Purple Haze, Grey Concrete

Purple is vulgar and impure, a bastardization of flaming, sincere crimson and noble navy blue into something neither/nor, a color fit only for the "spiritual" trinkets of New Age fatties.

And then there's the flower lavender, which has pissy little blooms, the shape of an insufficient phallus, and soft, hairy leaves of dark green fuzzed with downy, ancient, silver whiskers. L is for lavender, L is for Loser.

And Lord, the smell of these silly, straggly plants: an olfactory crime whose scent is mainly used for Glade air fresheners that completely fail to cover up somebody's fit of diarrhea, serving instead to somehow gild the stench and give it a place of honor in the home, as if you've invited in a schizo who leads a pet turd around by a silken ribbon.

All this, and then finally a Frenchman came to lavender's rescue. Gris Clair, released on an unsuspecting public in March 2006 by the Palais Royal magician Serge Lutens, is lavender ripped out of the calendar-photo Purple Haze of sunny, stupid fields and brought into a secret, subdued, and cosmopolitan world of gorgeous Ashcan School painters' greys.

This is lavender that has fallen off the visible end of the spectrum, a lavender of shadows and fog, of ash and concrete. This lavender murkily stains the gloaming as day ends over downtown New York on what will be the coldest night of the year. This lavender is the lead in the stained glass window.

Lutens erects a noble monument to a stupid little thing by basing the architecture of his unguent on tonka beans and incense ash, and burnishing it with a golden halo of amber and some feathered cirrus stripes of truly fine iris that streak across its sillage.

If you've ever hated at first sight and then found yourself falling ass over tea kettle into love with that very same person years later--a slow motion coup de foudre where the thunderclap is all the more enormous for being glacial in its arrival--then you know what it's like to long for the hateful lavender of lovely Gris Clair.

Serge Lutens serves up an invisible flower as a midnight snack under the empty dome of a silver room service platter at the Georges V...An exquisite existential treat best enjoyed in the torn tan Colombo trench coat and ultraviolet high heels you'll wear while hailing a taxi in the small hours back to your own hotel on the opposite side of the Seine.

Comments

[Qwendy]

You should see Serge Lutens' Palais Royale shop = ten shades of purple paint applied in baroque patterns and adorning every surface in the place, carpet, trim, walls, staircase. I do find that I'm attracted to purple in waves, as it is the fave color of my 70's childhood, and I'm back on it right now. I love Encens et Lavande, his other Lavender scent, but Gris Clair is not for me.
I just found you today, looking for news of Luca Turin, thanks!