New-York Nicolaï / Parfums de Nicolaï 1989

The Lincoln Continental rolls slowly along the road. The whitewall tires take no notice of the cracked asphalt. The houses are as shabby as everything else in this neighborhood. A car like this is out of place here. A chauffeur with a cap is recognizable, the passenger behind the tinted windows is not. The kids at the side of the road ignore the intruder and turn up the absurdly large cassette player a little louder. The dealers on the corner look on suspiciously. Their crack rules here, it's like an epidemic, not the first and certainly not the last.

The window opens a crack. You can see leather upholstery, wood paneling, maybe a minibar. Definitely tailor-made suits, $300 haircuts and even a shave costs more than the kids here have to live on per month. You can smell the latter too, a spicy, fresh herbal scent hangs in the air for a moment before the window closes again and the car slowly drives on. The kids look behind, knowing that another world is rolling away, a world to which they will never belong

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Even though New York is a quintessentially French fragrance, you can definitely imagine it in New York, but in my opinion more at the beginning of the 80s than at the end, I would see its roots even earlier. But it is definitely a fragrance of the upper class, of a Gordon Gecko or a protagonist from a Don DeLillo novel, which is not to say that you couldn't wear it as an ordinary mortal, then as now.

In my opinion, New York does not start out particularly fresh (citrus notes are more in the background), but very spicy and warm (cinnamon, clove, some pepper) and green (herbs, which are also rather supportive). Lavender is added very quickly and is slightly floral, powdery, relatively sweet and is later supported by equally powdery musk. So I shouldn't really like it, but it is very well integrated by the spicy notes. In this phase, the fragrance hovers between chypre (for which the floral notes are not enough) and fougère (for which the caraway is missing), with a slight tendency towards fougère.

The base is defined by cool, slightly soapy moss and increasingly resinous notes (sweet tonka, styrax, incense without smoke). The resins become more dominant, are sweet but also spicy, and a slightly fruity note also plays a role. Such sweet resins can also become too much for me, but here they are very well integrated by the spicy aspects and especially the moss.

New York manages to skilfully avoid several pitfalls, which is due to the fine balance of the individual notes. Nothing is too much or too little here, everything is where it needs to be. And this has been the case since 1989, or 1982, or whenever - timeless.

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Thanks to Grandmaster Floyd!
Soundtrak: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PobrSpMwKk4