According to Susan Levine (The Perfume Guide, Haldane Mason, 2000) Edmond Roudnitska once described a certain perfume as 'a beautiful flower snapped into a new leather handbag'. Levine thinks this a good description of Chanel's Cuir de Russie, and so it is.
This is one of my all-time favourites. A deeply compelling blend of flowers and leather. I suspect that the sexy combination of flora and fauna lies at the heart of many unforgettable scents. The novelist Angela Carter has a wonderful passage in Wise Children where the narrator remembers the skeleton of a dessicated gardenia in the pocket of an old fur coat and reflects upon the slightly scandalous relationships by which she came by these. In the 1930s, women pinned orchids or gardenias to stoles of silver fox or coats of Russian sable. No need to labour the symbolism, here.
Perfumer Ernest Beaux composed Cuir de Russie in 1924. It makes me think of the Ballet Russes, or Iris Storm, the doomed heroine of Michael Arlen's cult romance, The Green Hat, of that year. Iris is a symbol of modernity, who collides with tradition: she drives her yellow Hispano-Suiza smack into an old oak tree.
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