For our readers who have the urge… save your dollars for what’s coming from Serge. Have your scent mules (or hearses) at the ready for two new fragrances Vitriol D’Oeillet and De Profundis that’s sound like fragrant episodes of Tales from the Crypt.
The House announced the Vitriol D'Oeillet (Venomous Carnation), a very unusual carnation scent will debut will be launched July 1st, 2011, exclusively for the Palais Royal boutique and will be available worldwide in September; August 1st the bell jar creation (only available in Paris).
“No more ghostly than a train, nor more sudden than death, nor quicker than the opening of a grave, my vitriol is distilled from carnations. After a moment of hesitation, the carnation – alias the clove pink – is what I am in every sense: this fragrance fraught with anger is my riposte. Its petals, laced with tiny teeth, hold out the solution: a burst of fragrant spikes. Would it make you smile to know that the wallflower packs a real fragrant punch, that the pepper comes from Cayenne and that the scent of cloves lies deep within this composition? Yet the carnation is an obsessive and intrepid flower. When it doesn’t bloom on market stalls and in open fields in southern France, the carnation – blood red, as if bitten by a dapper criminal with a fox-like smile– perishes. North, across the English Channel, London gentlemen wear white carnations in the buttonholes of their silk lapels. In the crimson velvet interior of a cinema, a girl in a film is being used as bait. She stumbles in the eerie flicker of a street light. As usual, she’s poor and her hair is disheveled. The street corner suddenly goes dark. Unable to see, the poor thing braces herself for the worst. And one fears (and hopes) that it will happen. And it will, unless the projector providentially overheats and the film catches fire, plunging the room into inky blackness. Yes, things look very bad for our heroine. We hear her shriek – “No!” – and read the French subtitle: ”Non!”-Via press release
"De Profundis" is named after a Baudelaire "Fleurs du Mal" poem
“When death steals into our midst, its breath flutters through the black crepe of mourning, nips at funeral wreaths and crucifixes, and ripples through the gladiola, chrysanthemums and dahlias. If they end up in garlands in the Holy Land or the Galapagos Islands or on flower floats at the Annual Nice Carnival, so much the better! What if the hearse were taking the deceased, surrounded by abundant flourish, to a final resting place in France, and leading altar boys, priest, undertaker, beadle and grave-diggers to some sort of celebration where they could indulge gleefully in vice? Now that would be divine! In French, the words beauty, war, religion, fear, life and death are all feminine, while challenge, combat, art, love, courage, suicide and vertigo remain within the realm of the masculine. Clearly, Death is a Woman. Her absence imposes a strange state of widowhood. Yet beauty cannot reach fulfillment without crime. The chrysanthemum is the sole pretext for writing these lines. Turning gravesites held in perpetuity over to Life – a familiar of these haunts – the chrysanthemum invites Death to leave the cemetery and offer us its flower. De profundis clamavi.”-via press release
We leave the dark for the light. Finally, the international release of Serge Lutens Tubéreuse Criminelle. Not sure of the timing but we promise we will update soon.
There will be five new engraved editions later this year, in the fall of 2011 for:
Vitriol d'Oeillet
Serge Noire
Louve
De Profundis (two)
– Emmanuelle Varron, Sr. Editor and Michelyn Camen, Editor-in-Chief