Serge Lutens talks about Féminité du Bois.
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Posted by Robin on 22 Comments
Serge Lutens talks about Féminité du Bois.
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Consider it blasphemy, but am I the only one who finds Lutens speaches rather weird? Weird in a super-intellectual, overly complicated and not really helpful kind of way? (And don’t get me wrong, I usually appreciate a certain level of cultural snobbery :-))
Oh, I don’t think it’s blasphemy at all, in fact, I think it’s expected that he will be interesting but not particularly informative.
Fascinating. Am I the only one to notice the similarity of content, style and delivery with Marcel Duchamp’s interviews. The theme of artist as alchemist “redeeming” or transforming the “accused” (cedar) through love. Like Duchamp, Lutens seems to be well informed of kabalistic symbolism, the “femininity of wood” relating to the exiled and naked bride (the accused stripped bare) inhabiting the very “wood” of the tree of life. It is fun to draw on similarities between this interview and Duchamp’s “Le Processus Creatif” of the 1950s.
I have never read a Duchamp interview, and am woefully uninformed on kabalistic symbolism, so cannot comment.
Ah, thanks for explaining that last bit. I actually was with him there until he went from “transformed” to “accused”. I am just starting to venture into books on alchemy and kabalah.
Thank you for the context …. I was getting very lost!
My partner also read about kabalah and alchemy and also how the symbolism also relates to tarot.. mindboggling stuff to me, but I will forward him the link and I am sure he will understand more than me! 
Woah, blow my mind here Serge! He and Jean-Paul Sartre would have had some mind bending discussions… the judge in love with the criminal… (this seems so quintessentially French!)
So long as I don’t have to listen to the discussion, LOL…somebody can send me a précis later.
Yes, my initial reaction is still WTF! But there are all sorts of typical French themes in here – Genet, for instance, possibly even Simone Wiel. In style this throws me back to Heidegger’s essay on nothingness, in which he manages a great conjuring trick of pretending to say something while getting into a complex syntactic muddle. Not that Serge mistakes grammar for ontology but his effort at compelling profundity…
I think the whole accused thing must have some existential significance, possibly also to do with guilt, we’r all guilty, but the guilt is exposed yada yada…
Accused wood, huh? I really TRIED to follow the conversation, but I don’t quite get it.
Thanks Haunani! I mean, let’s acknowledge the know-how and the creativitiy behind the scents but let’s not forget that we are talking about perfume, not about Kant or Schopenhauer.
Ha! So true!
Verbillage! as we say in French.
Other than the first few minutes where he talks about that piece of cedar that he found, and his barely disguise dislike of the original Shiseido bottle for FdB, there is really nothing in this enterview other that a man who likes the sound of his own voice.
Yes, Shisedo seemed to get lost somewhere in there.
You mean ‘verbiage’, surely.
Verbillage – Is that like Bafflegab?
As I tried to indicate in my previous comment: there is no such word as ‘verbillage’. The word is ‘verbiage’. It is used in English as well and means the same thing as it does in French: too many words that don’t mean much; it doesn’t go as far as ‘bafflegab’.
I have to spray the tester bottle until wet just so that I can smell FdB at all. And then I get about half an hour out of it before it dies. So I have often wondered what all the fuss is about.
I have the scent in the brown Shiseido bottle-when I first bought it, the cedar overwhelmed everything else. It’s had a couple of years to settle and is now beautiful, if still a bit sticky, as all the SLs are.
Really couldn’t completely understand him-other than the fact that I suddenly, mysteriously want to fall in love with cedar.
This is gorgeous stuff (the SL version because I haven’t tried the Shiseido,) and I’ll probably get a FB at some point, but yikes.
He lost me somewhere between harmony with discord and the accused… and I say this as an English major who has sat through hours of similar intellectual ramblings on abstract concepts with little relevance to our reality.
But my Shakespeare prof never made perfumes like this, so it’s a bit easier to forgive Serge for his flights into momentary incomprehensibility
This interview reminded me of an Angelina Ballerina cartoon I saw once: she had been leaping around very proudly in her point shoes, spinning around, oblivious, until she found herself tightly wrapped in her own tail.
I couldn’t follow the harmony/discord discussion in either language; I don’t think anyone could. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Definitely, someone in love with the sound of his own voice! And really when you factor in the house he has been renovating for the past 35 years but has never slept a single night in… well, that is just plain weird. But hey, I like some of his perfumes.