Latest news with #LesParapluiesdeCherbourg
Fashion Network
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Fashion Network
The first Grasse Perfume Week celebrates diversity of the sector
The first Grasse Perfume Week opened on Thursday to showcase Grasse's expertise and the wide diversity of contemporary perfume creation. Until Saturday, conferences, exhibitions, installations, workshops and tours will take place in and around the center of Grasse. Organized by Nez, an olfactory cultural movement created in 2016 around a specialized publishing house, the event is the counterpart to the Paris Perfume Week created last year, prior to an edition in Shanghai in October. "We want to present a panorama of contemporary perfumery, explain what has happened here, what continues to be done and what will be done tomorrow," explained Romain Raimbault, director of Grasse Perfume Week. While major groups are partnering the event and opening their doors in different parts of Grasse, the perfume mecca, the emphasis is on niche perfumers, invited to showcase their creations in a Palais des Congrès quivering with original fragrances. "Thank you for believing in us. This is the beginning of a beautiful story," said the town's mayor, Jérôme Viaud, who had rose-scented misters installed in the pedestrian streets of the town center. Among the many proposals for professionals, enthusiasts and the curious, the Swiss company Luzi will be organizing a screening of the film "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg" on Friday evening, with fragrances created for eight specific scenes, inspired by what the characters eat, images of the set, and atmospheres. In an exhibition, Marc-Antoine Corticchiato, doctor in chemistry turned perfumer, looks back over 20 years of creations, associating each fragrance with the extract that forms its backbone and an evocation of his inspiration. "I don't start with a fictitious human target, like industrialists' cabinets, but with a story," said the perfumer. Corsican cliffs for "Acqua di Scandola", the breath of a horse for "Equistrius", the light of dawn for his bestseller "Le Cri", bringing together "all the most luminous materials" around ambrette seed, or a carpet of weeds for "Mal Aimé", which combines brambles, roots and nettles around an extract of inula. Like all niche perfumers, he has remained small: six employees, with annual sales of just over two million euros, a quarter of which is generated in France and the rest in some forty countries, including Italy and Kuwait. But he invites the public to cultivate their "olfactory curiosity" so as not to be satisfied with the "consensual notes" of the sector's big successes: "Big brands, small brands, it doesn't matter. Use your nose!" news_translation_auto Click here to read the original article. Copyright © 2025 AFP. All rights reserved. All information displayed in this section (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the contents of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presses.
Fashion Network
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Fashion Network
The first Grasse Perfume Week celebrates diversity of the sector
The first Grasse Perfume Week opened on Thursday to showcase Grasse's expertise and the wide diversity of contemporary perfume creation. Until Saturday, conferences, exhibitions, installations, workshops and tours will take place in and around the center of Grasse. Organized by Nez, an olfactory cultural movement created in 2016 around a specialized publishing house, the event is the counterpart to the Paris Perfume Week created last year, prior to an edition in Shanghai in October. "We want to present a panorama of contemporary perfumery, explain what has happened here, what continues to be done and what will be done tomorrow," explained Romain Raimbault, director of Grasse Perfume Week. While major groups are partnering the event and opening their doors in different parts of Grasse, the perfume mecca, the emphasis is on niche perfumers, invited to showcase their creations in a Palais des Congrès quivering with original fragrances. "Thank you for believing in us. This is the beginning of a beautiful story," said the town's mayor, Jérôme Viaud, who had rose-scented misters installed in the pedestrian streets of the town center. Among the many proposals for professionals, enthusiasts and the curious, the Swiss company Luzi will be organizing a screening of the film "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg" on Friday evening, with fragrances created for eight specific scenes, inspired by what the characters eat, images of the set, and atmospheres. In an exhibition, Marc-Antoine Corticchiato, doctor in chemistry turned perfumer, looks back over 20 years of creations, associating each fragrance with the extract that forms its backbone and an evocation of his inspiration. "I don't start with a fictitious human target, like industrialists' cabinets, but with a story," said the perfumer. Corsican cliffs for "Acqua di Scandola", the breath of a horse for "Equistrius", the light of dawn for his bestseller "Le Cri", bringing together "all the most luminous materials" around ambrette seed, or a carpet of weeds for "Mal Aimé", which combines brambles, roots and nettles around an extract of inula. Like all niche perfumers, he has remained small: six employees, with annual sales of just over two million euros, a quarter of which is generated in France and the rest in some forty countries, including Italy and Kuwait. But he invites the public to cultivate their "olfactory curiosity" so as not to be satisfied with the "consensual notes" of the sector's big successes: "Big brands, small brands, it doesn't matter. Use your nose!"
Spectator
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Instantly captivating: the mysterious harmonies of Erik Satie
The first time I heard a piece of music by Erik Satie it was on the B-side of a Gary Numan single. Played on a synth that sounds like a theremin sucking on a dummy, 'Gymnopédie #1' is so saccharine sweet it actually makes the music seem sorry for itself. And yet. It got me hooked on Satie's catchy yet sombre ironies. Par for the course, says Ian Penman in this dazzling study. People who know nothing about music beyond the top tens of their teens can be so 'instantly beguiled, captivated and transported' by Satie that his 'pop single length' works are 'now part of some collective audio memory'. For all that, there is no mention of Numan here. Nothing strange, you're thinking – but get a load of those who do turn up in the book. Ravel, Debussy and Poulenc are present and correct, of course. And since he studied composition under Satie's pal Darius Milhaud, I guess Burt Bacharach was a shoo-in for a look-in. But how about Stevie Wonder and Elton John? The Keiths, Jarrett and Emerson? The Evanses, Bill and Gil? It's Sunday Night at the Penman Palladium! Bring on those stars of stage and screen! Satie's double act with Francis Picabia in René Clair's comic silent Entr'acte ushers in a reverie on Morecambe and Wise, Pete and Dud and Vic and Bob. Satie came from Normandy and was rarely seen without an umbrella – give a big hand to Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. Yet none of this scattershot name-dropping is facetious, much less otiose. Even Penman's recollection of Les Dawson's version of 'Feelings' serves to point up the wit that underlies so much of Satie's music. You'll have gathered that this book, which is being published to mark the centenary of Satie's death, is no garden-variety monograph. Indeed, since it really does have three parts – a vaguely conventional essay on Satie's life and times; an A-Z of all things Satie; and a diary of the last few years in which Penman has jotted down Satie-stimulated hunches and hypotheses – we might do better to call it a triograph. But there's no way of shelf-marking a book like this. Dismissing the conventional biography for being 'too linear – as if modernity never happened', Penman is trying, like his film director hero Nicolas Roeg, to engender a whole new form. The result is something that looks more like a screenplay than a critical tract, with as much white space as black ink. Aphorisms and apophthegms – many of them so brief they occupy only a line or two – ladder the page like a John Coltrane chart. No attempt is made at logical, step-by-step argument. Penman's points rarely relate to one another and certainly don't flow in any order. Not that he's being lazy and making his readers do the work for him; he wants to get 'people… out of the habit of explaining everything'. Satie's minimalist phrases, shimmering, impressionist harmonies and cubist rhythms play havoc with convention – he wrenches time about in just the way the canvases of his chums Picasso and Braque reconfigure space. Similarly, Penman wants to undermine the commonplace that criticism must cohere to convince. Satie's aesthetic was so influential, Penman believes, that it gave us the sound of the contemporary world. He invented the ambient music that Michael Caine loves (Satie called it 'household music'); the industrial music of Lou Reed and Kraftwerk; and full-on muzak (an insulting name that is somehow outdone by Satie's original idea of 'furniture music'). Whatever the truth of these claims – and surely the bombast and braggadocio of what Penman calls 'big puffed-up symphonies', 'self-important concertos' and 'sweaty drama-queen conductors' have had some sway on rock and pop, too – they licence some stunning aperçus. Satie makes us 'attend to the forgotten realm of quiet moments'; an encyclopaedia is 'a largely successful attempt to keep chaos at bay'; Harold Budd's 'Luxa' is 'lift music for a lift that never goes up or down'. No, I haven't heard of that either. But then, if nothing else, this book leaves you with a playlist that will take weeks to work through. And be in no doubt: you'll want to hear what Penman's heard. His bibliography is brief to the point of pointlessness, and some reproductions of the images he is so fond of discussing would have been nice. But really, what more can one ask of criticism than that it turn you on to stuff you've never seen or heard?
