L'Artisan Parfumeur La Collection de Grasse: new products (inc. scented gloves!)

L’Artisan Parfumeur looks to the roots of perfumery for its new collection: La Collection de Grasse (The Grasse Collection). In recent years, exotic travels have fed the creativity of L’Artisan Parfumeur and its perfumers, now the French perfume house returns to the mythical home of fragrance. The collection will debut this October with two stunning candles - L’Automne (autumn/fall) and L’Hiver (winter). In parallel, L’Artisan Parfumeur will launch a truly luxurious and surprising new product: scented leather gloves, perfumed with its iconic Mûre et Musc Extrême fragrance.

L’Artisan Parfumeur was inspired by Grasse, spiritual home of perfumery, and most specifically by the Grasse “arrière-pays,” or back-country, where mountains and Mediterranean meet. With the passing of the seasons, this fragrant landscape is alive with colours, and fleeting emotions. This new collection is also L’Artisan Parfumeur’s celebration of French artisanal heritage.

L’Automne and L’Hiver candles:
These two L’Artisan Parfumeur candles transport you to the Grasse back-country, creating a warm and cosy atmosphere for your home, redolent of the seasons. For the Grasse Collection, L’Artisan Parfumeur imagined a new handmade vessel to house the candle, and sought out other artisans, ceramic masters from the other side of the world, based in the Chaozhou region of China.
Available in two sizes 200gr (for over 60 hours burning time) for 55GBP and 1.5 kg (for over 100 hours) for 220GBP.
Spring 2013 will see the release of two more candles: Le Printemps and L'Ete. 

L’Automne A stroll through the wild landscape surrounding Grasse, where leaves and nuts fall onto the humid earth.
This candle recreates this special muffled atmosphere, where leaves on the ground soften the sound of footsteps. The air is getting fresher, and more humid, the light is getting paler, comforting as the wind picks up. At first, we detect a lavender note, which carries us into the countryside, then chestnut, caramel and blackcurrant notes. Finally, a cedar and lichen accord brings to a close this promenade in the Grasse back-country.

L’Hiver A gathering around the fireplace, surrounded by the comforting scents of smoky woods and pine needles.This candle is highly-evocative. Imagine being by a burning fireplace, safely tucked-up inside, when all outside is cold and dark. At L’Artisan Parfumeur, the winter season is often a time for reunions with those you love, moments filled with emotion. So, the ingredients were chosen with great care: clary sage, married with notes of pine and fir tree from around Grasse, to create this welcoming wintry scene.

click to enlarge

The Scented Gloves

The scenting process
The process of ‘scenting’ the leather was developed after extensive research by L’Artisan Parfumeur. The leather (the ‘raw skin’) is soaked for four hours in a very specific mixture of nourishing oils and the specially-developed Mûre et Musc Extrême concentrate. This process softens and scents the leather. The leather is then removed from the mixture and placed in a special drying-room, to be left to dry overnight. The mixture of oils and the Mûre et Musc Extrême concentrate results in the leather of the gloves being elegantly perfumed for around three years. The gloves can also be re-scented using the Eau de Parfum Mûre et Musc Extrême, without staining the leather.

The House of Causse. The savoir-faire of the glove-maker
The history of the House of Causse is closely entwined the glove-making workshops of Millau, in the South of France. The expertise of these workshops has ensured that Millau has become the glove-making capital of France. Causse is officially celebrated as an “Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant” (a company seen as part of France’s cultural patrimony). Causse gloves are still designed and made locally, by hand, with the same love and attention to detail. Far from being anachronistic, this painstaking artisanal work has found new meaning with L’Artisan Parfumeur and relevance to contemporary perfumery.
The beautifully soft black leather gloves, available in fours sizes (XS, S, M, L) fit your hand perfectly. The kid leather, of French provenance, is of outstanding quality, perfectly supple and soft to the touch, offering great comfort, as well as that certain French elegance. When you remove the glove, your skin is delicately scented, impregnated with your favourite fragrance. The Mûre et Musc Extrême scented gloves, lined with natural silk arouse the senses of both touch and smell.
Only 100 pairs are produced, available from October 2012 in selected L'Artisan boutiques for 320GBP. This year, with L’Artisan Parfumeur, Mûre et Musc Extrême will fit you like a glove!

To discover the ‘making-of’ candles video, please click on this link:

http://youtu.be/wXHJSk144FI

In the same vein, please click through the below link to discover the ‘making-of’ video of the scented leather gloves

http://youtu.be/_iHRnPn9RMo

  info via press release

Leather Series 2: Scented Leather and its Origins

It wouldn’t be inaccurate to claim that French perfumery owes its birth to the malodorous tanning process and its nauseating smell of decay. Shocking as this statement might sound, it is nonetheless true.

Tanning requires the use of nitrogenous waste to cure hides, to make them fit to be processed for the items the aristocracy requested and to kill bacteria that would infest dead tissue. Even today in places where traditional tanning techniques are used, such as Morocco, there are big basins of human and animal urine and feces, along with various tree barks rich in tannin, where workers have to stand with their feet naked, immersed in this revolting liquid, stretching the shaved hides, making them pliable and soft. The smell is trully insupportable for the wandering tourist and it is not without intense distaste that one has to urgently seek solace in a scented handerkchief or a small bunch of greenery to relieve the nose from the malicious fumes emanating from those ponds of filth.

It was not that dissimilar back during Renaissance times, when treating hides followed this method, the atmosphere of which Atelier Grimal from the “Perfume” coffret by Mugler (based on the novel and movie “Perfume: story of a murderer”) tried to capture.
From Florence and Italy, a stronghold of the European commerce with the East and its aromatic tradition, perfumes came to France through historical personages of the Medici family and through an item of clothing: gloves.

The Gantiers, the Guild of Glovers that is, was one of the most important guilds in France. It was in 1268 that it was granted the status of corporation in Paris. It was later under Colbert’s economic management that the gantiers parfumers were awarded pride of place in the Six Corps; the six most powerful societies of the day. This allowed them to have access to expensive products from overseas. The production of leather goods took place principally in Montpellier, a town famous for its tanneries. It was there that Eau de la Reine de Hongrie (Hungary Water) was produced as well. Another centre for tanneries was Grasse. The two towns were economic rivals.

Catherine de Medici (1519-1589), Queen of France from 1547 to 1559 and mother to three kings, was a personality that hasn’t been reinstated historically-speaking yet. The stigma of murderess is still attached, as she used special mixes to get rid of her enemies and was implicated in the St.Bartholomew’s Night massacre. When she left Italy to marry Henri, Duc d'Orleans, she didn’t leave behind her favourite artists, poets and even her own perfumer, René le Florentin ~named Renato Bianco at birth. It was he who scented the gloves that poisoned Jeanne D’Albert, mother of Henry IV. Catherine also made use of poison rings: jewels that opened to reveal a hollow place that contained poison to be poured into drinks and food. Monstrous as the habit seems to us, it was nonetheless very common in the courts of Europe at the time and Catherine turned it into high art. René was the first perfumer to open shop in Paris and soon anyone who was anyone flocked to his door to purchase his offerings; scented goods and ~discreetly, following the tapestry that hid the secret passage to a chamber upstairs~ non-scented goods…

Leather products did not smell particularly good in their raw state. This was due to the tanning process. Tanning de facto involved less than pleasant smells (mainly urinous, used to make hides pliable) and tradition in many countries was to further aromatize the end product with fragrant essences to hide the manufacturing process off notes: In Italy they used musk, civet and orris butter introduced by Muzio Frangipani (hence "gants frangipani"), in Spain camphor and ambergris, in France orange blossom, violet, iris and musk were the usual essences prefered. It is worthy of mention that it is hypothesized that it is exactly this re-odorized smell that accounts for our perception of what leather smells like, in both sartorial and perfume terms.
Catherine, proud of her beautiful hands and a fan of opera gloves to keep them soft, in her desire to mask the smell of cured leather, liked her leathery garments to be scented with agreeable essences. There was also another reason behind the habit though: the dire need to bring something scented to the nose when crossing the streets of the times, which were in actual fact open sewers transporting human and animal waste to the rivers and ultimately to the sea. The improvement on sanitation in the following centuries was a welcome relief that diminished the need, but the tradition remained, having given European perfumery its kick-start.

The real craze for leather goods in the mid-16th century and especially gloves was allegedly imposed by Marie de de Médicis (1575-1642), queen consort and part of the Medici family. Lured by perfumes from Cyprus, the famous chyprés, she sent for her Florentine perfumer Tombarelli to come to Grasse, where the flowers were renowned, instructing him to capture their ambience in perfumed essences. It was thus that Grasse knew a rebirth in economical terms. Tanneries profited from the trend producing the famous Gants à la Frangipane, from the name of the Roman family of the 12th century. Thus the name “frangipani” enters the scented vernacular. The gloves were made by odorizing the leather with fresh jasmine flowers (in lieu of plumeria fowers) for 8 days and fixating the scent with the use of civet and musk.

Soon indigenous plants, such as lavender, Cassie, myrtle and lentisque (mastic) as well as those that took well to the mild climate (such as jasmine, rosa centifolia and Italian tuberose) started to be cultured for the expressed purpose of using them for harvesting their aroma. Grasse therefore gave priority to the scented part of the industry, while Montpellier remained more focused on tannery per se.
However when in the 1760s the French government raised taxes on hides considerably, the gantiers parfumers suffered a crush to their revenues; especially those of Montpellier naturally. Thus Grasse managed to outdo her rival, retaining the privilege of perfume capital for centuries to follow.

Even today the noble practice of scenting leather is echoed in the niche brand Maître Parfumeur et Gantier, created by the perfumer Jean Laporte, previously founder of L’artisan Parfumer. To this day, mr.Laporte sells scented gloves in his Paris boutique, fusing past and present into one fragrant stanza. The legacy of scented leathers has trully enriched our appreciation of fragrance.




Next instalment will focus on another aspect of leather in perfumery.

Pic of leather gloves Ledge by Paul England/Flickr. Painting of Marie de Medici by Rubens, courtesy of Wikipedia