coty by saying, This one is crap.

Part 2. The media and the reactions

Like the previous section, we were originally envisioning the book as being about me as the Times critic and only later decided to cut that thread, so this section was out. Youll notice that I sometimes write things just barreling straight through without stopping to check the spelling of Whoopi or to find an example of a polyurethane piece of shit like TK__________. I like TKs (an editorial mark meaning information To Come but written TK because there are relatively few instances of the letters T and K coming together in English so its easy to search for). *** The brand-new first-ever New York Times scent critic, and so I went on The Today Showgot up early, a hot August day, got a car service up 3rd Ave, then west on 50th [TK 50th?] to Rockefeller Center, into the green room, onto the set, tripping over the electric cables snaking everywhere and cameramen with headsets, and Matt Lauer was the nicest guy, slightly incredulous to be honest ("But how do you describe a smell?") but still game enough (as we're waiting to go on air he's telling me how he doesn't wear scent because in our time we had, what, Drakkar Noir? and what is that stuff? and I replied that he was 110% right, it's unwearable, and then felt guilty because perfumer Pierre Wargnye, who created it it was revolutionary when it came out, OK?is one of the nicest guys I've ever met and one of the best communicators on perfume construction around; at the end of the segment Matt shoved his wrist at me and asked what he was wearing and I think I said, "Uh, you?" and he shouted, "Purell!"). I went on Whoopi [TK SPELLING WHOOPIE?] Goldberg's morning radio show (she and her guys get up really early), rode my bike over to 6th and 42nd just after dawn, was supposed to be on air ten minutes and we kept going the whole hour, I'd invited my buddy Mike Strong to watch and he showed up earlier than me, they put him in a booth and Whoopi sees him and motions to him to get his ass into the broadcast room and hang out next to her, we're all going nuts, it's like a party and she turns out to be a complete knowledgeable smell freak with very decided opinions, stuff she hates, and scents she totally loves. (I should stop being so surprised. My friends Alexia and Ethan invite me to their place in Brooklyn for dinner, they're also inviting over her book editor, Panio, and his girlfriend Molly who turns out to be Molly Ringwald, and Molly turns out to be a complete perfume connoisseur and knowsand has wornvirtually every fragrance I've ever smelled, so we talk perfume all night.) The Washington Post ran something nice, and a Chicago Tribune columnist said, "This guy's job should

have been mine," and we couldn't figure out if she meant it nicely or as a dig. (Mostly nicely, she told me later.) Others were much less nice, like the columnist (the column was titled "Smell of Excess") who began tartly, "Those of us who toil in the trenches of journalism often fantasize about that 'dream job.' Restaurant reviewer. Movie critic. Animal columnist. We never knew we were aiming too low until we learned the New York Times has hired a perfume critic. That's right. Let's say it together. Perfume. Critic. In other words, this guy -- who goes by the improbable name of Chandler Burr -- will be paid for smelling ...." Fair enough. The Columbia Journalism Review did an interview with me that was preceded by an intro presenting the idea of a scent critic as equal parts "hey, this is pretty cool" and "is The Times serious?" In response to the piece, one reader wrote, "I collect perfumes as a hobby/obsession, so when I heard from similarly fragrance-fixated friends on makeupalley.com's bulletin board for perfume" (one of the biggest perfume discussion sites; there are, it turns out, tons of thembasenotes, perfumecritic, scentzilla, nowsmellthis, perfumeoflife, braintrappedingirlsbody, and lots of others, an entire fan world furiously discussing everything from Britney Spears' retail nuclear device on every counter to the details of the most microniche perfumes I've never heard) "that Mr.Burr would be contributing to the New York Times on a regular basis I was thrilled. His first column wasn't perfectour tastes in fragrance do not coincide. But.....just the fact that the NYT hired him to do this is great." This opinion, which was quoted a few places online, was not, to put it mildly, universal. I'm not a web surfer at all, in fact I do everything I can to minimize my life online I'm one of the people least interested in blogs I've ever met, I rarely read them, and I take a SWAT approach to my nytimes.com: Get in fast, survey the landscape, hit your targets, get the hell out. Opinion on the perfume sites was hotly divided on me, on the column, on The Times, my choices. From one site: "I shall ever recall today," said one of me, "when bemused irritation became patent loathing." Which met with "LOL!" and "say it sistah!" and "what an ill-informed ass he is." "he's pompous as hell, that's for sure, but it seems like criics often are." "he irritates me. anyone else?" "He infiltrates perfume boards then drops the communities when he gets bored. Jerk." "I think he feels it would be inappropriate to post regularly. I have written him and he responds quickly. I think he is a busy person." "I enjoy reading him even when I don't agree with him. "I actually like himI met him and he's nice and enthusiastic." "the funniest thing is ppl who apparently know absolutely nothing about fragrances feel they could fill in Burr's shoes. thank god it's at least Burr and not any of those." "Yes. I don't like him, but I don't think just *anyone* could start writing about perfume." We'd made a very conscious decision that The Times column would cover perfumes from every era Jicky, which started modern perfumery, was 1898and one wrote, "I was dissapointed that he didn't cover any fragrances that came out in 2006. Old news, yawn." We were absolutely clear that I'd be free to give my (considered) opinions the way I felt them, and they hated something, which I'd written

elsewhere, about Diorella. "it's not a bad thing that perfume criticism is actually starting to get attention," wrote someone. "Maybe people will start to think more about the fruity-floral world domination that seems to be going on via dept. stores. And he loves the vintage Diors. If only for that, I'd be glad he's got this job. I *want* to see them released to a wider audience and perhaps (a girl can dream) this will inspire Dior to do so." But then I'd gone and described Diorella: to me the best analogs for smelling this astonishing perfume are (and I realize this sounds strange, but in my olfactory experience these are the two real-world references) a freshly dry-cleaned fur coat (the clean, strange thickness you get when you smell fur coupled with the bracing, effervescent trace of the dry cleaning chemicals) and a very fine, chalky mint toothpaste (a complex, indirect mint with the dull brilliance of burnished platinum, a metal whose low-wattage glow is actually so expensive). The response: "Burr finds mintbasil is not mint. is mint one of the principle 'green notes'? i'm thinking unlikely. but in any case, with the plethora of other notes, he picks MINT as the main note?" The response to that: "about Diorella - I've seen someone I very much like on this board say that Prada is *identical* to Angel, so much so that Thierry Mugler" (creator of Angel) "could sue Dior. I don't get that at all. But she does and I respect her opinion even if I disagree w/ it." The categoric response to that: "talking about mint in Diorella and not mentioning basil is like talking about Diorissimo and never mentioning lily of the valley: a mortalnot just a venialsin.") Someone said, "I don't understand why some folks are getting all huffy. Are not we ALL fragrance critics here?....Give a guy a break!" and the response was, "Yes, that is EXACTLY OUR POINT. He's claiming to be the First Perfume Critic, the Columbus of perfume writing..." (Actually the press release said "The New York Times announced todayits first columnist to review and rate fragrances," but the word "first" just killed the online people.) What strikes me about the heat of the disdain, the viciousnessthe flame wars over which jasmine feminine is the best, or whether someone is a bitch because she likes En Passant better than lAir de Rien and doesn't she know it's shit is the degree of the fury aroused. These are bottles of perfume. *** I can't exaggerate how unexpected this job was to me. I interned in downtown Tokyo at the giant trading company Mitsui Bussan (a huge aluminum and glass rectangle, our floor overlooked the oxidized [TK SPELLING]-nickel green roofs of the emperor's palace) in the kenkyo-bu [TK SPELLING]. My bucho took me for barbequed eel in the salariman lunch places under Omotesando. I was tracking a career in international trade, or perhaps foreign affairs. This is compounded by the fact that aside from a pair of Timberland boots, I've never bought a single thing from any designer or brand, and it holds no interest for me. I would no more purchase a $400 Gucci shirt than I would a Maserati. And at least I admire the hell out of the Maserati. Added to that is the fact that I've always looked at fashion as happening on someone else's planet. I can't imagine actually wearing a belt with a huge Herms "H" on the buckle. And then this happened. I talked to a friend about my ambivalence. He sent me a piece by Ginia Bellafante, who from 1999 to 2004 did for The Times on fashion what I now do on perfumeboth reporter and critic. Bellafante said that when she started the beat, her mother considered disowning her. The piece was a nice delineation not only of Bellafante's thoroughly-mixed feelings but of the otherworldliness of the whole thing. It wasn't merely the superficially silly, though there is much of that.

"The fashion beat affordsplenty of time spent in the company of fashion people, something variously dreadful and exhilarating. Disciples of the fashion tribe will surely say The Devil Wears Prada exaggerates their manners and proclivities. It doesn't." She reported a conversation with a PR girl who had confided that her client's collection was going to be "devastational." But then the marketing materials for virtually every perfume amount to intellectual carpet bombing. They fuel the beast with fake stories. Guerlain sends out press materials about its great Jicky of 1889 that tell the public, "When perfumer Aim Guerlain returned to France after finishing his studies in England, he left behind a young Englishwoman with whom he was madly in love. Despite the heartache, life went on Years later, in 1889, he created Jicky, in a tribute to the love of his youth." This is the marketing story. Guerlain pushes it hard. The reality is, apparently, that Guerlain made Jicky for his nephew, Jacques, nickname Jicky, but it doesn't play as well as some great fictional love story. I don't think the executives at Guerlain need to spin fake stories. They bore the hell out of me, but the marketing people tell me they sell well. They spin this tedious candy for you over and over. When Lauder introduced Beautiful, the story that Lauder PR people and Leonard Lauder himself told reporters was that Estee had come up with the name. She'd tested it on friends, and all of them said "Oh, that's beautiful." Nice story. A few months later, Lauder admitted the name had been chosen by a Clinique exec. On it's own, it's inconsequential. When, however, you have them on the phone, and you're asking them questions, and they're simply lying to you, when they expect you to re-vomit up their marketing protocols in print (and they have good reason for automatically assuming you will; most of the publications that write on perfume do) and you're completely aware that what they're insisting is "so-and-so designer's vision" is the manufactured result of some 3:30pm corporate meeting in an office tower in midtown, when you ask the simplest question about the molecules forming the real construction of the scent and they behave like panicked sheep and the stuttering and/or dreary silence you hear coming over the phone represents not necessarily them but the fanatic neuroticism of some huge company that doesn't believe in its products, doesn't believe in its clients, and sure as hell doesn't believe in accurate journalismthen you get angry. Those few moments in which they actually let down the armor and talk to you like a human being pulls you back from the edge. Late in the dayit was winter, the Manhattan skyline outside his office was gray and getting darker, and there were no leaves on the trees in the park far below usa top perfume exec finally stopped talking. He'd been dutifully giving me the made-up line on his latest scent. I think he looked at my face during the recitation. He rubbed his eyes hard with his hands and looked at me. "Don't you think sometimes that I have out of body experiences talking about this crap?" he asked. No, actually. I didn't think that. But it reassures me. Part of the problem is that perfume is sold within the world of fashion, and fashion can be mesmerizing in the way that porn can be mesmerizing. It can be important as a reflection of, say, cultural change,, but relative to education policy and economic trends, the importance of the trend that decrees that handbags will be squared this year is an order of magnitude lower. Because it is ultimately so empty and because it is fed by facile vanity, the pretension that accrues under its wheels is more voluminous. Usually the silliness cruises the stratospheric. Sometimes it becomes untethered and spins off into the outer vacuum of complete irreality. When Martin Marghiella TK SPELLING makes a second-rate career of

ostentatiously avoiding being photographed, he is a man desperately screaming for attention, but at least we're spared having to see him; when fashion photographer Hans Feurer tells a reporter, ''I'm such a private person I don't even give my cellphone number to my family," he's just an asshole. The spelling and grammatical errors that litter their inane, intentionally false, touchingly earnest press releases. Alexander McQueen's Kingdom the press release for was printed in immaculate charcoal on heavy bond paper. Under "The Concept" was a quote, italicized and capitalized: "OUR HEART IS OUR KINGDOM. IF WE DO NOT ALLOW OUR HEARTS TO BE BROKEN, THEN WE ARE NOT EXPERIENCING LIFE TO THE FULL." -ALEXANDER MCQUEEN. This is completely stupid. You open the press brochure, which has at great cost been printed in a bronzed metallic laminate like they used to make in the disco era (the French are to a great degree stuck in an idea of luxury appropriate to 1977). You open it. "Himand no one else." You think: Oh boy. Next page. The pull-out quote: "My eyes are riveted on you, like a magnet." Note in particular the comma ("My eyes are riveted on you comma like a magnet") as if the magnet were so powerful it formed its own independent clause. "I cannot take them off you." And now let's read the text. "You are there. I can see you at the bend of the road. Everything around you has disappearedthe city, the buildings, the streets and the crowds seem to have vanished. Your presence has absorbed it all. Your attitude fascinates me. Physical, sensitive, strong and sensual. The clothes you re wearing make your every move unforgettable. I recognize the signature instantly. The style is inimitable. Who are you? A man. An Yves Saint Laurent man. That's all I know about you." Egad. The next pull quote, "I will call you 'L'Homme Yves Saint Laurent'" and below this philogenetic musing we get, "Sure of himself and his masculinity, 'L'Homme Yves Saint Laurent' asserts his style. His elegance and refinement underscore his virility." Fascinating. "His presence is charismatic physical." (The ellipse is a nice touch.) "His seductive magnetismcombining strength and sensitivitymakes him totally irresistible." It's like reading porn from The Discovery Channel. This is, incidentally, the press kit for TK______, which after all the froth is just the 3,987th version of the same old masculine clich. The press kits aren't just fill in the blank, they're fill in the blank + seduction-as-harangue. Gucci sent me, "A sensual, floral fragrance, Gucci Envy me 2 is as undeniably feminine and intoxicating as the woman who wears it. An expression of feminine impulse, Gucci Envy Me 2 [note the switch to the capital M in this case] an irresistible object of desire. In Limited Edition, it is precious, rare and only for a select few. This is the essence of a woman who relishes temptation almost as much as finally giving in to it. She is driven, impossible audacious and sweetly sensual, delighting in life's most delicious pleasures." It is, of course, as un-rare as the international corporate distribution network can possibly make it, a product for a select few million. I look at the end of the press release and see it's by a girl I work with. She is really nice girl, eager, and sincere. Andoh, kill me now. I actually tell them all the time not to send me the fucking press kits for A, ecological reasons (I can't recycle four tons of paper), B, they cost the houses a ton, thick, luscious high-rag-content paperlet them put the money into the juice, C, they're not only content free but, D, they depress the hell out of me. "It's got notes of choc-o-late!" they trill to you, "and candy-yummy-gooey goodness! and addictive

notes of fill-in-whatever." Addictive? Their accountants wish. They'd happily put oxycontin in the stuff if it nailed that second sale, but they can't and it doesn't so let's drop the pretense and that particular adjective. They "quote" the designer. "Deeply provocative, a man's scent embraces and seduces you whenever he draws you close." Oh for Christ's sake. In my capacity as a New York Times reporter, in my mind I divide everything I do into "real" and "PR." The PR is necessary. Basically I hate it, I'm completely cynical about it, and I recognize that it's part of the game. The game is the presentation of huge amounts of product worth billions of dollars in the pages of magazines and newspapers. The Times is not immune to its base mechanics. The Times fashion sections are acolytes of the new, cultists and cultivators of the trend, arbiters of the hip for the simple reason that this is the substance of fashion, and, as much as the church-state separation is both given lip service for public consumption and simultaneously sincerely, fervently believed in quiet watchers of advertising dollars, just like everyone else. I'm glad the RNC and DNC don't put full-page ads in the Times every week. That would be a lot of money for everyone in political reporting to ignore. Everyone knows how weird it already is to have Chevron, Walmart, and General Motors spending millions a year on the ad space of a paper whose job is to stalk and attack gross strategic corporate mismanagement, the export of American manufacturing jobs to less-expensive labor markets like China's, and the international petroleum industry's environmental depredations, systematic corruption, funding of terrorism, and warping of American foreign policy. It's like a company hiring a PR agency to get the word out, and the agency also employs a team of private investigators dedicated to bringing down the company, that team being funded by the fees the company pays to get the word out. It's a strange, strange relationship. The fact that it works is testament to a beautiful secular religion involving a civic belief in free speech, the undeniable fact that the thing shows up in TK CIRCULATION___ million pairs of hands and TK____ million computer screens every day, and some other pieces of magic no one wants to look at too closely right now for fear that the whole thing will fall apart. The writers and editors on the Times' fashion pages swim in a sea of informational crap. The PR machines with multi-million dollar contracts from Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani, and LVMH produce mountains of gleaming brochures, slick CDs, glossy photos, and ingenious wrappings for the above, packed with images of bottles upon bottles after bottles on top of bottles of perfume. (And skirts and shoes and bags and bracelets, but I only see the perfume stuff.) And everything "For Immediate Release" is, 100% of the time, nothing. Just nothing. The house's are simply completely unused to handing out anything except the most facile, superficial, laughably vapid bullshit. Why does it matter? It debases good perfume. My first year at The Times, Paco Rabanne sent me the PR materials for the launch of their new masculine, Black XS. The text centered around the modelthe skinny, empty kid whose face they were using to represent the perfume, and it was embarrassingly stupid, pathetically grasping. The part about the gaze is particularly insane. "Only a man combining masculinity and appeal could represent Black XS. A sought-after face scattered over men's magazine covers, Will Chalker stands out for his performance at high-profile fashion shows, flaunting muscle and making good use of an irresistible gaze. He was the obvious choice for the Black XS ambassador. Here, we see muscles in relief and a torso covered with chains there, we see him

nestled amid the sheets with a rose between his teeth. The man, free of prejudice, yields to the camera lens of photographer Matthew Brookes in a very natural way." There's no point in criticizing the idiocy of the PR for a polyurethane piece of shit like TK__________. The standard fatuous marketing verbiage, revomited for the nth time from some infinite cesspool that sits beneath the communal press management machine. (The bizarre "free of prejudice" thing is just a direct translation from a French phrase which sounds moronic in English, one that no one thought to trim out. This is ubiquitous in fashion; the French are linguistically incapable of picking them up, and the Americans are too baffled, or cowed, or indifferent, to stamp them out.) They whip up the usual fatuous, pointless list of "notes" (the Orwellian marketing term)Calabrian Lemon, Black Cardamon, Patchouli, and Praline. These lists are for morons. Three of the four materials named here might actually be in this juice, though I wouldn't bet any money on it. As for the fourth, because the houses have followed a self-destructive policy of intentionally keeping consumers in the dark on how perfume is actually made, there are in fact people who thinkto the degree to which consumers are permitted to think about perfumethat Paco Rabanne is somehow dumping caramel-covered pecans (which is what praline is) into a vat of hexane to distill them. They aren't. It is the garbage the marketing people send out on silver trays, and it makes perfumers privately groan in agony, but they've been told in no uncertain terms to shut the hell up and that they'll keep their heads down over their lab benches if they know what's good for them. What the marketers don't send out are all the surprising natural materials that are, in fact, in the juices ("La carrote?"). What they don't send out are all the interesting synthetic materials that are in the juices. Their argument is always the same: "The consumer won't understand." No. The consumer would prefer to be fed predigested elephant shit. What take this from insignificance to minor tragedy is that Black XS is a terrific scent, one of the best in a long timemoreover it is, quite astonishingly, made for menan honest-to-god serious, beautifully structured machine built by Olivier Cresp. Cresp says the idea was electrical current, which sounds suspiciously like words some marketer whispered in his ear, then pushed him toward a microphone to repeat, but forget them. What he and Puig produced is something beautifully different, unplaceable, and instantly mesmerizing, as if an experimental rock album were both authentically innovative and yet compulsively listenable. The smell itself could be described as swimming in a sweet-water pool inside a blossoming lemon grove. It is so blissfully free of any trace of moronic hairy-chested machismo, formulaic sports car attitude, and urban-slick insecurity that the result would be shocking if the scent didn't embrace you with such calm assurance. Any of this they could talk about. What do they talk about? An unremarkable kid with no relation to the creation of this scent in any way shape or form, his performance at high-profile fashion shows, his flaunting his muscle and making use of an irresistible gaze. Free of prejudice. What has been truly devastational to perfume is the perfume industry. I am as capitalist as Mike Bloomberg, but the short-sightedness in this business would numb Veblen. Bellafonte identified The Devil Wears Prada, a movie I went to see because it came out the same time that we launched the scent critic column, as the first film that saw fashion for what is has become, "not visionaries but functionaries" who live and dress and think according to the seasonal edicts of global conglomerates "with little appreciation for whimsy." Or art qua art, to put a finer point on it. Because perfume is a forcibly subjugated province of fashion, I spend a certain amount of time talking to fashion people.

Bellafonte: "A fashion editor might not genuinely crave the new pump of the hour, but she worries how devalued she'll be if she doesn't get it." In this new Orwellian world in which originality and substance are capital offenses, I find this observation"[F]ashion people don't possess artistic souls but actuarial ones, [and] they are energized more by fear than by desire"lamentably true. And when you smell the fear in the perfumes, that's when you start taking away stars. That's the serious aspect. There is also the non-serious aspect: These are people who actually have mental episodes over the placement of their seats at fashion shows. I was in one of my deepest periods of ambivalence in mid-August when I got a call from a girl. "Mr. Burr?" Yep? She was calling from The Fashion Week Daily, the (she explained) IMG publication "distributed in the tents." (I said: What are "the tents"? The girl paused on the phone, apparently baffled. "The tents. The tents, in Bryant Park, where the shows take place" Was I nuts? No, I'd just never heard of Fashion Week, which happens every September in New York, and had never been to a "show." She said, "Oh," then, a true professional, gave me a pass. So, she was calling to ask if I'd do this "series of Q&A's from various fashion experts." (Oh. So I'm now a fashion expert. Awesome.) "We'll just you the questions by email, is that OK?" Sure. "It has to be all about fashion, OK?" OK. They sent them over, I appended answers. - "Mr. Burr: Which perfumes do you think are probably the most popular among the fashion crowd and why?" I know that fashionistas claim to like Comme des Garcons' Odeur 53, but I've never actually smelled it on anyone, and I don't actually believe anyone can wear it without bursting into blue flame. In fact, I don't actually think these people know what the hell Odeur 53 smells like. This perfume is like the Yeti: Many claim to have worn it, but it's always "Well, last year" or "When I was yak farming in Calabria." Right. - "When too many fashion folk come together, all wearing different scents, is there a probability of sensory overload?" There is a probability of room-temperature nuclear fusion, but sensory overload? Not olfactorily. Fashion people (for some reason that correlates negatively with the wearing of hideous leather slacks) tend to under-spray. Not over, like your aging blue-hairs on East 82nd. They might wear, it's true, perfumes whose aesthetics are less Proust and more Hustler. Or Inches. These are tough to dose low. But fashionistas tend to be mysteriously light on the trigger. - "How many spritzes is too many when you're seated in close quarters?" Depends. Issey Miyake's Le Feu? I love this stuff like Richard Pryor loved crack, but you could jumpstart Soweto with .001 ml of Le Feu injected into a butt cheek. Diorella? You might want to stop at four, but for goddsake make it a good four, on the neck and (most important) forearms, and wear a strapless top. Pamplemousse by Parfums des Beaux Arts? It's so subtle and lovely and fresh you could go seven or eight and have people clubbing each other's assistants to score the seat next to yours. Happy for Men? I was once with a 6'3" blond Canadian with a lumberjack's build and a neck bathed in this stuff, and you just couldn't get too close or stay too long; Happy for Men is basically methamphetamine with none of

the disadvantages. - "What are the elements that make a scent chic?" A brand whose creative team is willing to give the poor perfumer a price-per-pound for compound higher than the cost of a can of tuna and a Snickers. Start there. - "Most every clothing label has a scent: Why do fashion and fragrance go together so well?" Are you kidding? Because if you can create a blockbuster perfume, that thing will print you money faster than the Bush administration can burn it. Yes, yes, some designers are either skilled or lucky enough to get scents that really do, for better or worse, perfectly re-create olfactorily the aesthetic of their clothing, which is to say the perfect accessory, and if you're dressed by Badgley Mischka and you aren't scented by Badgley Mischka, you might as well wear a wife beater and a jockstrap. That's one reason. But the primary reason, of course, is money. So what if the industry is edging toward a 99/1 flop-to-hit ratio and I just smelled a launch as cheesy as a mustache. You taste that success once, you're so hooked it's like Vegas without the sunburn, baby, you just are not gonna stop rolling those dice because if the dice ever pop up screaming "J'adore!" in your face you'll be polishing your Jimmy Choos with twenty-dollar bills and a dollop of La Mer. - "Could you love a perfume that was in an ugly package?" Yes. I would focus on its personality. I thought they'd send it back. It turned out they loved it. When the second column ran, I got a call from a friend telling me he'd been listening to Rush Limbaugh on air attacking The Times with "They've got a perfume columnist!" He said someone on the perfume blogs had said well what the hell did Limbaugh know about perfume, and someone else said, yeah, like what did he wear, Eau de Loudmouth or something? and the first person replied, No: Dior Addict. That I liked. At the same time, I'm quite susceptible to the accusation. I spent years reporting on epidemiology and international economics, and feel completely this particular journalistic tension. I realize this is my personal psychology. I spent my undergraduate years in political studies focusing, at schools in Beijing and Paris on politics, history, and international relations, I have a masters degree in international economics and Japanese political studies, and I began my journalism career writing on politics and economic development in Southeast Asia. And I'm writing on perfume in the fashion pages. It freaks me out. In the end, there are two points. The first is purely logistical, my point of view as a reporter. There is thank Christa substantial buffer between fashion and perfume. Perfume isn't, in fact, fashion. It's a completely separate world, one that for marketing reasons has wound up being created and sold as fashion by raw materials companies that have, in fact, nothing to do with dresses, shoes, or squared bags. When you meet them on the job, in their offices, their labs, at launches, at lunch, most perfume industry people are not doing the intellectual equivalent of stuffing a sock in their jeans. They're working, like the rest of the corporate world, and their best products strike me as being roughly on a par with the best designs and goods it's possible to find. A few are among the worst people I've ever met. Some are stupid. Some a merely victims of their own institutional terror. One I think should be in a mental institution, an opinion shared by those who work for him, but of course that's par for the course in any business. The fact is that I like most of them and some I think are absolutely terrific, delightful, intelligent people, people with whom you spend a very pleasurable afternoon as the traffic flows below,

talking new launches and classics, briefs and upcoming materials. They generate a creative element with at least the artistic value of architecture, and this is the second, conceptual point. What is this stuff? In an parallel world, perfumes would be created by artists, and there would be a Rodin, a Barber, and a Sargent working in the medium of scent as artists work in stone, sound, and paint, its classical forms exhibited at the Metropolitan and sold in bottles at the Guggenheim and the Getty museums as works of olfactory artyou'd be able to take home MOMA's three scents from its giftshop not to put on your wall put into your air; if MOMA were smart, this is exactly what it would do, it would hire a director of scent art, and they'd start identifying and curating the olfactory Klees and Rothkos, and it wouldn't do it tongue in cheek but as art altogether as serious as Klee and Rothko. Perfumes aren't sold in museums. Yet. But the art, the creativity and beauty that you get to see every once in a while, stuff that just makes you float like Rose Barbare or feel like you're drowning in sunlight like Ambra di Venezia, is underneath. And then I'm thrilled. Thrilled. And after they show you this stuff, after you've smelled it with them, and you see how proud they are of it, you think, OK, this is real. I close my 2.3 pound Dell Latitude X200, and I get on my bike and head down Park (if I've been at Firmenich or Symrise) or across West 57th (if I was at Givaudan or IFF) or 5th (from Fragrance Resources, next to Bergdorfs), and if it's dinner time I'll stop on my way home at Le Kwan Yu at Lex and 39th and while I'm waiting for my takeout I'll get out my cell phone and call my friend Joe in Houston or Mike on West 91st and say, "I just got some great shit! Dolce & Gabbana's Light Blue has this molecule!" Then it's real. And then I love this stuff.

Q&A with Chandler

'Everyone's a critic' applies more and more with the internet. Do you pay much attention to what is blogged or written about you? No for two simple reasons. First, because Im terrible at navigating the internet and blogs and I dont have the patience for it and I hate it. It makes me crazy. Its just not my thing. Im the kind who yells at my friendsthey all know thiswhen they try to have friendly conversations with me by email or IM. I grab the phone and call them up and say, IM ON THE COMPUTER THE WHOLE DAMN DAY, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I WANT TO SPEND QUALITY TIME WITH MY FRIENDS *ON *THE *COMPUTER? Theyve all gotten the treatment. I have a facebook entry and I never check it and I never accept friendsIm just not an online kind of guy. The second reason is that the nasty crazies are so nasty and so crazy that I dont want to read them. They are a small percentage. And its nice hearing the nice comments, and more than that Im truly actively interested in the intelligent, rational criticisms that are made of my work. But the crazy, freaky criticisms? No, thanks. I have a friend who actually likes to navigate these things, and sometimes he brings me stuff via email and I read that, but he knows what Im interested in. There is good, thoughtful criticism of my work, and it does help me. Why do you think perfume and fashion became so linked, and do you think the 'celebrity'

fragrances like SJP's could begin to take over due to the instant recognisability of the names? Perfume and fashion famously became linked in 1921 with Russian migr perfumer Ernest Beauxs creation of Chanel No 5 for Gabrielle Chanel. Before that, perfume was created by perfumers; having it created by fashion designers was considered as weird as its being created by car manufacturers or bakers. No 5s success took perfume and made it the unconquerable province of designers, and in a sense its absolutely no weirder, nor more unlikely or illogical, for perfume to be designed by actors and singers than it is for it to be designed by people who makes clothes. I assume perfume is going to be increasingly colonized by other categories of people, and eventually were going to see the Republican and Democrat perfumes, the Mercedes perfume, the IBM and Apple perfumes. In fact Steve Jobs is an idiot if he doesnt create a scent logo for his products.

Part 3. Christopher Brosius and why we don't perceive perfume as art

I actually dont remember why my editor wanted this cut, and I strenuously disagreed with himand still do; I love this sectionbut you pick your battles, and I gave up on this. The fact is that perfume as an art form is limited biologically by the sense of smell. Christopher Brosius once commented to me, "Maybe the reason we dont perceive perfume to be art is that its almost impossible to experience it as a group." Maybe the problem is that smell in homo sapiens can't convey much intellectual information. Touch is perhaps the most restricted sense. For communicating information, touch basically gives you rough, smooth, hot, sharp. It's "Yo, this razory thing could slit open a vein" or it's "This soft thing would make me very happy if I were lying next to it" and thats it. When you touch a piece of Thai silk, you can blend the data with the visual and arrive at sophisticated judgments from "rare and beautiful and $400/yard" to "cheap. But unless you're blind, by itself touch gives you an intellectual process that's about as complicated as "Smooth. Nice. Like. Good. Rough. Hard. Danger. Bad." Touch is a pretty stupid sense. We've evolved such that two senses, seeing and hearing, convey massive amounts of information, two huge pipelines pouring into our brains. They're the most intelligent senses for homo sapiens, the wide bandwidth senses. Our brains can assimilate so much more, in so much more detail and with such greater accuracy via the eyes and ears. So a painting, a stop sign, directions to the restaurant, the look on the guy's face as he gives you the directions will convey worlds to us. Combine them both in a song and pack the greatest punch. Last night I slept in sheets the color of fire Tonight I lie alone again and curse my own desire Sentenced first to burn and then to freeze And watch by the window

Where the boys grow in the trees A scent? Your dog goes out, and everything is covered in writing, blasting signals, but this is because he's neurologically set up to read it all. This molecule is X and X is left by Y, and Y comes by Z times and is R feet tall and likes to eat T and, now this molecule, this is lovely, B leaves it when she urinates, and it means she's eaten K and she's sexually receptive, note to self, and, wow, those molecules are L and P, and they're On and on. If you had the dog's information in written form, you could do the same, but you don't. "I used to have a labrador," Brosius told me, "who developed a bizarre spinal menengitis, and the vet said 5% of these dogs dont make it, and so I drove through to the vet hospital five hours away in blinding snow, but he was my dog and my friend and I was going to do whatever it took to make sure he got better, which ultimately he didnt. So just before he had to be put down, he was completely blind, and his back legs were paralyzed, so I had to hold up his back legs with a towel. And it had just snowed the night before, and even so he raced out into that snowy field with me running behind him supporting his back half, and he started to sniff, and I realized he knew more about that field than I ever could."