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On a recent visit to London I spent a wonderful couple of hours in the newly refurbished Bond Street Hermès where I felt instantly at home amid the scents, silk, leather, porcelain and enamel. The fragrances are artfully arranged, flooded with light in their sensual collections: the romans, grand classics like Hiris, Bel-Ami, 24 Faubourg, Jour D’Hermès and Calèche that tell grandiose, dense histoires. I wanted to sample the nouvelles, the short stories, sketches or watercolours that constitute the Hermessence collection. These are Jean-Claude Ellena’s portfolio of effects, references and aromatic pantones. Sampling them all again, I was really intrigued by their modernity and timelessness. They seem now like a guide to structure and simplicity.

Jean Claude Ellena

According to the scented grapevine, Jean-Claude’s time at Hermès seems to be softly drawing to an enigmatic close with Christine Nagel waiting patiently in the wings. Yet he shows no signs of taking his fingers off the mouillettes just yet. He has not made any concrete statement about retirement; much of the chatter about his departure is a fiction of the press and perfume blogs. I sense a certain wistfulness and longing in his work, but this is not enough to prove pending departure. He is taking stock, referencing past work and re-working beloved themes, aromatic canvases. This is what makes him unique as a perfumer, an ability to repeat yet innovate; lay down thematics, allowing us to see them afresh each time. He will go when he goes and until then each new piece of perfumed work seems somehow imbued with melancholy and intense self-awareness.

Le Jardin de Monsieur Li TSF

There is undeniably a signature to Jean-Claude’s work, a creamy aquatic yearning, scattered with baie rose, cumin, glassy rose, hesperidic tones of bitter orange and grapefruit, palette awash in the lambent glow of Iso-E Super. His works move like watercolours, wet on the paper of skin, flowing and mixing, the perfumed chromatics bleeding and washing into one another creating more complex effects and messages. He focuses on scented details, pursues themes, using repetition and echoes of notes, chasing their development through different scents. Jean-Claude Ellena’s journey as a perfumer has essentially been one of disassembly and restriction, a careful and deliberate honing of his olfactory palette from a full arsenal of aromatic effects to a much more intensified placing of materials in the same manner in which an artist very deliberately places a brush or pigment upon a bone white page sheet of paper.

Photo: Craig Schlewitz

Le Jardin de Monsieur Li is an ambiguous jasmine androgyne, wandering tenderly in a glimmering garden. The key is transparency; a sheer gauziness of effect that at times seems barely there, yet trembles with beauty at the edge of our sensory awareness. It is incredibly diaphanous and addictive. For now, I’m hooked, liberally wearing and losing myself in the reverie of pale, ghostly jasmine, water-soaked and haunted, stripped of indoles to a moist dewy cling. In fact the jasmine is almost vapourous, so carefully reserved is its presence, petals rendered in watercolour, edges seeping off into the expansive white musks and ozonic swell in the main body of the scent.

TSF

There is a kumquat effect in the top apparently, those odd little olive-sized oranges. It translates freshly as you might expect, but also with a burst of woody sweetness often associated with the fruit. Mixed with herbal mintiness and Jean-Claude’s trademark mineral echo, the citric element flows gently on a drifting wind of discernable sap effects, setting finally into a whisper of faded bloom. You can almost smell wet stones touched by morning mist as feet leave imprints in chilled glittering grass.

 

Craig Schlewitz (reimaged)

This is perhaps the most ephemeral to date of the Jardin series, (Un Jardins Sur Le Toits  was released in 2011, so it has been 4 years and  it may be the last signedby M.Ellena). Monsieur Li is a phantom meander through a garden of abstracted memory. The materials themselves seems distant and out of reach, the kumquat for example resembles an blurred image of itself, a pearl of orange ink dropped onto wet cartridge paper, spreading into an aura of tonal dispersion. Each time I wear Monsieur Li I detect tiny anomalies of pattern; swirls and line in the assembly of materials and effect. There is lushness, melonic moisture, and then sometimes I smell sweet candied peel, a mix of angelica and green rhubarb. Last night I inhaled freshly cut guava as I sprayed liberally over damp post-shower skin. The woodiness is spectral, hidden behind musks and clouds of iso-e-super or something similar. The jasmine is not at all indolic, in fact the note resembles more closely the aqueous cut-grass jazziness of cis-jasmone, perhaps using clove bud oil and pink peppercorn to imbue a gentle bite of creamy spice. As it settles I do smell a familiar ozonic, be it hedione or the metal marine rush of algenone.

Le Jardin de Monsieur Li, despite its contemplative landscape and dreamy drifting is a scent with serious intent. The mix of notes and expansive presence on skin (clothes love it too…) ensure the skin holds a pale melonic linger as the main jasmine theme rises and falls. It has a melancholy, cool air about, a little distracted. This is something I have noticed in Jean-Claude’s work since he created Voyage in 2012.  Le Jardin de Monsieur Li is a reflective addiction to Jean-Claude Ellena’s on-going preoccupation with hazy mineralised aquatics and imagined gardens. Like so much mist and rain, rumours of his retiring and departure swirl, but still there is mystery. This is how is should be.

Disclosure: From my own collection

-The Silver Fox, Editor and Author of  The Silver Fox