Caron: En Avion

for L.–

Autumn temperatures, finally. And, with them, the opportunity to reacquaint myself with some “Hall of Fame” scents. Yesterday and today, I have been luxuriating in Ernest Daltroff’s olfactory homage to the female aviators of the last century, En Avion (1929). Often labeled as a “leather chypre,” En Avion came ten years after Daltroff’s monumental Lost Generation masterpiece, Tabac Blond, and, while it shares some of that scent’s “woman of confidence” bearing, its personality is marked by a more overt, if darker, femininity. The tobacco of his earlier “oriental leather,” has here given sway to an eccentric, if somber, blend of orange tree (yes, the tree), rose centifolia, jasmine absolute and spicy, clove-laced carnation. Again, the spirit of leather is evoked, but not the supple kid gloves and suede of Tabac Blond; rather, here it is the leather of the cockpit: gear, upholstery, bonnet and goggles. The woman is still rich and independent, but wary of her husband’s overweening financial machismo. This is, after all, the spring before the Crash. She has been to a Freudian analyst and perhaps rankles at the sweet pipe tobacco of yesteryear. She’s ready to pick up the pen and begin writing her own story, to make her own road, even if it spells some brand of disaster. And when she’s not trailing vapor at ten thousand feet, she’s trailing sillage like Isak Dinesen at the Muthaiga Club, Nairobi. She’s re-found her feminine charm. She even professes a love for flowers after all that flapper-era genderfuck fol-de-rol. I love her.