L'air de Rien by Miller Harris
Jane Birkin piqued the imagination of thousands when she sighed
heavily throughout "Je t'aime, moi non plus", the Gainsbourg song that
Brigitte Bardot had refused to sing and which the Vatican renounced as
sinful. Her personality, her insouciance and her contradicting fashion
sense, embracing tattered T-shirts alongside the Hermes bag which got
named after her, made her an idol that contrary to most should be
graced with a celebrity scent. And so it has: Lynn Harris, nose of
Miller Harris, surrounded her aura with a bespoke which launched
publicly to the delight of many.
Here at Perfume Shrine we were quite taken with it and decided to post
our two versions of what it means to us.
Enjoy!
By Denyse Beaulieu
"I have never liked perfumes. I have always preferred to carry
potpourri in my pocket. It was an interesting exercise in finding
out what you don't like. All the things usually associated with
heady, dark-haired women like hyacinth, tuberose and
lily-of-the-valley made me vomit when they were enclosed in a
bottle so this one is much more me - I wanted a little of my
brother's hair, my father's pipe, floor polish, empty chest of
drawers, old forgotten houses."
Jane Birkin's quote in vogue.co.uk at the British launch of L'Air de
Rien put me off trying the scent for quite a while. I love perfume,
loathe potpourri, tuberose is one of my favourite notes and
never in a thousand years would I dream of smelling like Andrew
Birkin's hair - though I enjoy the films he wrote, such as The Name of
the Rose and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, his hair is not,
frankly, his most appealing feature.
It took the combined pressure of Vidabo and Mimiboo, whose judgment I
trust, for me to dig out my sample. Both were so taken I needed to
know what, exactly, exerted such a pull - Vidabo compared it to what
an avant-garde Guerlain could be.
It took several tests to "get" the elusive L'Air de Rien, which truly
lives up to its name... In French, "l'air de rien" can be said of
something that looks insignificant or valueless, deceptively easy (but
could be the opposite). It can also be literally translated as
something that "looks like nothing" - perhaps nothing we know.
Something completely new, then, which, intriguingly, L'Air de Rien
turned out to be.
Never has a composition behaved so capriciously in each encounter. The
initial dab from the sample vial yielded nothing but a rather mild
musk sweetened by neroli. Then a spray from a tester bottle was an
outsize slap of oakmoss. Thinking my sample has gone off or come from
a defective batch, I secured a second: musk again. Second spray,
different tester bottle in a different shop: oakmoss redux.
Curiouser and curiouser ... I turned to specialists to explain just
why the two star notes refused to sit down and play together. I first
contacted perfumer Vero Kern. She ventured that the difference in
result was due to the difference in application: spraying would
produce a much more ample development. She also suggested I contact
Lyn Harris directly, which I did. She promptly responded:
"As the creator of this fragrance, I do find it totally mysterious
and magical. It almost seems to behave like a wine in the way it
changes and evolves so much with age and on different skins. It is
a very simple composition based around oakmoss, amber, neroli,
vanilla and musk as Jane wanted and had to know exactly what was in
it and I never wanted to deceive her. She completely loves oakmoss
on its own so this had to come through the top notes as it does as
you spray but also as the composition doesn't have a lot of top and
heart notes (...) Oak moss is the least tenacious material with the
neroli and so this is most prevalent when you spray and then drops
away on the dry down."
Mystery solved? Hardly. Mystery is truly at the heart of L'Air de Rien
-how such a short, simple formula manages to create such depth of
resonance. Almost as though the stripping of most head and middle
notes, to delve directly into base notes, echoed the depth of intimate
memories - and Jane Birkin is nothing if not a repository of memory,
that of her long-time romantic partner and Pygmalion,
singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, whom she left in 1980 but whose
songs she still performs. Indeed, in the eyes of the French public,
she is still predominantly known and loved as the quirky, immensely
moving English ing�nue muse of the greatest French-language poet of
the late 20th century...
L'Air de Rien's heavy sexual gravity belies the sweetness of the
musk-neroli marriage. The balsamic bitterness of the oakmoss sets off
the dark, almost medicinal facet of the musk that can be found in
Middle-Eastern perfumery - say, in the Tangiers perfumer Madini's
Black Musk or Musk Gazelle blends. It is the polar opposite of the
more fashionable clean white musks of Narciso Rodriguez for Her or
Sarah Jessica Parker Lovely. The ing�nue has aged and weathered: she
may slip feet dirty from wandering in dusty rooms or moist, rich
gardens into scuffed, well-loved boots, no longer willing to seduce
with a bat of her gazelle eyes, but on her own, mournful, timeless,
terms. Or not at all.
By Helg
I will always remember Jane Birkin in French film of the 60s La
Piscine starring Romy Schneider and Alain Delon: an erotic thriller of
sorts, in which she ~long haired and surprisingly young~ moved her
lithe limbs innocently doe-eyed. Her French pronunciation hilariously
Brit ackward as she asked "Laquelle preferez-vous?" while rolling
little pieces of bread with moist fingers into miniscule spheres,
averting her eyes from Romy Schneider. This faux innocence has served
her well in other roles too, such as the underneath conniving,
outwardly gauche heroine of who-dunnit Evil under the Sun. In that one
she even dons some other woman's perfume to make her con more
believable. We are talking about a character with perfumista clout,
obviously. A scent starring oakmoss no less: one of the shining
ingredients of L'air de Rien!
It is with the same mock innocence that L'air de Rien fools you into
believing it is a simple musk fragrance. Musks of course have been a
love of mine from ever since I recall first sampling one, a rite of
passage. It was thus with a sense of exaltation that I put L'air de
Rien on my skin. If nothing else it proved as unique and contradictory
as the woman who inspired it. Like she said herself of her life:
"I don't know why people keep banging on about the '60s. I was very
conventional because I came from a conventional family and I didn't
go off with different people - I rather wish I had now, seeing all
the fun everyone else was having"
If her perfume is meant to be worn "like a veil over one's body", then
it is with Salome's subversive power of being driven by a higher
entity that one would do it. Only Salome wore multiple veils and here
we only have a few: the notes of the fragrance progress so rapidly
that one is confused as to the denouement.
There is cosiness and snuggliness aplenty. A strange feeling of
humaness, as if a living and breathing human being has entered a dark,
forgotten room in an old abandoned cottage in the Yorkshire
countryside or the scriptorium in the The Name of the Rose;
coincidentally among my most favourite novels (the film of course
necessarily excised much of the esoterica of the book by Eco).
Like old parchment there is a bitter mustiness to L'air de Rien that
gives a perverse, armospheric sexiness to the sweeter note of amber
that clutches on to shadowy musk for dear life.
If you have secretly fantasized about having a roll on the floor of
the dark kitchen in the murderous monastery of the above-mentioned
film with a handsome young monk, then this is your scent. Literally
nothing lay hidden underneath Valentina Vargas' dirty cloak as she
silently seduced Christian Slater with all the rough innocence of
their respective youth and all the postcoital regret of the eternally
unattainable.
Lacrimae mundi, tears of the world...
Click here for the famous nude scene from The Name of the Rose.
Warning: Not office-suitable!
Pic of Jane Birkin and Charles Gainsbourg sent to me by mail
unaccredited. Pic of Andrew Birkin from The Telegraph 2003. Artwork by
Polish illustrator Zdzisl/aw Beksinski courtesy of BekinskiOvh.org
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