From "VII Russia" Cultural perfumes aesthetics of France, Britain, Italy, the US. The differences you get.

Just after India, Turin drove down to Paris to the launch of the perfumes he and John Stephen had created for Fragonard. The event was to unfold on the seriously chic main level of Fragonard's Paris office, 39 boulevard des Capucines, a spectacular 1930s theater around the corner from Chanel's barracks on rue Cambon. Fragonard was calling the fragrances the Absolus. Turin circled the block a few times, found a place to park the blue Citroën, and showed up to find things in full swing. He greeted Agnès Costa warmly and shook hands with her mother, a handsome Frenchwoman wearing a mink raincoat and diamonds. Everything bubbled like molten metal. The lighting was Martian, and it intimidated.

There were a few different languages moving around the air, French and English and something Russian-like and Italian, and Turin cocked his head at them. "The French like luxury," he said, looking thoughtful and sipping something, "but what the French call luxury is actually call-girl chic. Put it this way. After finishing secondary school in Milan at sixteen, I went back to Paris to go to university, Paris XII, Pierre et Marie Curie. I rented a room from Madame Clouzot, the sister of the film director Henri-Georges Clouzot, right near the Champs Elysées. She explained that there were only really two great French perfume makers. Guerlain and Caron. Guerlain, she said, was for cocottes-kept women. Caron was for the duchesse. But in fact it is 1880s cocotte style that today passes for chic in France. What the French consider 'chic' is actually a sort of kept-woman vulgarity." He looked very grim, then permitted himself to pronounce "Hermès" and then "Vuitton." "Caron, on the other hand," he said, brightening, "is absolutely proper, proper chic." And what is that? He laughed, thought about it, said "um" and "oh God." "Chic is, first, when you don't have to prove you have money, either because you have a lot and it doesn't matter or because you don't have any and it doesn't matter. Chic is not aspirational." He sighed, despondent. "Chic is the most impossible thing to define. Luxury is a humorless thing, largely, and when humor happens in luxury it happens involuntarily. Chic is all about humor. Which means chic is about intelligence. And there has to be oddness-most luxury is conformist, and chic cannot be. Chic must be polite and not incommode others, but within that it can be as weird as it wants.

"The Italian perfume aesthetic is, of course, completely different. What I call cashmere indigestion. They like floral Orientals, spice, and flowers together, that sort of warm, uniform, suntanned beauty with no chic whatsoever. Middle-class taste writ large. There's a couple of really great Italian fragrances, mind you. Helietta by Princess Helietta Caracciolo. I actually tracked her down at her shop in Rome recently to ask her if she still had any of the fragrance. She's a sweetheart. Orange-peel chypre with a woody angle. And Teorema by Fendi. But in general, Italian perfumery-I essentially look down on it. It's boring. Nothing is more nauseating than good taste in high doses.

"The British have floral dresses, which are pale, and leathered libraries, which are better. They've done some great masculines, since Englishmen really do care. The dandy was an English creation. Monogrammed-slippers-and-monocles like No. 89 by Floris or Lords by Penhaligons. America is generally big and beautiful, the perfume interpretation of the Hoover Dam. Americans are hygienic and athletic. Cabochard-not the piss sold under the name today, the real stuff that you can't get anymore-you have to be into soiled underwear for that. It is a fucking wonderful fragrance. Not for Americans. But having said this, Americans have done some really great fragrances. Estée Lauder's Youth Dew, Aliage, White Linen. Among the truly greats. Tommy Girl, which is quintessentially American and one of the greatest twenty perfumes of all time. It was done by Calice Becker. She's French. Actually, she's one hundred percent Russian.

"Obviously, perfume culture itself is to a great degree gay culture, though some people think you're not supposed to say it. Gay guys were bored with all these stupid hairy-chested male fragrances and went out and bought Alpona, by Caron, which is wonderful. Actually, there aren't many gay perfumers. It's weird. Jean Guerlain said, 'I composed Chamade for my then girlfriend,' and I thought, 'Right.' Turned out it was true. I mean, it's not weird in that the Grasse milieu is still completely homophobic-I know one young guy who was not taken in perfume school simply because he was gay. Mind you, he was also a raging pain in the ass, but so what? The thing is, all their customers are gay, and you'd think it would be to their advantage to have a few around 'in house.' But instead they get Englishmen. Fashion is gay. We're living under a gay dictatorship; I'm sick of it. Look at that vile Gaultier's Le Male, what do I care about that stuff? Put it this way: I love Old Spice-you go back to the time of freshly shaven Daddy. What's wrong with that?"

At Fragonard candles incinerated fragrant molecules into the dark electrical air. Powerful speakers at one-hundredth their capacity were pumping a beat into the floor. The new four Absolus lined the swank walls in oils and soaps and sprays, which the Fragonard employees-young women like caryatids, slender as insects, sheathed in black-were handing out to guests in immense shopping bags. The guests peered inside, turning the bags this way and that.

Turin went back to the French. "If you consider Shalimar by Guerlain, lovely, with a marvelous little black sillage, the trail of perfume you leave behind you, Shalimar is nice the way the Paris Opéra is nice, lots of plush velvet and gold. This is not to say, by the way, that Guerlain hasn't done some chic perfumes. Mitsouko is infinitely chic. But look at Tabac Blond by Caron. There's something dykey and angular and dark and totally unpresentable about that. It's a phenolic fragrance. If you bring the girl home and she's wearing that, your mom's going to be alarmed. Unless your mom's chic, in which case she'll say, 'I really like that girl who wears Tabac Blond.' Tabac Blond is a woman smoking cigars and driving-not being driven-way too fast."