The Discreet Charm of Chinoiserie

I have an odd fondness for what is called chinoiserie: Western art made in imitation of or homage to the East, Chinese culture specifically. Nervous college students tend to frown on the images the West has manufactured of the East, and for good reason; there are a lot of silly sex fantasies, a lot of Odalisques, plus a lot of monkeys wearing Chinese clothes. But I like watching West ape East. Some wonderful things can come out of it.

In the 1950s, the soldiers were home from the Asian theater of the war, and they brought back souvenirs, stories, and a taste for Asian culture. Next thing you know, people were eating crab rangoon at Trader Vic's, and Caron, that quintessentially French perfume house, was coming out with Poivre.

Poivre is perfect chinoiserie, because it is exactly not the sort of thing the Chinese would ever make or want to smell themselves. (I've said the same about much-mourned Nombre Noir's japonesque: it was a perfectly French idea of Japan.)

Advertisements for Poivre showed an exotically ferocious red dragon (its segmented body, appearing at top and reappearing at bottom, resembling two boiled mutant crawfishes) curled around a bottle shaped like a golden vase. The scent itself is a masterpiece of pepper that would make a Szechuan chef proud. The first dab is a medicinal syrup that your Chinese grandmother might give you for a cold. It socks you out with the intensely funereal sweetness of carnation laid over with an incongruous and yet absolutely complementary hot waft of nose-tickling pepper. Not black peppercorns: hot pepper, red chile, dried and crushed. The carnation softens, fades, and what rushes forth out of it is the gigantic spicy aroma of cloves. As you settle into the heart of the scent, that's pretty much what you get all the way through: cloves, pepper, and the ghost of a carnation.

I love Poivre, but East and West have gotten to know each other a bit better since 1954. There are more like me now, who live in both worlds simultaneously (or in whom both worlds live—your pick). Americans and Europeans know more about China, and she knows more about us. And so when Bond No. 9 New York, Laurice Rahmé's niche perfumery house, came out with Chinatown roughly half a century after Poivre, chinoiserie had undergone a drastic change.
No more high operatic drama. No more dragons. No more sweetened tiki cocktails. No more blasts of red hot spice.

Instead, Chinatown begins, in a gesture that amazes me, with a significantly Chinese smell: the deep gold of a ripe peach, a native Chinese fruit that has traveled around the world. Unlike the peach note you might find in the trite fruity florals that clamor for the same youthful market on fragrance counters everywhere, Chinatown's peach isn't bright, isn't cheerful, isn't out for a good time. It's a peach in a teak bowl: its edges blur into a quiet background, smeared with an almost buttery softness. In time, Chinatown takes on the austere heat of a joss stick burning in a home shrine; the gold of the peach and the glow of the coal at the end of the joss stick blend together in the same low radiance. It's an oriental without vanilla, without the condescending sweetness of Americanized sauces. Chinatown was commissioned by a transplanted Frenchwoman in New York for American buyers, and it is one of the most flattering ideas about Chineseness that the West has ever had.

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