I got back to Seattle yesterday after a non-stop pavement pounding weekend in New York where I met up with a gaggle of fragrance hounds from the Perfume of Life forum (wait, do hounds gaggle?), plus a meeting with Della Chuang, a New York graphic designer and the author of KyotEau: Bottled Memories.
I took my friend Julie with me, and we booked two rooms at the Mandarin Oriental in uptown New York -- it's located in the huge Time Warner building that hunkers down on Columbus Circle, right across from Central Park. When we arrived, they upgraded us to rooms right next to each other and with views of the park (when I'd booked online, they were showing only city view rooms).
This is what I woke up to each morning (you'll have to pardon the quality of the photos -- I had to take them with my iPhone as I realized upon my arrival in New York, and much to my great horror, that I'd left my Canon G10 sitting forlornly on the kitchen table back home):
View from the 40th floor
I was surprised that we were able to be upgraded and moved around so easily on a weekend, but #1) it was August in New York, and it's not necessarily the time when people flock to the city, and #2) hotels are presently running at much lower occupancy rates than they have in years, if ever. Restaurants, too.
For example, we went to Del Posto for dinner on Friday evening -- a huge, swanky, glitzy, overblown paen to the heady days of high-finance and multi-million dollar Wall Street bonus checks. Del Posto opened in 2006 and was immediately a hot-ticket (and hotly reviled by the food snobs) item with its deep, straight from Italy wine list (wine book is more like it), but as we sat at the bar waiting for our table (we'd arrived about a half hour early due to there being about 50% less traffic on the streets than I'd anticipated), the bartender mentioned that it was not a busy night, especially for a Friday, and when we looked around, we realized that he was oh so right.
The tables were mostly filled, yes, but there was no standing-room only crowd, no waiting in line, no spillover into the bar area -- couple that with how fast and easy it was for us to get from the Upper West side to the Meat Packing district when a trip like that is usually bumper to bumper, stop and go on a Friday night, and I was getting a sense that the big city is a lot quieter than it ever used to be.
But the atmosphere of the place was still engaging, with live piano music tinkling in the background and very personable, attentive service from the staff, but another change that struck me as different from the last times I've visited New York was the way the restaurant diners were dressed.
Julie and I were in our best New York black duds, and I swear we were about the best dressed people there, which has never been the case for me before (at least not in New York) -- I saw lots of casual button down shirts with slacks, but no jackets for the men (there was barely a suit in sight, save for the waitstaff, who were all dressed about ten times better than the majority of the diners), while the women were in much more casual dresses, or skirts and blouses, than ordinarily you'd see at a swank of a restaurant like this.
The style actually reminded me of a much more casual West Coast attitude toward dress codes, which is pretty much, "If you can pay the bill, you can have a table." Not what New York has been known for in the past, which makes me think that some of the trendier big-ticket restaurants are just happy to be filling tables at all, snooty attitudes be damned.
But beyond the food, quite a bit of the trip was spent touring Bergdorf Goodman, since I was meeting up on both Friday and Saturday with beauty/fragrance bloggers and forum members. Below is a photo of Julie and yours truly from the Saturday morning meet-up brunch at Sullivan Diner, where sixteen fragrance fanatics sat at a table groaning under the weight of goodie bags filled with perfume samples.
She said, "Sniff for the camera" -- so we did!
I'd never been to Bergdorf before, even though I've visited NYC numerous times (and even lived there for a year in 2002/2003), so it was a pleasure to take in the sights at the department store that pretty much epitomizes the high-end department store experience in the United States.
Being more than perfume friendly types, we of course stopped into the JAR boutique, of which there are only two in the world -- one in Paris, and the other right there in the basement of Bergdorf. We were given the full-on JAR experience, which includes a lengthy explanation of the history of the development of the fragrances, as well as anecdotes about jeweler and perfumer Joel Arthur Rosenthal.
Since I didn't have my good camera, I can't offer photos of the boutique, which is a shame since there's a really nice bolt of lightning mural that stretches from one end of the ceiling to the other, inspired by their signature perfume, Bolt of Lightning.
But the sales assistant (Robert) was personable and welcoming while also being very good at what he does -- out of the four of us who were sitting at his table, two of us walked away with bottles of JAR fragrance, which isn't a bad success rate as far as salesmanship goes.
***Note: there would have been three sales out of the four of us if the new, as yet unreleased JAR fragrance that Robert let me smell from a tester had been bottled and available for consumers. It was deeply sweet and complex, with a quality like warm honey poured over old saddle leather.
He also let each of the three women try on some pairs of Rosenthal's earrings that he had on hand, which were light as air, hand-made geranium leaves and rose petals fashioned out of aluminum, some of them painted or oxidized, others covered in gold.
Julie in JAR earrings
Some earrings look good on a person. These looked stunning -- the ways in which they curved and twisted made them appear as if they were floating at the ear rather than hanging as a piece of jewelry.
Again, kicking myself that I didn't have the G10 with me.
But JAR is rather up-into-the-stratosphere stuff, and a pair of painted, aluminum earrings runs $2400.00 (his more elaborate and jeweled works can run into the millions), so we took a pass on the jewelry experience of JAR.
Robert did mention that there's talk of a Joel Arthur Rosenthal retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2012, and for that I would travel specifically to NYC to visit. The man's work is extraordinarily beautiful, and is never available in any sizable collection for viewing by the likes of the unwashed masses (such as myself).
The days flew past, a blur of perfume, fashion and design chatter, and we had our meeting with Della Chuang on Saturday evening at Bar Masa, located also in the Time Warner building, and right next to its much more formal sister restaurant, Masa, described as Manhattan's "most expensive temple to the gods of sushi" by New York Magazine.
At Masa, reservations are taken only on the first week of the month, and only for the month that follows. Needless to say, it's formal and exclusive and I hadn't called far enough in advance. Bar Masa, on the other hand, is easy going and no-reservations required, so we breezed right in, got a table and settled down for an evening of good sake, excellent sushi and fascinating conversation.
Ms. Chuang had brought along a prototype of her packaging concept for her KyotEau fragrance, and I was stunned at how simple and yet deeply elegant the whole presentation turned out to be. The packaging was reminiscent of the quality of the Lalique Encre Noire EDP packaging, but even more sophisticated and creative.
Unfortunately, Della doesn't have the deep financial pockets of a name like Lalique, so it will be a challenge to bring this vision of hers into reality, though there's certainly a market for it, as tooling around the interior of Bergdorf's proved -- if it's gorgeous, exquisitely crafted and exotic, then the Ladies Who Lunch don't care what price it is.
Della's packaging concept for KyotEau is all three (gorgeous, exquisitely crafted and exotic), with its hand-smoothed, coral red, carved wood box and kohl-black glass bottle with heavy stained wood cap, and could easily retail for several thousand dollars without the high-end consumer batting an eye -- although there aren't any diamonds involved, and now that I think about it, the Ladies Who Lunch really love their diamonds . . .
Search
Comments