Who Wore It Best: Christine Ohuruogu vs. Serena Williams

The smallest of questions can impel the most vociferous judgements and debates: in grammar, in philosophy, in sociology, but most of all in matters of aesthetics. We do not believe that our eyes can lie to us. ‘Who wore it best?’ implicates a primal dual as much as it does centuries of human refinement. It is a question we are bound to ask ourselves anytime we see two similar or dissimilar people wearing somewhat similar items of dress.

This series will succeed in capturing not only the fashion zeitgeist, and emerging trends or brazen singularities, but also frozen moments in the history of time. For some of the pieces in this series will be archival, delving into a long and rich past of people wearing clothes, and their clothes vaguely or less vaguely resembling the clothes worn by others. At issue are fashion’s broadest strokes and most minute details: sweeping concepts may be compared as often as certain designers and specific items of clothing. A vivid and sympathetic visual imagination may be required to navigate apparently disparate garments, and to discover the hidden connections which lie between.

The first piece in this series features 400 metres runner Christine Ohuruogu, an Olympic and twice World champion in her chosen event; and Serena Williams, multiple-time Grand Slam tennis victor, and one of the greatest players ever to have adorned her exterior with racket and fuzzy balls.

Christine Ohuruogu raced on Saturday in the Great North CityGames. A concept devised by the ever-innovative Brendan Foster and his Nova International, the Great CityGames see elite athletes competing on specially designed track and field structures, in the hustle of city centres and with spectators afforded the opportunity to stop by and watch free of charge. The Great North CityGames is located on the Quayside between Gateshead and Newcastle, and has been held annually since 2009 on the day before the Great North Run. With the stretch of track running between the Sage Gateshead concert venue and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, this is an eminently suitable place for fashion as well as athletics.

Ohuruogu was one of many athletes who had competed the previous evening in Brussels – the last Diamond League meeting of the season, but one which produced a number of world-leading performances. In the men’s high-jump, Mutaz Essa Barshim recorded the second-best jump of all time at 2.43 metres, beating Bohdan Bondarenko into second place after he managed a still-impressive 2.40-metre leap. The two men jumped 2.42 metres in New York earlier this year, and appear ready to break Javier Sotomayor’s twenty-one-year-old world record of 2.45 metres sometime in 2015. Justin Gatlin achieved the best ever combined time for an athlete running a 100 and 200 metres on the same night: his 100 metres time of 9.77 seconds was the fastest in the world this year, while his 200 metres time was 19.71, combining to better a mark set previously by Ato Boldon.

Renaud Lavillenie established a new world-leading height in the men’s pole vault of 5.93 metres. Barbora Spotakova threw a world-best of 67.99 metres in the women’s javelin. Allyson Felix’s time of 22.02 in the women’s 200 metres saw her take the world lead in the event ahead of Daffne Schippers, who ran a seemingly unbeatable 22.03 in the process of taking gold at last month’s European Athletics Championships. And Mercy Cherono impressed in the women’s 5,000 metres to take the overall victory in the event – and $40,000 in prize money – ahead of Genzebe Dibaba.

On one bank of the Tyne on Saturday, Ohuruogu proved victorious in the women’s 500 metres – a unique event which pitted her against 400 metres hurdler Eilidh Child, and 800 metres competitors Lynsey Sharp, Jenny Meadows, and Alison Leonard. Child won a gold medal at the European Championships in Zurich after taking silver at the Commonwealth Games; and Sharp has bolstered two silver medals with some exceptional performances across recent Diamond League meets. But Ohuruogu has had a relaxed season, and easily possessed the strength to win out over this unusual distance, which saw the five ladies hurtling and jostling down an incline before reaching the track.

As the athletics in Brussels wound down on Friday evening, Serena Williams took to Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York and was soon busily dispatching with Ekaterina Makarova. Makarova’s journey to the semi-finals was exceptional: she progressed against Eugenie Bouchard in the fourth round and Victoria Azarenka in the quarter-finals, and hadn’t lost a set all tournament. Yet Serena beat the twenty-six-year-old Russian 6-1, 6-3 in precisely one hour. So she found her way through to to the 2014 US Open women’s singles final. There on Sunday she faced Caroline Wozniacki. Wozniacki was participating in only her second Grand Slam final – having reached the same stage of the US Open in 2009, only to fall to defeat against a then-returning Kim Clijsters.

Williams reached this year’s final without dropping a set, while Wozniacki had to endure tough battles against Magdalena Rybarikova and Maria Sharapova in the early rounds. And in the final, Williams proved typically too strong and too accurate for her opponent, winning in two sets – 6-3, 6-3 – to claim her sixth US Open crown, and her eighteenth Grand Slam in total. Tying her with Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, in the open era she is behind only Steffi Graf, who reigns supreme with twenty-two titles to her name.

If New York trumps even the Quayside as a centre of world fashion, still by virtue of performing over the weekend on Saturday rather than Sunday, Christine Ohuruogu managed to display her outfit first. She wore a vest with prominent black splotches and spots over a white background; with black side panels and the Adidas stripes running down the sides in white. Her shorts were black with pink trim. And she wore bright pink running trainers. Serena Williams wore an animal print dress in black and white, with a pink Nike logo; and with a ruby headband and ruby print wristband. Her trainers were black with a pink Nike swoosh.

The similarities between the outfits worn by the two ladies rest upon their bold black and white prints, offset by highlights in shades of pink. To call the prints worn by these women merely ‘animal’ would be to resort to the inexact. Animal prints differ from one another. Cheetahs have a fur which is covered with relatively small black spots. Unlike cheetahs, leopards and jaguars possess not spots but rosettes. Rosettes are rose-like markings, comprised of a dark outer line and a lighter inner shading. Jaguar rosettes are larger than leopard rosettes, have thicker lines, and their inner shadings are marked by lines and dots. The image immediately below shows, from left to right, the coats typical of cheetahs, leopards, and jaguars:

So it is clear that Serena Williams wore a leopard print dress. Indeed, she varied during the two weeks of the US Open between the black and white leopard print and a version in pink. On the other hand, it is debatable whether Christine Ohuruogu wore an animal print at all. If it is determined that she did, her animal must surely be some sort of hybrid – showing the solid black of a cheetah’s spots, but with the patternation somewhere between a leopard and a giraffe, and the intensity of the blacks also calling to mind the zebra. Perhaps her wardrobe simply cannot be defined in animal terms. Regardless, of these two highly accomplished and endearing sporting outfits, my modest preference is for Ohuruogu’s.

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Fashioning a World Cup Final: How the BBC Dressed

As their counterparts on ITV opted for a more casual presentation, sans jackets and ties and with open-collared long and short-sleeved shirts and sunglasses – seated at three bar or garden tables somewhere along Ipanema beach – the BBC’s pundits for the World Cup final came dressed in an array of formal ensembles. In a studio located further up the beach, with Ipanema’s mountains providing the backdrop, Gary Lineker, Alan Hansen, Alan Shearer and Rio Ferdinand were not merely wearing suits, staid and nondescript, as Germany faced and ultimately defeated Argentina. Their wardrobes were highly distinct in form, cut, and colour.

Three of the men – Lineker, Hansen, and Ferdinand – wore suits. Boldly yet subtly different, Alan Shearer wore a blue blazer, slightly ruffled, with notch lapels, a natural shoulder and little or no padding. His white shirt sleeves emerged prominently from the arms of his blazer, and showed French cuffs and cufflinks. Saturated, and significantly hidden by the BBC’s stacked tabletop, it was difficult to discern the precise colour of his trousers, which were certainly dark, but may have been black or a deep shade of charcoal. The only member of the BBC team who deigned to wear a pocket square, its vivid purple and white pattern unbecomingly mirrored the purple and white diagonal stripes of his necktie.

To his right, Rio Ferdinand sought almost to revolutionise menswear, with one idiosyncratic choice after another resulting in a challenging complex of popular fashion. His 4×2 double-breasted, indigo blue suit had a shawl collar and decidedly thin lapels. The suit’s buttons seemed to be mother of pearl, and he partnered it with a bright orange knit tie. A gold tie bar appeared just above the right lapel, just below his BBC-supplied microphone. His white shirt had a cutaway collar; and he wore several bracelets in tones of brown around his left wrist.

Alan Hansen – for his final turn on Match of the Day after twenty-two years as the programme’s chief analyst – took the most conservative route, wearing a black suit, with notch lapels and a rope shoulder with padding. His tie was a paisley of azure blue. Meanwhile Gary Lineker’s slim-fitting suit was of a dark blue pinstripe, with peaked lapels. Its provenance, according to accrued information, is the Savile Row tailoring house Spencer Hart – which advertises itself, via a quotation on its website, as ‘A new strain of British Luxury that is far removed from the old-fashioned backdrop of Savile Row tailors’; and which has been worn by such luminaries of the entertainment world as Benedict Cumberbatch, Robbie Williams, and Sean Combs. Lineker’s shirt had a tab collar, from which protruded a thin white-on-black Macclesfield dot tie.

Thus the BBC managed to dress both more formally, and more appropriately for the occasion, and at the same time more playfully than did their poor relations over on ITV. The degree to which this affected the viewing figures enjoyed by the two channels can only be conjectured. Whatever, an average of 12.09 million viewers watched the BBC’s World Cup final broadcast, while just 2.86 million preferred the fare ITV offered.

A Newcastle United supporter, but always ready to lay aside prejudice in the pursuit of objectivity when it comes to matters of dress, this website maintains that Alan Shearer was the best dressed male on this evening concluding the World Cup. His errors were the most egregious: the matching square and tie, while his trousers for all the uncertainty did look suspiciously and perniciously black. His choice of jacket invokes a longstanding debate over which types of shoulder best suit which human beings. While it may generally be accepted that a sloping shoulder or one devoid of all musculature benefits from some shape and padding, it is sometimes asserted that men who are heavily built in the shoulder also require padding to provide a straighter line and a more graceful appearance. Shearer, however, has the physique to pull off such soft expression: his jacket showed his figure while still hanging elegantly about him. It is for the construction and colour of his blazer – and for the daring to wear one rather than a suit – that he wins this website’s acclaim.

All four men went with the four-in-hand tie knot. Hansen’s version was probably the best – Lineker’s knot with a thin tie was too short and stubby, while Shearer’s and Ferdinand’s were too thick – but he could have done with cinching it more firmly about his collar. His suit fitted him well and it was complemented by his choice of tie, but altogether the outfit was far from inspiring, and it had a touch too much padding. Lineker’s shoulders were a little pointy, but his combination of patterns was accomplished, the peaked lapels a logical choice for the show’s host, and his suit was a good fit. However, while Shearer and Hansen had their jackets unbuttoned while sitting down, Lineker kept his top button done for the majority of the broadcast, which meant that some pulling was unavoidable as he gesticulated over the match.

Ferdinand’s outfit wasn’t appalling, but it evinced a clash of elements which were far from perfect in and of themselves. The relatively high buttoning point of his double-breasted suit, and the fact that he buttoned the top row of buttons, made him seem constrained in the upper body. A thin shawl collar did nothing to help a thick, bright and textured orange tie. There is room for arguing too that his jacket buttons clashed with the orange, and ought to have been more subdued. Numerous wiseacres on Twitter posited that his outfit made him look like a flight attendant; the position that he looked like a flight attendant for a budget airline was gratuitous. Whatever, he surely flew home from Brazil pleased – before signing for Queens Park Rangers –  with his overall performance, having spoken eloquently throughout the tournament and surely consolidated a career path upon his retirement from the pitch. And so there’s nothing really to worry about, aside from being a little run-down.

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Eau d’Hermès, by Edmond Roudnitska

Eau d’Hermès is one of Edmond Roudnitska’s lesser known and lesser celebrated masterpieces; sought and treasured in the undergrowth as Femme, for Rochas, and Diorissimo, Eau Sauvage and Diorella, all for Dior, bask in the sun.

Femme was one of Roudnitska’s early perfumes, and the first he developed for Marcel Rochas, coming out months after the liberation of Paris, at the end of 1944. Through the remainder of the 40s, he continued to create for Rochas, with Mousseline, Mouche and La Rose, all now discontinued; and Moustache, a masculine encouraged by his wife Thérèse, which appeared in 1949. In 1946, he established Art et Parfum, with its laboratory in the Parisian suburb of Bécon les Bruyères – where Guerlain had based their production from 1894.

Diorama, from 1948, was Roudnitska’s first perfume for Dior. Luca Turin, in lamenting the state of the fragrance today, describes the ‘stupendous original’ as ‘a sunny orange-peel version of Mitsouko’. Eau Fraîche followed in 1955; and Diorissimo a year later in 1956, significant as a synthetic reconstruction of the scent of lily-of-the-valley, whose extract cannot be obtained naturally. 1966 saw Eau Sauvage; and Diorella came in 1972, bearing ‘all the hallmarks of Roudnitska’s mature style… a rich, woody-floral accord at once sweet and bracing, very abstract and of no definite sex’.

Eau d’Hermès came out in 1951, in the middle of Roudnitska’s career. It was his only creation for Hermès. Promoted initially as a unisex perfume, it is frequently categorised as a masculine owing to its accords of spices and leather notes, and its civet. The fragrance opens boldly with top notes of bergamot and lavender, accompanied from the first by the cumin and cinnamon which distinguish the perfume and persist throughout. It is this accord of spices which has given Eau d’Hermès the reputation of smelling somewhat like sweat; joined later by the civet, the fragrance is often described as dirty, sensuous, and animalistic, and divides opinion especially on first encounter.

The heart notes comprise jasmine, sandalwood, birchwood, cedar and vanilla. The drydown is rich, subtle and in my experience long-lasting, with the leather notes and civet prominent. Roudnitska reportedly wanted the fragrance to smell something like the inside of a Hermès leather bag; while the civet, traditionally obtained from the civet cat’s perineal glands, and described as ‘powerfully fecal’, is now synthetic.

The shape of Eau d’Hermès bears resemblance with Aimé Guerlain’s Jicky, which also possesses a bergamot-citrus opening, a jasmine-woody middle, and basenotes of vanilla and civet. Yet the spices of Eau d’Hermès change the balance of the perfume: in contrast to Jicky’s gradual development, Eau d’Hermès opens more stridently and more revealingly, with the succeeding notes layered atop one another and less easy to distinguish. Still, the fragrance remains restrained and never overpowering, warm on the skin; and suits any season and any time of day.

Roudnitksa’s perfume fell entirely out of favour until Hermès began re-marketing it in the early 1990s. Beginning in 1993, commemorative limited editions of the perfume were produced: 500 each year, sold only at Hermès stores, and coming in hand-etched crystal bottles. The 1993 edition featured an etched horse and rider; 1994 saw a variation with an etched Pegasus; and by the final run in 2002, the bottle displayed an etched carriage – all tying in with Hermès’ equestrian logo. These limited editions sold for as much as $1,000 a time.

Since then, Eau d’Hermès has again fallen into relative obscurity. It is not easy to find today outside of Hermès stores. Jean-Claude Ellena has been greatly influenced by Roudnitska: his Déclaration, for Cartier, created in 1998, shares Eau d’Hermès’ citrus opening and pronounced cumin; and Ellena wrote a portrait of Roudnitska in 1999, in which he remarked on the influence of Kant’s aesthetic theory – elaborated in the first part of Kant’s Critique of Judgement – upon Roudnitska, who in 1976 published his own L’Esthétique en Question: Introduction à une Esthétique de l’Odorat. Ellena has been the ‘nose’ of Hermès, their in-house perfumer, since 2004, creating a host of new perfumes and overseeing the reformulation of some of Hermès’ older classics. It is his Terre d’Hermès, from 2006, with its grapefruit and vetiver, which is typically forwarded by Hermès when one seeks a masculine fragrance.

Having sought Eau d’Hermès when living in York but to little avail, I purchased a bottle at the Hermès store in Amsterdam – along P.C. Hooftstraat, between the Vondelpark and the Museumplein – on my first visit to the city, before determining to move here last autumn. A polite manner and pleasant visage secured six samples, four of which are pictured below, all by Ellena: Vanille Galante and Osmanthe Yunnan, from the Hermèssence collection; Terre d’Hermès; and Eau de Pamplemousse Rose.

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Jean-Claude Ellena’s ‘Portrait’ of Roudnitska, in French: http://www.art-et-parfum.com/textes/ellenaus.htm

Elena Vosnaki’s review of Eau d’Hermès at Perfume Shrine: http://perfumeshrine.blogspot.nl/2010/01/hermes-eau-dhermes-fragrance-review.html

Turin, L. & Sanchez, T. Perfumes: The A-Z Guide (Vicenza; Profile Books, 2009)

2013 Oscars Best Dressed: The Definitive Analysis

In their lamentable haste to set the agenda and furnish the world with their opinion on the best and the worst Oscar garments, most publications released their merely subjective takes on this matter in the hours and days immediately succeeding the ceremony which marked the 85th Academy Awards. A week, or the best part of a week, may seem a long time in which to consider outfits. In fact, I did not stay awake to watch the Oscars on Sunday night; instead watching it in parts over the following two evenings. And in the time which has elapsed since those evenings I have been considering those outfits which I saw carefully, so as to give them their proper due.

My analysis of 2013 Oscar dresses and dinner suits will be pictorial and broadly thematic, with themes indicated by way of headings.

Best Actress Contenders

Jennifer Lawrence beat out Jessica Chastain to win Best Actress for her part in Silver Linings Playbook; but I think Chastain edged Lawrence when it came to their respective garments. Jennifer Lawrence looks perfectly lovely, but in all truth I’m not convinced that her dress complements her ideally: its roundness doesn’t suit the roundness of her cheeks; nor do its three curves suitably adorn her hips. Perhaps the fault lies with the second curve, which comes in too much before moving into the skirt. Jessica Chastain, meanwhile, looks glamorous in an Armani dress which obviously complements her hair – though some commentators spoke and wrote as though this similarity of colour emerged only slowly, unapparent at first, then appearing as a sun through clouds.

Double-Breasted Dinner Jackets

Both Hugh Jackman – pictured here with his wife, Deborra-Lee Furness – and Chris Pine wore six-button double-breasted dinner suits, both with buttons in a keystone pattern, Jackman’s with a shawl collar and Pine’s with peaked lapels. Both look good. There are a few issues, however, with Pine’s outfit. Where Jackman has left his bottom-right button undone, creating a pleasant and relaxed diagonal when the jacket is in motion, Pine has left both bottom buttons unfastened; and though his jetted pockets are traditionally correct, their positioning aligned with the unbuttoned button holes together appear cluttered. More, Pine’s trousers seem a little tight in the thighs, and taper too much into an excess of fabric round his feet. Jackman’s trousers, on the other hand, break perfectly.

Pale Tones

Apparently, so it has come to light, the dress Amanda Seyfried is pictured wearing above bore such similarities to the Valentino dress Anne Hathaway intended to wear to the ceremony that Hathaway ditched the Valentino fairly last minute, and went with the above Prada creation instead. This has caused all sorts of consternation, not least because Hathaway has been a long-time and much publicised wearer of Valentino.

Perhaps some things turn out for the best, for both ladies attended the Oscars wearing pale dresses, but in very different styles; and as both looked excellent, a victory was thereby obtained on behalf of variety. Anne Hathaway is supremely elegant in her pale pink dress, and I think all claims and concerns regarding its chest area were very much overplayed. Amanda Seyfried’s dress seems to have divided opinion, some saying it washes her out; I disagree, and instead admire the neck and the shape.

Foregoing the Bow Tie

Jean Dujardin was dressed impeccably last year, when he and The Artist swept the awards. Much discussion in the build to this ceremony centred round concepts of sexism and xenophobia and the film Zero Dark Thirty: were the Academy guilty of sexism in failing to nominate Kathryn Bigelow for best director; and did the depiction of torture in the film support the idea that America can disregard morals and laws in their pursuit of information? In all earnestness, one may wonder whether the real scandals of sexism and xenophobia do not involve instead Jean Dujardin, emblematic of male actors in Hollywood who do not speak an Anglicised or Americanised form of English, and are therefore marginalised, their talents wasted in lesser and infrequent roles; or else they’re made light of, as Seth MacFarlene, this year’s host, made cruel and unnecessary light of Dujardin.

As for his attire this time round, both he and Liev Schreiber, among others, wore plain silk ties rather than bow ties with their dinner suits. Indeed, the regular tie, usually tied in a four-in-hand-knot, is an increasingly common but nevertheless non-traditional substitute for a bow. It is non-traditional for a reason, for it is not an optimal solution to black tie. In theory, perhaps the higher buttoning point of Liev Schreiber’s jacket should offset the incongruity of the long tie. In this comparison, however, I think Jean Dujardin comes off best. His jacket is better for being slightly fuller and longer; his trousers are a better length; and the single-button jacket at least emphasises that he is wearing a dinner jacket. Schreiber’s dinner suit looks too much like a regular black suit.

Architectural Dresses

I am not convinced that either of these dresses worked out for the individuals involved. Anne Hathaway’s short haircut suits her well; but whilst I’ve liked Charlize Theron particularly since Young Adult a couple of years ago, her short hair is too severe, and doesn’t have her looking her best. I don’t see the logic to the top half of her outfit, or find flattering the way it protrudes from her waist. Kelly Rowland so nearly pulls her dress off, but not quite: viewed from the front, it is just a little too architectural and jutting at the top.

Award-Appropriate Attire

All three of the producers who ascended the stage to receive Argo‘s award for Best Picture look good. Ben Affleck’s outfit is the most stimulating, comprising a fairly typical modern five-button waistcoat (without lapels, and, alas, Affleck has buttoned all of his waistcoat buttons), wing collar, and pleated shirt front. Grant Heslov’s dinner jacket fits him well, and he offers a contrast in shirt studs. George Clooney went for a somewhat louche look, spending most if not all of the evening with his dinner jacket undone, and without a waist-covering underneath, instead displaying the satin waistband of his trousers.

I do wonder – taking the cases of Dujardin and Clooney, for instance – whether some men deliberately dress down when they appreciate that they are not to be the focus of an evening’s attention. Dujardin’s long tie and Clooney’s casual appearance perhaps reflect the fact that the former was presenting rather than receiving an award this year, whilst the latter was keen to allow Affleck his moment.

It is interesting also to note the same three men’s attires for the British Academy of Film and Television Awards. Argo won Best Picture at the BAFTAs too, but all three men wore long silk ties for the ceremony. It may be that they hoped a more prestigious moment awaited them. Here, Heslov looks the best with his peaked lapels and well-cinched four-in-hand. Affleck’s dinner jacket seems to pull a little, and his tie isn’t tied effectively; whereas Clooney’s combination of shawl collar and long tie doesn’t work.

Silver and Black

Halle Berry’s Versace outfit is too strong in the shoulders, exacerbated by the thick stripes of the shoulder pieces. I much prefer Stacy Keibler’s take on silver and black, with its high neckline, sweeping pattern and belted waist.

The Younger Gentlemen

The buttoning point of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s dinner jacket is too high, its quarters too closed, and he could possibly have used some padding around the shoulders. As it is, he is all hips. Eddie Redmayne’s outfit is very fashion-forward: very slim fitting, with short jacket, and with slippers by Alexander McQueen. I don’t like the slippers, and I think the dinner suit is too small throughout. Daniel Radcliffe’s pockets display an interesting variety, jetted pocket on the right hip, flap pocket on the left; regardless, his suit fits him really well.

Bold Colours

I will limit my thoughts here towards suggesting that all of these ladies wore bold colour well; and we should appreciate them for it at least until next year. An additional thought: the black diagonals on Reese Witherspoon’s blue dress seem an almost overly and overtly simple device, but they function so effectively and suggestively to depict her waist.

Django Unconstrained by the Proprieties of Formal Evening Wear

These makers of Django Unchained appear more brazen in their choice of dress than they do in their choice of film: Django is an entertaining film which never lagged for me despite its length (and more, I was content with Tarantino’s role within it), but it also felt fairly formulaic. Samuel L. Jackson’s burgundy velvet jacket, with shawl collar, manages to be neither formulaic nor especially entertaining, offset by grey shirt and off-black trousers. Jamie Foxx – at the Oscars with his daughter – wore a well fitting suit with black satin peaked lapels, but I’m not fond of the black shirt and, again, it’s a dinner suit that looks too much like a regular suit in its cut and in some of its features. Quentin Tarantino looked willfully disheveled, with open collar and tie slung anyhow.

Christoph Waltz, however, always appears precisely and pleasingly fitted; and so this picture may serve as a reward for reading to the close of this piece.

‘Madame George’ and Guerlain’s Shalimar: A Portal to Perfumery

If asked, and obliged to be concise, I would name Astral Weeks by Van Morrison as my favourite album; and ‘Madame George’ from that album as my favourite song. This article isn’t intended as an extensive exploration of the album’s music or themes; it doesn’t recount my own listening experiences of the song as a form of personal history; and it doesn’t fully attempt to define or explain what I feel about it. Instead, it is a brief history of how the album and the song came about; and a depiction of how it encouraged, in turn, an interest in a particular perfume.

Van Morrison’s band, Them, after touring America for a couple of months but returning to Ireland neither moneyed nor content with their management, disbanded in 1966. Morrison signed a contract in haste with Bang Records – a label just then founded by Bert Berns, who had produced some of Them’s recordings – and in early 1967 travelled back to America, to New York, and recorded over two days a group of songs which Bang Records released as the album Blowin’ Your Mind!. Morrison, apparently neither consulted or made aware of the release, was thoroughly displeased, believing the songs he had recorded would only be released as singles and that they did not, together, comprise a coherent stream of music.

One of the songs from the album which was released as a single, ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, reached the top ten of the American charts in the middle of 1967. Owing to the terms of the contract he had signed, in neither the short nor the long term did its success furnish Morrison with financial reward. Increasingly in dispute with Berns – who made it difficult for Morrison to get gigs in New York; and who failed to provide anything approaching assistance when Morrison faced visa problems, eventually solved when he married his American girlfriend – Morrison relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts. He began performing, with a small band comprising acoustic guitar, double bass and flute, some songs around Cambridge and Boston which he’d written and kept to himself over the past several years. Motivated by ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, some producers from Warner Bros. attended one of these performances; the group included Lewis Merenstein, part of Inherit Productions with whom Warner Bros. had a working relationship; and Merenstein, moved in particular by a performance of ‘Astral Weeks’, determined to sign Morrison and set to work on an album.

Astral Weeks, in essence Morrison’s debut, was released in November 1968. Merenstein’s partner at Inherit, Bob Schwaid, had succeeded amidst fraught and acrimonious circumstances in freeing Morrison, albeit with stipulations by which Morrison did not quite abide, from his contract with Bang; Warner Bros. ultimately buying Morrison’s contract out. Astral Weeks was recorded over three sessions, with its eight songs ultimately drawn from two of the three: the first, taking place on the evening of September 25; and the last, on the evening of October 15. The middle session, on October 1, apparently took place in the morning, which the musicians involved have explained didn’t provide the right sort of feel for the music they were engaging with. There is a palpable sense of the evening through Astral Weeks; an impression of the fading of the outward light, consummate with an intensifying of the inner. The musicians that the recordings brought together were talented and experienced; the two most prominent, double-bassist Richard Davis and guitarist Jay Berliner, having previously worked on two of the greatest jazz albums of all time: Davis on Eric Dolphy’s 1964 album, Out to Lunch!, Berliner on Charles Mingus’ 1963 work, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.

‘Madame George’ was one of four songs recorded during the first session, alongside ‘Cyprus Avenue’, ‘Beside You’, and the title composition. Despite the pedigree of the musicians, it remains one of the miracles of art that a collection of people who had not worked with each other before, and who played without lead sheets – which provided the musicians significant freedom of expression – came together and made these four pieces in one sitting. John Cale was working in an adjacent studio, and years later reported that, ‘Morrison couldn’t work with anybody, so finally they just shut him in the studio by himself. He did all the songs with just an acoustic guitar, and later they overdubbed the rest of it around his tapes’. This account doesn’t appear quite true: Morrison recorded concurrently with the rest of the musicians, but apparently somewhat isolated, in a separate vocal booth. Yet the resultant music transcends music, inseparable from the heart and the soul of Van Morrison developed and revealed in his singing.

‘Madame George’ was originally called ‘Madame Joy’, and first recorded while Van Morrison was still with Bang Records. A version of the song, titled ‘Madame George’ but with Morrison singing ‘Madame Joy’ throughout, was released on the 1973 album put out by Bang against Morrison’s wishes, T.B. Sheets (Columbia later compiled the same recordings on a 1991 release, Bang Masters). Whereas the titular song indicates – in its surging rhythmic claustrophobia, its emotion, its closeness to suffering – what was to come on Astral Weeks, the version of ‘Madame George’ on T.B. Sheets is much looser, drawing more from R&B and funk than jazz, coming in at half the length, and with an atmosphere of the pub or the club, emphasised by the audible background chatter and drinking.

As it appears on Astral Weeks, the song is a ten-minute recollection, a monologue in which the speaker recalls tenderly a scene from his youth, a character, and their physical passing but emotional and metaphysical remains. The speaker pulls the scene apart and places it together piece by piece, talking himself explicitly through his recollection, recounting to himself ‘That’s when you fall’, and the moment ‘You know you gotta go / On a train from Dublin up to Sandy Row, / Throwing pennies at the bridges down below, / In the rain, hail, sleet and snow’. The music critic Lester Bangs, in a beautiful piece of writing published in 1979, refers to the title character of the song as a ‘lovelorn drag queen’, and this seems indisputable from the song’s lyrics and gestures, though some have read ‘George’ as a reference to heroin. What follows are the song’s opening lines:

Down on Cyprus Avenue

With a childlike vision slipping into view

The click and clacking of the high-heeled shoe

Ford and Fitzroy Madame George

–

Marching with the soldier boy behind

He’s much older now with hat on drinking wine

And that smell of sweet perfume comes drifting through

The cool night air like Shalimar

The House of Guerlain was founded in 1828 in Paris by Pierre-François Pascal Guerlain, a chemist who moved into cosmetics, began to focus on perfumery, and had increasing success – often creating personalised perfumes, with Balzac one of his clients – in a fledgling market. Pierre-François was able to open a store on the prestigious rue de la Paix in 1840; and in 1853 he became the official perfumer of Emperor Napoleon III, creating Eau de Cologne Impériale for Empress Eugénie. When Pierre-François died in 1864, with Guerlain well established in Paris and receiving commissions from royalty across Europe, the perfumery passed to his sons, Aimé and Gabriel. They took respectively the responsibilities of master perfumer and commercial manager: the one worked on the fragrances whilst the other took care of finances, production and marketing.

The perfume which Aimé Guerlain is most remembered for today is Jicky. It stands as the oldest perfume in continual existence, created in 1889 and produced on the same lines, with the same notes, ever since. Aimé was motivated to utilise, for the first time in perfumery, synthetic alongside natural ingredients in his composition. For its lavender and vanilla accord, Aimé took natural bergamot and lavender, and added to these synthetic vanillin – a relatively recent development by German scientists Ferdinand Tiemann, Wilhelm Haarmann and Karl Reimer – and synthetic coumarin and linalool. The vanillin used by Guerlain was procured from De Laire, a laboratory in France which had bought the patent from the Germans; and the vanillin it produced was an impure grade, leaving several residual chemicals which continued to provide Guerlain’s perfumes with their distinctive vanilla note well into the next century. Appreciation for Jicky slowly grew; and though marketed as a feminine perfume, its bold and revolutionary scent saw it worn by many men.

Jacques Guerlain, Aimé’s nephew and an inspiration for Jicky, took over as master perfumer in 1895. He created a string of celebrated fragrances, including Après L’Ondée, L’Heure Bleue, and Mitsouko, before creating Shalimar in 1921. The apocryphal tale of its development goes that Jacques, by way of experiment, simply poured whole a sample of vanillin into a bottle of Jicky – and Shalimar was the result. Its top note is of bergamot; its middle combines the floral notes of jasmine, rose and iris with a characteristically herbal thyme; and its base notes comprise that strong dose of vanillin, coumarin, opoponax and civet. Shalimar was re-released in 1925 in a bottle designed by Raymond Guerlain, and made by the crystal house Baccarat, and has been in continual production since. It was important in establishing Guerlain outside of France. It stands considered the classic oriental fragrance, the flagship perfume of the House of Guerlain.

An old and much missed Van Morrison website, once hosted at harbour.sfu.ca, notified me in my youth what the mention of Shalimar in ‘Madame George’ explicitly referred to. The song, with its sense of Shalimar’s sweet scent, drifting and lingering in the cool night-time air, both motivated and supported my fledgling interest in perfumery: there was an obvious impulse towards sharing something of the song’s atmosphere, something of its world. Shalimar was one of the first two perfumes I bought around three or four years ago – alongside Guerlain’s Vetiver – and I wear it whenever I feel so inclined.

Lester Bangs’ essential piece on Astral Weeks: https://personal.cis.strath.ac.uk/murray.wood/astral.html

An excellent blog on perfumery by Elena Vosnaki, which explains the chemistry of Shalimar in great detail: http://perfumeshrine.blogspot.nl/2008/09/shalimar-by-guerlain-review-and-history.html