Antonio Gardoni of Bogue Profumo

Antonio Gardoni’s flickering filthy Maai is one of my dark loves this year, (my best discovery of 2014 and one of CaFleureBon’s Top 25 fragrances of 2014).  It is a scent for hidden lovers, skin on shadowed skin, illicit whispers in darkness. It feels trangressive and all kinds of forbidden. Antonio is an artistic polymath, a man who can seemingly apply his talents to elaborate and arcane things; design, architecture and esoteric olfaction, these three notions flow in and out of each other in a complex and reflective stream of inventiveness. Antonio is the founder of Studio AG, an architecture and design studio based in Brescia, Italy and co-founder of Jump Studios in London (with Ron Arad). He is also a professor of industrial and interior design in Brescia.

Bogue Profumo Essences

‘My perfumes are rooms to discover with mood, texture, light and colour..’ Antonio Gardoni. These rooms are tenebrous though, laced with Maai, dank and lowdown. This is not comfortable perfumery, it shocks, even appalls a little and is all the better for it. It smells ancient, buried, something Antonio has found and offered up to us from damp chthonic depths. In some ways he has. Bogue Perfumery, Antonio’s niche house, was sparked into life by the chance discovery of a cache of forty perfumer’s preparations courtesy of an antiques dealer’s tip off. By manipulating and blending these vintage raw materials with modern techniques and the addition of ingredients such as styrax, castoreum, lavender and citrus, Antonio created atmospheric variations of the original abandoned essences.  This was the starting point for a sombre and detailed journey into understanding the very nature of how natural materials worked. I was very intrigued to read an interview where he discussed a method called ‘tree deconstruction’ whereby he believes a tree smells a certain way because it is the sum of its aromatic parts.  In his lab, Antonio recreates ‘a tree’, rebuilding it using specific percentage distillations of roots, branches, leaves, berries and bark in order to achieve the desired aroma.

Bogue Tailor 9 Vie

I find this kind of approach fascinating and it explains the depth, beauty and technical finish of his work. There is an unsettling realism counterpointed with a weird Grimm fairy-tale like intensity that permeates his obsessive perfumery. He has used a number of his awakened formulae in Bogue Tailor – 9 Vie, a nonet of bases that provide a starting point for bespoke perfumery. Then there are three created scents, Eau d’E, Cologne Reloaded and now Maai. Eau d’E feels sketchy and a little odd, transient almost, a journey to somewhere cold and empty. Cologne Reloaded (fabulous name btw!) is damn fine scent making, and old-time barbershop style aromatic but singed, twisted and shot through with dust, fur and lashings of lavender-lashed neroli. There is a strange heady drop into musky powdered comfort after its considerable drydown. A devastating re-loading of cologne ideals.

 

But Maai… oh my oh my. This is old school devastation. It reeks of pre-IFRA operatic, full-scale, room clearing skanky chypré desire. Oh….but the Fox adores it. Ok, I’ll admit it’s not for everyone. But for me it fits in my special inky cabinet alongside  Vero Kern’s Onda, Norne by Slumberhouse and Andrea Maack’s sepulchral Coven. When you first wear it, the senses panic, scrambling for recognition and clarity, such is Antonio’s unique alchemical dazzle. It is the sheer filthiness that hits you first with the force of a slap during midnight mass. A frankly seductive sensuality, borderline olfactive pornography. This seam of scent is rarely mined; restrictions aside, many people are just too afraid to wear aromas like Maai. Even some of my mates who are pretty hard core have backed off. But buried deep within this most extraordinary of brutal floral constructions is the most divine sense of body, genuine skin, wrapped in indoles and whiffy animalics, a mirror of our own wanton, hidden desires.

Bogue Maai -TSF This is not a Rorschach test

After a number of increasingly addictive wearings, I can smell the lingering rose and  indolic jasmine, a wealth of stained  tuberose up top, the mucky pelt and angry musks in the base. It’s a dangerous and incendiary mix of bestial floral and magnificent chypré elegance. The truculence of oakmoss and an eccentric smear of dried fruits making the hit of perfumed madness sincere and astonishing. If you are looking for scented danger, some shadowed olfaction, then Maai by Antonio Gardoni’s Bogue is aberrant and outstanding perfumery and your skin needs it, deserves it.

 Disclosure – From my own collection

The Silver Fox, Sr Editor and editor of The Silver Fox

Editor's Note: If 50 Shades of Grey needs a scent track…. we think Maai would be perfect

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