Scent Notes | Azzaro Couture

The perfumer Aurélien Guichard, the son of the equally talented Jean Guichard (the creator of the immortal l’Interdit for Givenchy), has excellent creative range. He can go from making the chic, retro-rich Baghari for the contemporary incarnation of Robert Piguet to the delicate translucent-flower-in-a-white-space-station cult favorite Chinatown for Bond No. 9 to the brutalist 21st-century chypre (take out the labdanum, put in asphalt and the scorched scent of steel under a welder’s arc) of Sean John’s Unforgivable.

Loris Azzaro’s first perfume, introduced in 1975, was Azzaro Couture, reportedly a bold, luxurious feminine. The brand’s managers were also behind the commercial megahit Chrome in 1996, a perfect example of the sterile metallic gas scents of the ’90s, a perfume that smells so metallic and chemical it’s as if it had its own atomic number. Chrome so dominates the Azzaro brand that it is almost strange to see the house revisit Couture, its earlier creation from a profoundly different aesthetic school. But it has. Guichard, under the direction of Vanessa Seward and Pierre Aulas, has created a 2008 version, which was introduced in September.

It is quite well done. Big, rich and gold-plated, this is a scent for women whose hearts lie in the 1970s and 1980s and have been dreaming of someone fusing the two eras. Their gratitude will be infinite. There is a distinct echo of Guichard’s Love in Paris, which he did several years ago for Nina Ricci, a lovely, white-gold floral that didn’t succeed commercially. But Couture is both more retro and, arguably, more up to the minute than Love, coming on like a spotlit runway model wearing all white. It is a floral, but with a huge, neo-’80s format built — I’m guessing — primarily out of an accord of mimosa (it has that weird, otherworldly mimosa smell, a flower from a slightly different planet) and Karanal, a knee-trembling synthetic that smells like blood macerated in peony with an electrical current running through it. It lights up the juice like neon and gives the perfume a sheen that has been polished like the hood of a champagne-colored BMW 7-series.

Sleek, the opposite of shy, materialistic — but only in the very best way, of course. Azzaro Couture says, “What bad economy? I still have my job in my big midtown office.” If you actually still have your big job — or if you just want to give the impression that you do — this is your perfume.

Azzaro Couture | Azzaro
(Three stars; Good juice) | $150 for 2.5 ounces; available at Neiman Marcus.

Read previous Scent Notes columns here.

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