Roja Diaghilev Parfum

Diaghilev is the closest thing modern perfumery has to a museum piece made on commission. In 2010 the Victoria and Albert Museum mounted an exhibition on Sergei Diaghilev and the golden age of the Ballets Russes, and Roja Dove created a fragrance to accompany it. The house still tells the story on its own site, including the detail that Diaghilev is said to have scented the theatre curtains so that the smell reached the audience before the dancers did. Roja put thirty-three ingredients into the answer.

It is a chypre, and specifically the kind of grand, spiced, animalic chypre that regulations and cost have made almost impossible to build now. The opening is a proper old-fashioned hesperidic burst of lemon, bergamot, lime and orange, sharpened with tarragon and, unusually, cumin, which announces immediately that this is not going to be comfortable in a modern way. The heart is enormous: Rose de Mai, jasmin de Grasse, tuberose, ylang, heliotrope, violet, blackcurrant bud and peach, layered rather than blended, so different flowers surface at different hours. The base is where the age of it shows. Oakmoss, civet, leather, labdanum, styrax, patchouli, vetiver, benzoin, guaiac, orris, ambergris and musk build something dark, fur-like and faintly dirty, warmed by vanilla and Peru balsam.

It is not a daytime fragrance and it is not a summer one. This is a Cape winter evening scent, worn to something that matters, and it is emphatically for people who already know they like animalic perfumery.

Sold as a parfum in Roja's Prestige Collection, it performs the way its concentration and materials suggest: twelve hours or more on skin, days on wool, and a presence in the first hours that fills a room without effort. Apply it the way you would an extrait, one small touch at a time, and note that the cumin and civet in the opening take twenty minutes to settle. Judge it after half an hour, not on the first inhale.