Stephen Jones Fitting a hat on the late lamented Anna Piaggi

‘Millinery, I think is closer to fragrance than fashion. A hat, like a perfume, is an evocation of something nebulous, ephemeral, and otherworldly’. Stephen Jones

This quote from Stephen Jones, one of the most skilled and irreverent milliners of our time demonstrates the often-neglected abstractions of hats and scent. Both are frequently perceived as frivolous and unnecessary adornment, but to those that obsess over them they are the complex and multifarious je ne sais quoi that completes an ensemble.

Stephen’s influence is far-reaching; he has landscaped the head. The asymmetry, elegant whooshes, skeletal construct and use of masking have filtered into countless high street department store millinery departments. Even the fluttering froufrou touches at the necks of many perfume flacons echo the singular eccentricity of his hatmaking. He has been creating subversive millinery since setting up in Endell Street, Covent Garden in 1980 with the backing of Visage singer and Blitz Club owner Steve Strange. His friendship and collaborations with Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons stretches back over thirty influential and mutually admiring years.

In 2008, Stephen Jones released his debut fragrance, collaboration with Rei’s Comme des Garçons’ fragrance wing run by House Creative Director Christian Astuguevieille. The scent was signed off by Antoine Maisondieu and described as a violet hit by a meteorite. Notes included magma and meteorite smashed with violet, rose, jasmine, guaiac wood, black cumin and amber. It sounds heavy and overwrought but was in fact a nebulous smoky violet fashioned with grace and a metallic charge. Like one of Stephen’s magical millinery creations; it is much more than mere adornment, endowing erotic majesty on the wearer,

Now we have the second collaboration; Wisteria Hysteria, again a unique artistic process involving Jones and CdG but this time with Nathalie Feisthauer (at Symrise), co-creator of Eau des Merveilles for Hermes (with Ralf Schwieger) and Putain des Palaces for Etat Libre d’Orange. Housed in a mini hatbox and nestling in milliner’s lace, the opaque grey-mauve bottle is stunning. I lifted my bottle out and watched the lace uncurl like white skeletal leaves.

Wisteria Hysteria is a cascade of frozen turmoil hanging from still white walls. It is dense, full of oddity and whimsy but lies down on skin with arctic force. Ostensibly, as the name implies the scent is a portrait, albeit an abstracted and illusory one, of the decorative climbing plants of the Fabaceae family, the distinctive hanging blooms that come in shades of white, violet, pink and vibrant purple. According to Stephen Jones in an interview he did with Dazed Digital, the hysteria part of the name was inspired by the feverish, high-octane edge of fashion shows: ‘If you’re a hatmaker you live permanently in this world of hysteria. It’s like the fashion business turns up to eleven. You’re always there at the last moment. Hats are the most visible thing and the most potent and extreme. It’s a hysterical world.’ Stephen Jones

 

Late summer wisteria in Stockbridge, Edinburgh

This sense of histrionics is an interesting riposte to a bloom I have always considered to be exceedingly aloof and chilled. Yet wisteria is tenacious and hardy, living for many years, vines and branches growing to wrist and arm width, crushing weak trellises and strangling trees. On houses they may look spectacular, flooding brickwork and stone with undulating parures of eye-catching hues; but beneath the beauty, walls are undermined, mortar choked and bricks smothered.

This dichotomy is played out in Henry Pincus’ short film for Wisteria Hysteria, a corrupted fairy-tale with model Charlotte Tomas coming face to face with a malevolent mirror of herself. Dressed in delicious fitted monochrome couture by the late L’Wren Scott, Charlotte and her dark twin devour each other. The icy Anime mood and wash of gorgeous narcissism only enhances the enigma of the perfume.

I love the glacial kiss of Wisteria Hysteria. I have been wearing it obsessively, mesmerised by the delicacy of sugar snow underpinning the mantle of vegetal dust and echoes of phantom carnation, brutally white like geisha maquillage. The trademark CdG woods provide support for the wisteria, a framework if you like for support and climbing. The mate note in the top adds a drip of sap emphasizing the sugared legume characteristics of the composition that float and thrum throughout the evolution of the scent. The sillage is luminous, the skin trailing white light and frozen dust. One feels veiled. It’s an odd sensation. Wisteria Hysteria has a certain plasticised finish and the reeks of floral holography. How real is the wisteria? If you come too close, does the illusion pixilate and fall apart? In the end does it really matter when the skin smells this austere and astonishing?

Notes: Pepper, Clove, Frankincense, White Wisteria, Rose, Mate Leaf, Musk, Styrax, Benzoin, Amber

–The Silver Fox, Editor and Editor of The Silver Fox

All art by the Silver Fox

Disclosure: From our own collection.  Available at Luckyscent.com  $165/55 in the USA and Commes De Garcons online worldwide

We have a  5ml sample draw of Wisteria Hysteria for our readers in the USA OR The EU. To be eligible, please leave a comment with what intrigues you about this review and where you live. Draw closes October 12, 2014

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