French niche line Lubin has launched Kismet, a new fragrance for women. Kismet was inspired by a 1921 Lubin fragrance that came in an elephant-shaped bottle…
Lubin Upper Ten for Her ~ new perfume
L de Lubin, vintage and new ~ fragrance review
I never thought much one way or another about the designer Halston, until I started researching him for a mystery novel. I’d remembered Halston’s dresses as tubes hanging on 28AA women with glossy lipstick who partied at Studio 54 in the late 1970s. Then I learned that those simple tubes were masterpieces of Halston’s “spiral cut,” in which he took an extra wide length of fabric — so wide he first used upholstery fabric, then commissioned his own fabric runs in Italy — and fashioned them meticulously to hang on the bias with a long, spiral seam. In the late 1960s, he even worked with legendary couturier Charles James and hung his fabric diagonally to relax before cutting it, just as Vionnet did.
Halston’s monastic simplicity? Genius and craft are what made those dresses look so effortless. The best light chypres of the 1970s stir the same magic for me…
Lubin Upper Ten ~ new fragrance
French niche line Lubin has launched Upper Ten, a new spicy woods fragrance for men. Upper Ten does not appear to be related to an older, long-discontinued Lubin fragrance of the same name…
Lubin Grisette ~ perfume review
French niche line Lubin recently launched Grisette, a new feminine fragrance with notes of grapefruit, bergamot, rose, iris, incense, cedar, musk, amber and vanilla. Grisette was named for the French Belle Epoque term for young working-class women who took a bohemian approach to love. Lubin frequently makes historical and cultural references in its fragrances, and this one sounded right up my Montmartre alley.
Unfortunately (for me, at least), Grisette evokes the eighties — the 1980s, that is, not the 1880s…