Sweat like an oil slick secreted from the smoked glass mirrors hanging on bitter chocolate walls.
Super sweet fruit cocktails ‘straight from Fire Island’ going half drunk on low tables, others tipped over, their cheap containers crushed under foot.
Four tonnes of silver glitter mixed with shards of glass and fresh cut coke for a floor.
Schrager says ‘it’s like standing on stardust’.
Secretly you’re thinking ‘how would he know he’s flying with the stars’.
She enters on a white horse: red dress, black hair, scarlet lips.
Supernature gives way to Heart of Glass.
And the beat goes on.
Around her, instantly, a crowd, a clamour for her glamour.
Photographers and their flashes, an instant strobe.
It’s all too much.
‘Someone will have a seizure’.
Behind Bianca you see her, pale and slim in a green sequined dress like a tube giving way to her equine neck and explosion of crimped coiffed hair, dusted pink.
She’s a flower.
An orchid.
And she’s holding his hand.
The skinny black kid wearing skinny pants, topless except a for a crimson bow tie, sucking on a lolipop holding a golden briefcase.
Blondie hands the baton back to Ceronne.
“We all feel the pain.
Is it necessary?”
You kiss her and your lips gloss leaves a mark on her powdered porcelain cheeks.
You can’t take your eyes off of him.
You long for Frankie Valli to come on, for the room to melt away for there to be just you and her… and him.
“When we feel the pain
Better stick together.”
You smile in his direction, he cocks his afro-ed head back and opens his plushly upholstered mouth ambiguously.
Is it a smile, an invitation?
“Music is the way
To relieve the pressure.”
She laughs and strikes a pose, he starts to dance and so, as if worked by wires, do you.
You spin and send out arms at diagonals, snake her under your embraces, crane yourself backwards against his leaning body.
In the heat their scent rises, they smell as though they came from a squat via a head shop and a candy store.
You’re high as hell on them.
“Music all the way
Do you get the message?”
His face in yours he mimes the words.
You close your eyes.
A kiss.
“Music all the way
Do you get the message?”
You come up for air.
It’s her staring back at you.
When did they change?
When did you stop caring?
“Music all the way
Do you get the message?”
You go straight back under.
The damndest happy drowning man in NYC.
“Chantez-moi
Je suis musique.”
Repetez.
“Chantez-moi
Je suis musique.”
To be clear Tom Ford Black Orchid emphatically does not smell like Studio 54, or at least not how I imagine it.
But…
This rich pseudo-intellectual, uber-complex, grand confection of a scent is an unmatched olfactory soundtrack for contemporary disco decadence everywhere.
It is the spirit of the dance floor at the end of the universe, bottled by Biba shipped by Star Wars.
Just as ’54 was very nearly the real incarnation of that concept.
It is perfume to be sexually ambiguous to, a fragrance for “girls who are boys who like boys to be girls who do boys like they´re girls who do girls like they´re boys”.
Sweet toothed and narcotic, floral and cordial-fruity it is a vulgar, beaming, over-opulent, grotesque of a thing.
And I love it.
I love the fact that it is everything that every two bit celebrity scent aspires but cannot bring itself to be.
I love it because I shouldn’t, because I know I should know better, because of all the ‘it’s beneath me’ baloney.
I love it purely and simply as a not-guilty pleasure and because if I were a clutch of years younger I’d be bathed in it every Saturday and silly on the fumes.
And in these times when it seems to have become a fashion, a sport even, in the Western world to wage cultural war on the young, this is one un-adult unadulterated pleasure we can and should afford them and, indeed, everyone.
There are acres of space devoted to this perfume’s notes, structure and development, so I feel no obligation to describe them in detail here.
It’s sticky, patchouli, smoky, berry and very, very chocolaty. It seems to make some people feel sick and an awful lot of others inclined towards sex.
Just like a good discotheque then.
Fans pretend after sophistication, but actually it’s a bit of wonderfully old fashioned razzle dazzle.
And if it seems already a little out of date in this age of austerity… wait, it’s time will come again.
By the way I hope you enjoyed all the tunes (try tapping on the pictures).
Just call me DJ Dandy!
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy.
The Perfumed Dandy. 