Alexis (Dadier) in Wonderland

Things simply aren’t as they would appear –– not this side of the looking glass, at least!

But Alexis Dadier, the young talent behind Thierry Mugler’s À Travers le Miroir (from the Miroir, Miroir Collection), was thinking more of Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film Le Sang d’un Poète than Alice in Wonderland. One of the picture’s seminal sequences involves a man passing through a mirror, and while I will leave the psychosexual critiques to those better qualified for that sort of thing, I will say that androgyny clearly was on the perfumer’s mind when he set out to create his own version of Through the Looking Glass. The TM Perfumes website sums it up as: “a fragrance that accentuates feminine strengths and masculine fragility.” In layman’s terms, À Travers le Miroir has set out to accomplish something that niche houses the world over would like to do –– mainly, create something that men and women will want to wear, regardless of the previously “gendered” materials found inside.

Let’s face it: the world has seen dozens of tuberose accords. To name the principals: Robert Piguet Fracas, Givenchy Amarige, Guerlain Mayotte/Mahora and Jardins de Bagatelle, L’Artisan Parfumeur La Chasse aux Papillons, and, most recently, Serge Lutens Tubereuse Criminelle and Frédéric Malle Carnal Flower. Fracas is the undisputed queen of tuberoses, big, sweet, buttery and unmistakable in a closed room. With its coconut shavings, Carnal Flower is the gourmand of the pack. Tubéreuse Criminelle is the bad girl, her flower steeped in gasoline, like a Molotov cocktail.

À Travers le Miroir is the boy-girl, with its heady white florals emerging initially but quickly overtaken by herbaceous, bitter, absinthe-like notes (nod to Lolita Lempicka for Men and Giacobetti’s Fou d’Absinthe). Here, liquor meets ice but forgoes the gourmand temptations of black licorice. Instead, Dadier overlays the whole production with a camphorous, mentholated note (wintergreen, I think), acknowledging a late-great tuberose from Le Galion, c. 1936.

I love the coolness of it all, as if we were relaxing on the other side of mirror with a tuberose Italian ice. Great work.