Serge Lutens introduces - Le Vaporisateur Toot Noir- a black atomiser to carry your favorite Serge Lutens perfumes in your purse. The atomiser is absolutely black without any sign or logo on it.
"A purse weapon - totally black - must be reloaded.
And with what, if not perfume, the best way to trigger seduction?"
Le Vaporisateur Toot Noir will be available in October 2012. This year Serge Lutens offers a choice of refills, - Ambre Sultan or Feminite du Bois, - for this perfume spray.
To know more about this elegant edition, please read the explanation given by Serge Lutens in the press release:
Serge Lutens, you are launching the “Vaporisateur tout noir” this year. At first glance, it looks fairly similar to the “Nombre Noir” spray you created in 1982. What are your thoughts on the resemblance?
With the “Nombre noir” fragrance in 1980 – that was the exact date of its initial creation – I first hit on the idea of black on black, followed by tone on tone. It was also the only time that a brand chose not to emblazon its name or logo on the packaging. In fact, that spray bottle was entirely clean, free of everything but black. It was up to the individual to decide what it would be. When I had the idea of a “Serge Lutens” spray, I didn’t see the point of redesigning an object that had been already been designed or, perhaps I should say, destined for use. All I had to do was make it pocket or handbag size.
The box of the “Vaporisateur tout noir” seems to flout the traditional style of the Serge Lutens brand. Did you really create it? If so, why have you abandoned a tried and trusted approach?
In reply to your first question, “traditional”, whatever does that mean?! As long as I live and breathe, everything is possible, everything can be changed, nothing is set in stone; it has a life of its own. One by one, day after day, I designed different sizes of letters on loose sheets of paper. Once I had decided on this alphabet, and had ensured that what I wanted to say was legible, I placed it on a light background. Rather than making all the letters the same size, I left them as they were, which created an almost childlike effect, as did the name of the “Vaporisateur tout noir”. I’ve never really grown up. When all is said and done, I never toe the line in anything. I simply “decode”. You have to make a choice: you either invent or you produce. I’ve made my choice.
You have likened this perfume spray to a purse weapon! Why describe it like that?
A weapon can be reloaded. And with what, if not the self-confidence of the woman or man who will use it? To stand up to society and its frustrating constraints, we all need to defend ourselves, and what is a perfume if not a way to trigger seduction?
This year, you are offering a choice of refills for this perfume spray: either Ambre sultan or Féminité du bois. Will there be different ones next year?
Of course, they replace our ephemeral editions. All you need to know is that there is more to come from this spray. I will go even further; I will go blacker.
INTERVIEW WITH SERGE LUTENS IN THE BLACKEST DARK
Serge Lutens, where does your liking for black come from?
Likes, dislikes; they both come from the same place. They’re nurtured during our first seven years of life. Although not fully formed at that age, they develop and crystallise until they fi- nally take on a colour. They make themselves known to us during our adolescence. In my case, I emerged from the shadows to see only black, the way others see scarlet, when I was around 15 or 16. In a way, the tone was set.
To clarify what I mean, I’ll use Freud’s rule of three: according to him, when we’re children, we’re at the centre and top of a triangle whose base is held steady by the father on the right and the mother, some distance away, separated from him by the base line. Now, my choice unbalanced the pyramid, leaving only an oblique line between my mother and me.
There was a good reason for this. It was 1942 and wartime and, due to the law and societal constraints, I was taken away from her at a very young age and entrusted to the care of another family. Instead of distancing me from her – which could have happened – her absence brought us closer. I invented her. My colour drew its origins from those events and became deeply engrained. Black. I won’t prevent its true colours from showing: black is also associated with death and mourning.
So what was Serge Lutens mourning?
My own death, first of all, well, the death of the man I should have been according to society and its rules!
Nothing happens by accident. I don’t love my mother in the usual sense of the word, but it is probably the unusual nature of that love which made me the high priest of her immortality; as a result of that, I was also mourning the death of my father because, by so doing, I removed him from the trinity. Nothing stays with you longer than a ghost. The lingering emotion I feel for him is an inextricable mixture of love and hate. This was also the time when, as a result of my initial leanings, my sexuality was a source of shame for a while, but the girl within me made up my mind. An irreversible drive allowed me to break free from the straitjacket of conventional behaviour. Everything was absurd, terrible, wonderful, legitimate, worth living and dying for. In short, those were funerals with a happy ending.
Serge Lutens, we’ve just talked about your mother and some people have put forward the theory that your taste for black might originate from a black dress she used to wear. Can you tell us about that?
There is some truth in that, but let’s not be too sentimental about the word ‘mother’. She may deserve the honour of being insulted, but she certainly doesn’t need anyone to feel sorry for her.
She would have hated that kind of fake sympathy. Although... she’s very intelligent, and might instead have turned it to her advantage. Okay, now let’s get back to the story.
I must be about 10 years old. During a big tidy up, I discover that dress, laid out against the sky blue background of the bedspread, its padded shoulders on a hanger. It’s really just a dress, one that women used to wear during the German Occupation. It’s made of black crepe Georgette (my mother’s middle name) and I have seen it before. It’s the one my mother wore for the first three years after I was born. The only one she wore, it seems to me. You can see that in the photographs (they’ve all been torn up, I don’t like keepsakes, they get in the way of the real picture). So what I’m looking at is her past and, by extension, mine, entangled: simply cut, straight, falling below the knee with long sleeves and fastened at the neck by three tiny buttons covered with the same material. The square shoulders of the dress are dotted with jet-black Parisian beads, which form no particular pattern. I’m dazzled. This threadbare dress was and is fabulous. The woman who wore it is standing beside me but, this time, she is no longer my mother; she is a woman whose judgement is unimpaired and who has turned her back on appearances and renounced anything that might make her look more attractive. Some images stay with you for good. They never leave. They’re indelibly printed on our internal walls.
What I am holding in my outstretched hands is no longer a dress, but the sloughed skin of a snake, which leads to my question: Why don’t you wear it anymore? She maintained what I would call an elegant silence for a moment. It may well have been from that time onwards that I deve- loped a dual personality. My double is the key protagonist in the betrayal that is to embody everything I don’t know and make her into someone noble: a murderess, an ambitious thief or a Queen in white mourning dress. To get to the point, I live her life. Our abandonment, hers and mine, were a real stroke of luck for me. They would generate all those to come.
You mention dual personalities and we’ve seen your photographs of women in white who are the hallmark of your work and appear to be worlds apart from your emphasis on black. How do you explain this?
I didn’t plan it. Beauty is cruel. It demands cruelty: any self-respecting poet is in love with his own death. Those women with chalk-white complexions and motionless features, attired in purple, in sumptuous pageantry and religious splendour, have no desire to please. They are femmes fatales. They fill and fulfil all the things that cannot be said. There is absolutely nothing sad about them. I laugh at my life the way others breathe it in. Black isn’t a choice. It imposes itself on you. It could be said that Chanel also had the same relationship with it, if only in reaction to the absence of her father. In fact, so did Saint Laurent. In my case, it was my destiny. For some people, it is just a trend. You could say that the colour runs right through me and reverberates from the depths: De profundis.
You talk about the depths of the colour black, and yet for some people it is the embodiment of evil.
It is evil! Who is looking at it? If you turn the binoculars round the other way, what you see is reversed! Take Baudelaire, he gave his flowers to evil. Other people, good people, point at it (the axis of evil). We all have a mixture of good and evil in our natures, unless we’re mad, and even that is human. Man acts in the best way he can at any given time to make things better, or at any rate, that is what he hopes. I’m thinking of an interview by a woman who fought in the Resistance, a concentration camp survivor who, when asked: “What is the one thing you can’t forgive the Nazis for?” replied in more or less these words: “For making me uncover the evil within myself, which saved my life.” In different ways, this is something we all have to face. What is the driving force behind good and evil, if not the force that allows hope to thrive.
Serge Lutens, what does black mean to you: luxury or poverty?
It has both sides to it, as long as you can tell them apart. There is nothing more important. Anyway, what counts is not so much the colour black, as what it contains. Make no mistake, it can be pink! Bachelard says that black provides a refuge for all the other colours. We all need to have somewhere we can escape to. We see most clearly when we’re in the blackest dark.
In conclusion, Serge Lutens, it has been said that you were a black line drawn without a ruler. What do you think about that?
I don’t feel as if I’ve drawn a line on anything at all. The only material I wish to bring to light in any way possible is this darkness, this blackness.
