Comme des Garcons for H&M

Yayoi Kusamainstallation view, Infinity Mirror Room, Phalli's Field (or Floor Show) 1965 (no longer extant); reconstructed 1998. From artnet.

Perfume Shrine has already posted a review of the new Comme des Garcons for H&M scent, and I'll throw in my own polka dotted two cents.

(In an interview, Jeff Koons said that the key to his success was polka dotted shirts. When he was selling memberships at the MoMA, in his signature shirts and suspenders, he managed to pull off "zany, yet inoffensive", apparently the magical cocktail for commercial success.)

So nu, CdGH&M is very pop, a perfect distillation of the CdG aesthetic. I was expecting a bland citrus like the energy series, because that would have been zany enough. (Dianu!) But no, they upped the ante, combining the larger than life smoky birch-tar/cedar of an amped up Hinoki with a fizzy citrus top note almost as an after thought. Like the clothing collection which sticks with dots as a major theme, and drives it home, the fragrance goes big and bold. (And much bigger and bolder than I would have expected.) H&M is not the place for subtle artistry, and the scent is as loud and brash as wood can be. Very cool.


David Ellis, DRUM PAINTING PROJECT, V5.0 2005



Sorry, I couldn't resist:

From the Yatzer design link to the restoration of Anthony Auerbach's Empire State Pavilion at the Queens Museum.

I was touched, (as I often am) by posts in Christopher Brosius' Blog. He describes the unusual connection he felt towards a stranger wearing his very personal Wild Hunt fragrance. The scent is brilliant, and in conjuring up the scent of a summer forest it has brought back my own memories of growing up.

Summers, my friends and I took a bus from our homes in Queens out to our summer arts day camp each morning. It was almost a two hour journey, so about half way we changed buses at a rendez-vous point in Queens. "Rendez-Vous" as we called it was the asphalt playground of a public school where we would wait half an hour for our second bus. But across the street was a small patch of wooded park which to us was a forest. We would explore the secluded reaches of the forest (often by necessity since Rendez-Vous had no bathrooms), and a friend who grew up in Russia even took us mushroom picking in this small green plot of land in eastern Queens.

Wild hunt is this quest, for an urban nature. Tamed in a bottle, we can find it daily, at the resting points in our journeys.

It's like a remote control for your smell-o-vision. I just found this ten channel olfactometer by clicking on one of my own ads. Targeted advertising is amazing some times.

Viva la vulva!

Judy Chicago (American, b. 1939). The Dinner Party, 1974–79. On view Brooklyn Museum

Sure, perfumery can be an art, but are there any applications for those who prefer to be shaken, not stirred?

Courtesy of Jezebel I present to you Vulva Original.

"Vulva Original is not a perfume. It is a beguiling vaginal scent which is purely a substance for your own smelling pleasure. Breathe in and enjoy, anytime, anywhere, the scent of a beautiful woman."

VOTE!

Smell-o-vision and Jasper Johns urge you to get out and vote. At least here in Brooklyn, the air is crisp and leaf scented. And if you need to clear your nose from the scent of all this democracy, the coffee today is free. (And if you're as lucky as I was this morning, so are the Red-Blue Doritos of Freedom.)

Fresh - Strawberry Leaves

Sarah Lucas, Spamageddon, 2000 -courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

An homage to the boldest fruit, she who wears her seeds on the outside. Sister to the rose, most feminine of flowers. Strawberry flowers are far worldlier than I, who in my unsophistication was shocked to discover their bottled scent. For in the world of Fresh they smell much like soiled pantyhose.

A wry comment on femininity. Perhaps this scent is a thesis project on the capitalist evisceration of the female body, extruded into bottles and sold as un elixir charnel. Conceptually astute, but I fear this is a scent I can recreate more cost effectively by embracing the lacuna between my own body and soap.

Still, bonus points for listing the ingredients: Alcohol, Fragrance, Water, Limonene, Hexyl Cinnamal, Linalool, Citral, Citronellol, Geraniol, Isoeugenol, Benzyl Benzoate, Alpha-Isomethly Ionone, BHT