Robert Piguet
Bandit Suprême, Zazen, Rue du Cirque, Cravache, A l’Ombre, Oud Délice, L’Entier and Atomica
Piguet Fragrances are named after a fashion designer who died in 1953 and is chiefly remembered for having been mentor to both Christian Dior and Hubert de Givenchy. His collaboration in the ‘40s with Germaine Cellier, a woman so talented and so ornery that her boss at Roure, Louis Amic , created a separate company for her alone, gave us Bandit and Fracas. After Piguet’s death, the fragrance house produced Cravache and Futur, both excellent. Things then gradually went quiet while Piguet coasted with its small range for decades, gradually fading from view.
In 2006, it came back under new management. Joe Garces, a blunt, burly New Yorker who looked like a hard-boiled crime detective and was in fact the most exquisite and devoted fraghead imaginable, decided to restore the Piguet Greats to pristine form. I briefly interacted with him during the resurrection of Futur, probably the least sentimental fragrance ever made. He and Aurélien Guichard asked me to compare iterations with some pristine Futur I owned1. They tweaked and tweaked until I, at least, could not tell them apart, and they went for that version. I assume all the others were done similarly.
For some reason, Garces left the company around 2015, and a new art director was brought in. Piguet has since produced ten new fragrances, including a complete reformulation of Cravache, originally a bergamot leather and therefore in the IFRA2 line of fire. The job of art-directing a company with a famous name and distinctive olfactory image is tricky. Produce fragrances in the exact spirit of the original and they may be wrong for today’s market. Interpret the house spirit in a modern way and the aficiòn will hate you. The hardest part may be to figure out exactly what the original fragrances had in common and then channel that thought into new compositions.
Cellier’s fragrances were, as the French say, taillées à la serpe (cut with a sickle). She loved brutal compositions; she would not have composed a gentle floral if her life had depended on it. She also used a lot of now-defunct bases3 in her compositions. I remember Calice Becker telling me that unpacking Cellier’s Monsieur Balmain from bases to single materials had been a labor of love, yielding a list of over 1000 materials, reduced to just over thirty in the (very good) reformulation. If I had to describe the spirit of Cellier just from her fragrances, it would be angry and impatient. I picture her as a perfumery Dorothy Parker, the famously acerbic wit who would answer the phone with, “What fresh hell is this?”
If done in the house spirit, Piguet’s fragrances must therefore be edgy. The problem is that everyone is trying to do edgy these days and mostly failing, through lack of humor, culture and sophistication. Thankfully, Piguet seems to have retained Aurélien Guichard, son of Jean, and therefore is in possession of a vast perfume culture, some of it likely in the form of dusty grimoires full of recipes. Guichard (witness Bond’s Chinatown) is a master of a style not a million miles from what Cellier was doing, i.e., classic orchestration accompaniments to slash-and-burn central accords.
One additional remark: Piguet and many others now sell their fragrances at slightly different prices, laughably suggesting that there may be some relation between formula cost and sticker price.
For paid subscribers, reviews of Bandit Suprême, Zazen, Rue du Cirque, Cravache, A l’Ombre, Oud Délice, L’Entier and Atomica