confessions of an anglophile

This was going to be a jovial little piece of perfume writing on the defunct house of Dukes of Pall Mall, the origin of my blog moniker and a bit of a fetish of mine - not just because their two perfumes, Cotswold and Belgravia, were indeed amazingly well-made, high-quality fragrances, but because I harbor an irrational fondness for the faded culture of the English gentleman and chap. A figure which could still instill hatred and mockery in the 70s as a principal symbol of British classism (Monty Python's upper class twit sketch would be a classic example)  but has meanwhile become so marginal it can actually now serve as a position from which to satirically and self-ironically observe the new inanities of  cool Britannia - witness chap hop. As London is once again burning, and a whole lot of other places, I started to wonder to what extent the inflexibility of the class system, in which the insignias of gentility from Savile Row suits to a shave at Trumper's were vital cultural capital, has contributed to the current malaise - Britain taking last place among all developed nations in terms of social mobility is a telling fact. What I didn't wonder about for a moment, was the extent to which 30 years of unbridled neoliberalism, whether of the Tory or New Labour variety, have turned much of the sceptere'd isle into a social wasteland of consumerist zombies (a fact the brilliant Shaun of the Dead made abundantly clear in the most hilarious way possible). In fact, these emotionally numbed mobs destroying their very own communities, armed with blackberries, apolitical, antisocial, narcissistic to the core, with nothing on their mind but loot, since their value system exclusively revolves around generating self-worth through sporting vaunted consumer goods (cultural capital!) are simply the underclass version of city bankers, brokers and hedgefund managers who have torched thousands of communities and wrecked innumerable businesses while piling up bonuses. These rioters are not rising up against the system, they are emulating it with the available means at hand. City bankers and Croydon wankers, tearing apart society from both ends.
Back to perfume (sort of): I say this not in self-defense of a personal favorite: but the old-fashioned classism embodied by Dukes of Pall Mall looks almost quaint beside the shallow and vain "American Psycho" consumerism of "luxe pour luxe" vanity, represented, for one, by the inanely priced Clive Christian fragrances, and the niche perfumery business as a whole, which, let's face it, has fed heavily upon the massive redistribution of wealth from the many to the few which has been going on in the US and UK for decades under the guise of free markets, deregulation, tax cuts for those who don't need them and other Chicago School oddities. Those with less and less money keep up the facade of middle-class affluence by piling up debt and the ones with nothing will evidently smash windows.   Economically, socially and psychologically, the hyper-consumerism of postmodern capitalism has become a dead end. Replacing communities (public space) with shopping malls (consumer space), self-improvement with self-gratification and emotions with commodities is turning people (and then their neighborhoods) into burned-out wrecks, self- and world-loathing sociopaths or, at best, alienated shopping junkies.
Is a new asceticism the answer? Hardly. There's plenty of drabness in Tottenham already. Apart from the political necessity of restoring true social democracy, i.e. a society sincerely aiming to include, to meet out social justice and ensure true equality of opportunity through education and public services, we need to turn to enlightened hedonism, to indulge in pleasures that put us in touch with ourselves rather than providing surrogates for real life. I'm not saying that Utopia will be achieved by way of Guerlain. But if you can learn to see the beauty of a perfume, rather than its worth as cultural capital, perhaps you can also learn to see the beauty in yourself, rather than accepting the S&P rating you're stamped with by society. And people who can accept themselves as they are have no need to vent an inner rage on others, or establish their worth through symbolic consumption, whether as shopaholics or looters. Stop burning down houses, start burning credit cards, then go smell some roses.        

Penhaligon's Shenanigans

I'd love to own a suit by Norton & Sons. That's the Savile Row bespoke tailoring establishment featured in Penhaligon's campaign for their most recent release Sartorial. The choice makes sense as Norton's current owner Patrick Grant is trying to straddle the low-key conservatism and discretion that defines Savile Row houses and the contemporary branding necessary to keep an operation in the black these days. Penhaligon's, while no longer British-owned, plays on its Victorian heritage, while its fragrances have meanwhile become quite contemporary and certainly lack the exclusivity - and sadly too often the quality - of a £ 5000 suit. If I were managing this house, I'd release a nearly-all-natural, über-quality line of historical scents at £ 1000 a pop to show Creed and Clive Christian what luxury REALLY means and build some neo-Victorian upstairs-only cachet - but that's a different story. Quite. For as Octavian Coifan has argued, convincingly, I believe, Sartorial is really Marks & Sparks in bespoke drag, i.e. a very nice, middle-brow 1970s fougère with a Duchaufour update and a touch of luxury. When I "haze" Sartorial on, I can look past the modernist metallic ozonism which is supposed to represent the shears and steam of a tailor's workshop. Applied directly last week, though, this Eau de Toilette went through an uncanny evolution on my skin. It started off smelling like some cheap toilet cleaner, the likes of which is encountered in public buildings, schools etc. Just nasty no-budget functional perfumery stuff - forget all the fancy bespoke imagery. It next progressed to a poor-man's Burt Reynolds retro-macho-cheapo-deodorant product. Slowly it approached the level of haute - well, sort of - parfumerie (cheap Rive Gauche knock off?). At last (all this was taking much too long considering the price tag) the high quality beeswax note started to take over and things fell into their proper place to make a nice, allround masculine with a touch of elegance. And curiously reminiscent of Dukes of Pall Mall's Belgravia, a forgotten EdT from 1983 which is also a beeswaxy fougère, but made from far better materials. What I learned from this is firstly, that Sartorial is the kind of fragrance for me, where mode of application is a vital factor and secondly, that I will wear Belgravia with my Savile Row suit. Which is not from Norton & Sons, but a vintage (of course) piece by James&James.

emperor's clothes

I have spent a delightful week in London, my favorite city, and despite the challenges and physical exhaustion that come with a 2.5 year old on an urban vacation, everybody had a good time. Daughter at Coram's Fields and the zoo , mom at the Tate and dad in Jermyn Street .
London is a great place for food and fragrance and like anywhere else in the world, there are renowned locations or products considered the epitome of quality and refinement. Sometimes these institutions are quite old and they have stuck to their principles and remain beacons of a past time. Others are merely facades behind which principles have been corrupted - or haven't kept up with new quality standards. This is all way too abstract, so let's make it practical: Fortnum&Mason is an inevitable address in every London tourist guide and I am not sure whether any native has been seen, on the ground floor at least, as a customer in the last twenty years - it's all full of Germans, Americans and Japanese eagerly buying tea, orange marmalade and other typically British fare at Francis Draconian prices. But just how good are these gold-plated foods? Well, to give you one example, F&M shortbread is not even pure butter, it contains cheap vegetable oils. Good old M&S , on the other hand, does pure butter shortbread (at a fraction of the price). They even have an organic version now and it's pretty tasty, if not quite Walker's.
The Fortnum approach is reminiscent of certain ultra-niche lines, which sell fragrant banalities in a fancy crystal bottle for astronomical prices to people who want to purchase prestige rather than smell good. Clive Christian is the F&M of English perfume - which one could care less about, if he hadn't bought and gutted the very fine Crown Perfumery for the purpose of using their bottle designs, while ending production of their truly well-made classic fragrances.
How refreshing, on the other hand, is the sobriety of Taylor of Old Bond Street, a classical men's grooming establishment that offers a range of simple and effective aftershaves and colognes with no other purpose but to equip the gentleman with the low key smell of the same - at an unpretentious 15 or17 quid a pop. I chose a bottle of Shaving Shop cologne as my souvenir - a fragrance which will remind every man of his father: aromatic citrus, with notable grapefruit and rosemary notes, and a mossy musky wood base - simple and yet strangely alluring, in other words, perfectly masculine.
Let me conclude by saying that we had some wonderful fish dinners at an unpretentious family run place, the North Sea Fish Restaurant in Leigh St., while the definite bummer of the trip was a disastrously bad & expensive meal at renowned eating institution St. John - I should have known that when Brits advertise "simple pared-down" cooking you don't get some kind of ingenious nouvelle cuisine a l'Anglaise, but ineptly boiled (i.e. half-raw) unseasoned cabbage.

Image: Our daughter's giraffe and a typical London view.