GUERLAIN UNVEILS ITS DNA: À TRAVERS CHAMPS Thierry Wasser has re-created a generous selection of vintage Guerlain perfumes for Maison Guerlains museum, using the exact same ingredients as when they saw the light for the first time. Originally composed by Aimé Guerlain in 1898, À Travers Champs didn’t reach a wider audience until 1924 when Jacques Guerlain took it up again and reworked the formula. À Travers Champs means through fields, to evoke the feeling of walking through a wildflower meadow. Guerlains roots were in the countryside as Pierre-François-Pascal Guerlain came from the Somme in the northern part of France, known for its open water, marshes, dunes and meadows. This patrimony was well-reflected in Guerlains perfume names, which when translated become such romantic appellations as The Good Old Days, April In Bloom, Dying Flower, My Vicars Garden, One Thousand And Two Flowers, Lily Of The Valley, Autumn Meadow, After The Rain Shower, and The Blue Hour. After 1914, when Guerlain moved to its new, posh address on the Champs-Elysées boulevard, a more cosmopolitan and exotic outlook emerged, with perfume names inspired by faraway places — Mitsouko, Shalimar, Djedi, Liu, Sous le Vent, Véga, Atuana, and also Night Flight and Away From It All. Its Jacques Guerlains 1924 version of À Travers Champs that Thierry Wasser has re-created for the vintage set, he explains, even though the sample bottle says 1898. Its one of Guerlain’s few true lily of the valley perfumes; Jacques Guerlain often used lily of the valley, but then mainly as a top note just to add lightness and air. Frédéric Sacone suggests that Jacques Guerlain chose to reformulate À Travers Champs because he had found a better lily of the valley base than what was available to Aimé Guerlain. The perfume starts out with an extremely diffusive, tingling and quite heady lily of the valley accord, mixed with violet and petitgrain, an intensely sweet and fresh-smelling essential oil extracted from the leaves, buds and green twigs of the bitter orange tree. As the lily of the valley starts to calm down, we get rich notes of rose and ylang-ylang, as well as a pronounced spiciness of carnation which lasts until the base notes appear: sandalwood, amber, orris, and a soft suede note. The drydown reminds us both of hay and of the exquisite, creamy scent of a newly opened shoebox. Although À Travers Champs is a type of floral that smells somewhat dated to modern tastes, you can still find the style in Guerlains catalogue, filed under Jean-Paul Guerlains ravishing Chamade. In 1924, À Travers Champs came in the lyre bottle, first made for Candide Effluve. It was later sold in the brown smoked bottle, originally designed for the perfume Loin de Tout, until the end of the 1950s when it was discontinued. See more below.
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 19:00:02 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015