INTRODUCING THE SCENT OF TOM

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SCENT NOTES: 'TOM OF FINLAND' BY ETAT LIBRE D'ORANGE By CHANDLER BURR

++++ (4 stars)
“Tom of Finland”
Etat Libre d’Orange
100ml: $93
www.henribendel.com

For the avant garde and frequently bewildering house of Etat Libre d’Orange – a label known for obliterating boundaries and honoring art for art’s sake – creating a perfume inspired by the Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen’s gay male pornographic drawings seems like a natural choice. Indeed, it is practically mandatory. Founded by the olfactory gallerist Etienne de Swardt, Etat bears the motto “Le parfum est mort, vive le parfum!” – promising the death of perfume as we know it, and the arrival of something new. Etat has delivered on this promise: consistently, startlingly, salaciously, delightfully, disgustingly, brilliantly. A single Etat perfume shows more creativity than the complete collections of most other houses. The masterful perfumer Antoine Lie created “Secretions Magnifique,” a work inspired by the scents of blood, sweat, semen and saliva. Whether it is wearable or not – and my personal opinion is that it is not, though more than a few people would disagree – is beside the point. The point is the art. The equally masterful Antoine Maisondieu created “Don’t Get Me Wrong, Baby, I Don’t Swallow,” which, in good post-modernist fashion, is a work of art that consists in equal parts of the perfume itself and its title. Lie’s “Rien” represents nihilism. Maisondieu’s “Jasmin et Cigarette” is perfectly machined photorealism. The most surprising Etat scent of all, however, might be one of the subtlest.

By the time he died in 1991, Laaksonen – who was widely known as Tom of Finland – had become one of the 20th century’s most important artists working in the pornographic style. He pushed the boundaries of homosexual iconography and was lionized both by the gay and straight fetishist communities. If ever an iconic figure was born to inspire an Etat perfume, it was he. Born in 1920, Laaksonen moved to Helsinki in 1939 to study advertising and almost immediately began military service as an anti-aircraft officer during World War II. When the war ended, he enrolled at an art college and began drawing in earnest. He developed his iconography as carefully and lovingly as any medieval painter detailing biblical and Catholic mythology. He took the existing ideal of the Finnish lumberjack and further mythologized the character by presenting him as hypermasculine, gay and particularly endowed. Laaksonen’s style evolved from illustration, naive and almost feminine, to photosurrealism laced with S&M and fascistic touches. In the 1950s and early ’60s, federal censorship laws in the U.S. prohibited publishing depictions of “overt homosexual acts.” So Laaksonen sent his work to magazines that purported to present handsome, muscular young men as ideals to be revered – models of physical fitness and health to be emulated. The 1962 decision in the poetically named MANual Enterprises v. Day decriminalized depictions of male nudity, and eventually Laaksonen transitioned into overt gay pornography. In 1973 he quit his job at the Helsinki office of the advertising agency McCann-Erickson and became a full-time artist. Or pornographer. Or both, depending on your point of view. His drawings of ’60s-era bikers in their dens, wearing black leather jackets, black leather hats and black leather pants – usually engaged in acts that were overtly sexual, sometimes anatomically impossible and not infrequently as funny as they were erotic - either demonstrate a unique artistic sensibility taking on a taboo subject or an out-of-control sex drive in a man who just happened to be able draw. Given all this, Etat’s “Tom of Finland” scent is unexpected in several ways. It is a precision-crafted, edgy leather: dark, with a charred, smoky note clinging to it, yet also somehow beautiful. It is recognizably masculine, but also intelligent. By way of comparison, “Kelly Caleche,” one of the most severely underappreciated pieces of scent work in existence, is also a leather, though it is lovely and soft from being sweetened a bit with flowers and sunlight. The leather in “Tom” has been exposed to a few too many cigarettes in the biker den gloom and sat on a few too many sweat-stained bar stools to be considered lovely. Nor is it sweet. But those stools have imparted their light fragrance of wood – a fresh, natural scent of forest. And somewhere, somehow, some dark flowers have left a trace of their odor as well. The man who wears “Tom of Finland” may be a biker at 2 a.m. But who knows – at 10 a.m., he may be a florist. Stranger things have happened. “Tom” is almost perfectly calibrated to match Laaksonen’s style. But it is not a pornographic scent. Nor is it shocking. Nor is it the mirror image of another reality. It expresses the style of an artist who played with images – no matter how overtly and enthusiastically obscene they may have been – and mixed them with a wink. You can smell Laaksonen’s serious passion for the world he created, and the fetishes he loved, and his sexual drive. But you can also smell his sense of humor.

Here’s what some people think about Tom of Finland…

SPECTACULAR! Amazing, amazing scent! I do admit that when I first tried it, I wasn’t completely sold on it, but I kept sniffing and sniffing, and suddenly I couldn’t get enough. I have never smelled any parfum even remotely like it –it has such complexity, that all the different fragrances all seem distinct and appear at different moments. Truly an olfactory experience worth repeating over and over!
Rating: *****
HalloweenHJB -Professor from Indianapolis

I loved this bold and bracing scent right out of the bottle! The lemon and metallic scents jump out and say here I am! The dry down is warm and sexy but alas, it is gone oh so quickly! I could smell nothing, not even a ghost of this exotic blend after 2 hours. Oh Tom, come back to me!!!
Rating: *****
Jennifer B - from Laguna Hills

Tom of Finland was not love at first sight for me, because simply it wasn’t what I expected it to be. And for that I’m glad! It bends expectations, stumps them, and reformulates them. It’s sparkling clean take on eroticism is truly a breath of fresh air! And yet, it is not timid either about its earthy underside: that saltiness of the skin, that lick of metal, that bitterness which remains when all is said and done… Inspired!
Rating: ****
arch.memory -architect from Philadelphia