It never fails. We get to late February/early March, when it could snow (or be tee-shirt weather) in the mid-Atlantic… and I get a hankering for Paris.
Paris the city I hanker for pretty much all the time; right now I’m referring to YSL Paris. I have two or three vintage bottles, plus a wee vintage of parfum.
Paris is a mystery. I don’t even particularly like rose fragrance, and you could argue (others certainly have) that Paris is the uber-rose. The ur-rose. The mother of all roses. The Frankenstein-meets-Godzilla of roses, heaven help us.
A young Madonna at the 15th anniversary party for Fiorucci at Studio 54, ca. 1983.
Maybe it’s because I wore it back in The Day, with my trendy new-wave cut and my vintage dresses and my Fiorucci earrings (anybody else remember Fiorucci?) It came out when I was in college, and it made me feel wildly sophisticated; at the time my flacon was as close to Paris the city as I could get. I was pretty much broke, and that bottle (at full retail) represented a significant purchase. I wore it until it was gone. Then I moved on to Poison, which came out two years later.
Paris is Sophia Grojsman’s love-letter to roses, from the sweet violet tips of their velvety petals right down to the woody stems. It’s fantastically easy to over-apply even when I’m cautious. I shudder to think of what I smelled like in 1983, but then again you could still smoke in the mall, so I suspect it all blended together nicely. (Maybe fragrances got lighter as the smokers got chased outdoors and everyone regained their sense of smell?)
This was going to be a review of CK2, which I wore on and off for a few days, and about which I can think of nothing to say, except life’s too short to wear CK2. I’m going to wear Paris until everyone in my office starts begging for mercy, and then it’ll be spring.
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