The Party in Manhattan

The Party in Manhattan?  

No, this will not be an account, Woody Allen style, of confused and neurotic love bumblings in the Big Apple. Nor will it be a warts and all exposé of sexual shenanigans in your favourite scent store. Instead it’s a one-off three way perfume review from Patty, March and I. Hope you’re not too disappointed.

A seemingly hush-hush number, unless you’re Italian (seems like it’s everywhere there), this is one of those rarities stocked in Roja Dove’s Haute Parfumerie in Harrods, London. There’s a video out there somewhere with him talking about it. Anyway, here’s a bad translation of the PR puff:

“New York, the 30s, a perfume and cosmetics store opens on Madison Avenue and launches a new perfume. A Perfume now reborn under the name “The Party”. In fact, a very exclusive party, which participates in worldwide entertainment and finance, art and dell’industra, celebrates the debut of a great Fragrance.”  (eh?)

The Party in Manhattan can begin.

“We have created a fragrance of quality in “The Party”, belonging to that emotional and very glamorous world. The gentleman is well combed and elegant, caught lingering in the foyers of Broadway theatres, lifting your sets of suitcases and trunks of leather uphill on the walkways of yachts into Europe, at a bar in Manhattan where, mixed with the scent of Havana cigars, the heat of the drinks are a counterpoint to the thick snowfall that, as you could see from the windows, slowed down the traffic on Park Avenue …“

And here’s some info from http://cosmeticsbusiness.com:

“Paulo Borgomanero, one of the men behind the success of Acqua di Parma, is bringing vintage scent The Party in Manhattan to the UK, and has high hopes for success.

After selling the Acqua di Parma brand to LVMH in 2007, Borgomanero wanted to pursue his dreams of relaunching a 1930s fragrance, inspired by the scent Galore, which had been very popular during that time.

He decided to call the scent The Party in Manhattan after the original scent was launched at a party in New York, attended by a plethora of socialites and Hollywood stars.

Says Borgomanero: “I launched The Party in Manhattan in my native Italy at the end of 2006 and it has been very successful. I really hope that success is replicated in the UK. It is a beautiful chypre scent that transcends generations and comes in beautiful bespoke packaging, evocative of the 1930s. I hope it will appeal to discerning customers who appreciate how special it is.”

The Party in Manhattan comes in a variety of sizes and 100ml retails at £295. It contains top notes of bergamot and sage, middle notes of jasmine and carnation and dries down to a base of ambergris and vetiver. Each scent comes in a handmade box, made with hand-rolled Venetian paper and can be lined in different coloured silk lining if required. Each scent has a solid brass stopper, which can be customised with diamonds, rubies and other precious stones on request.

It is being distributed through Harrods, Fortnum and Mason and Selfridges, by Hornvale, who are managing the distribution in the UK.”

So,  without any further ado, what did we think?

March: The Big Cheese and I share a home office, which is where the mail goes first when it arrives.  I´m constantly getting packages of bottles and decants, and the Cheese has a serious online used-book habit, so it´s hard to say which of us the mail carrier hates more. This week, though, it was probably me.  When my small vial of  The Party in Manhattan showed up you could smell it through its plastic wrapping, through the Tyvek envelope and across the room – and it had not leaked.  It´s just that embracing!  It was so embracing, in fact, that when I sprayed a tiny bit on my wrist the smell engulfed the office in a cloud of scent the likes of which we do not often see.  So much so that the Cheese, who has at this point a remarkably high tolerance for my nasty, acrid meth-lab-potency scents, leaned back and waved his arms in front of his face like he was warding off the Devil, and said the X-rated version of: “My goodness!  That is certainly some strong fragrance you have there, and if you wouldn´t mind terribly, perhaps you could take that particular scent somewhere else?”   Pluto, maybe.

Seriously, though — it´s not that bad.  I´m guessing this is in the style of one of those venerable scents from Guerlain that people would give their eyeteeth to smell.   Like Candide Effluve, I think it´s called, or the other one that smells like goat´s balls in the best possible way.  This is approximately what I thought Coty Chypre would smell like, only it doesn´t (Chypre smells sweeter than I expected, based on my one or two small vintage samples.)

It´s incredibly elegant, and in an unmarked vial I´d have guessed vintage Guerlain or Caron.  It could absolutely sit next to Jicky and Mitsouko, in the extrait.  I am weighing here … it is not intensely animalic.  I mean, I don´t get the laugh-out-loud filthiness of something like Mona di Orio´s Nuit Noire.  I´d put it at Jicky level.   As far as I know the skank horn´s being blown by the vetiver, oakmoss, patch and ambergris, plus some random musks, but not civet, and the jasmine is discreetly indolic, so you don´t get the full unwashed panty (fecal/urine-y).   I think it´s very sexy, but only if you find Jicky and Mitsouko sexy.  There´s also a note of cigarette smoke that adds an interesting, conversely “modern” feel, as if you´re smelling a recreation of a room at a party and all the scents therein, including the wood paneling, the flowers wilting in a vase, and the sweat of drunken people in formal clothing that does not get washed after every wearing.  Given the reaction of the Cheese, the mailman and my children, who acted like the unwashed hordes had just ridden into the room, I suspect I am anosmic to at least some of the musks.  Maybe it´s a lot filthier than I am giving it credit for.

Lee: At first, I did think those decadent Depression babes had left a stack of their unwashed panties in the package Patty posted me. If I say Bal a Versailles extrait you’ll get the drift. Ripe, indolic, faintly scatological in its rich texture, it certainly has the classic nod to the unwashed fullness, the rounded ripeness, the Frenchy pourriture of scents from an earlier era. It’s floral and dirty. (And, as an aside, what is this I keep hearing from the Republican convention about ‘we’re not France’ or ‘we don’t want to be like Europe’. Is this just reported in the UK, or do you hear all that over there too? I thought the French-bashing had faded away…). But then, it becomes leaner, angular, a Mitsouko without the peach, an austere and otherworldly chypre of impossible elegance. A cut glass beauty, oh too young, in a long cocktail dress, cigaretter in filter holder, wan, sardonic smile, a world of smoke surrounding her, drifting impossibly away as the cocktail music (yellow cocktail music, just as in The Great Gatsby) merges with the laughter of a rapidly drunker crowd, increasing your blurred myopia. Like you dreamed it.

Is The Party in Manhattan worth all that money? I haven’t seen the packaging in the flesh, so I can’t say, but it’s one hell of a cleverly blended chypre with the opening stink of an alley cat, and the luxurious purr of a Persian to follow. It’s furry.

Patty: Should I have sent this through through the mail without an XXX on the outer wrapper?  Being alone when I first opened this and spritzed it on, I can’t account for how anyone else reacted, but my reaction was laughter.

The perfumer charged with making this must have screamed with joy when given the sketch and the latitude to make this filty, dirty, skanky, magnificently beautiful creation. It does go on just like Mick’s hotel room the morning after a Stones concert.  The drydown exudes elegance and luxury, while never completely losing that little bit of the very real underside of life behind the carefully made-up face.  You do have to grit your teeth a little for about 10-15 minutes on the open, but just do it, you’ll feel great in a while as the floral bouquet opens and takes away the most lethal qualities of the open.

I can speak to the packaging of The Party in Manhattan, it really is that elegant.  A heavy bottle with a heavy cap and a gorgeous little box to nestle into.  I can’t answer the “is it worth it” question either. For me, it’s one of the most fascinating things I’ve smelled in a good, long while.  I’ve smelled the old Candide Effluve and Bouquet Faunes and other Guerlain skank monsters. They were pretenders to the throne that The Party in Manhattan now occupies.

(Chrysler building image by Jim Buckels)

The Party in Manhattan full bottle is available only in Italy.  The Party in Manhattan sample and decants are available at Surrender to Chance