Agent Provocateur Agent Provocateur For Your Pleasure
a vintage rose-strewn boudoir romp
“The most beautiful girl in the world, when she goes to see her lover, she takes off her dress, takes off her makeup. What’s left? The charm of her voice and her perfume.”
- Jean-Paul Guerlain
The love of beauty - is it a virtue or a vice? I am shamelessly of the aesthete life, of living for beauty, of being surrounded by beauty. A part of me understands the decadence of Dorian Grey, of Andrea Sperelli. My world becomes rarefied as I surround myself with details designed for pleasure. Whether it be a porcelain bird, an Egyptomanian tray with hieroglyphs, a bouquet of fresh flowers, a golden icon of Mary and of course, perfume. I think scent is among the easiest ways to transform the space around you and tell a story, setting the scene of the drama to unfold. In Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Pleasure, Andrea gets drunk on his own romantic machinations. In one sensual scene, as he waits for his former lover he becomes intoxicated on the scent of burning cedar wood in the fireplace and the bouquets of roses that carry the weight of memory of years of decadence, romance and endless pleasure, piacere, piacere….
This is the landscape of Agent Provocateur by Agent Provocateur, released in 2000. I reviewed this fragrance earlier this year on Fragrantica and wrote the word “sexy” in my review at least a hundred times. Because this perfume is sexy. It is pleasure, it is Andrea’s drawing room with an alluring blend of roses and cedar, with heavy red velvet curtains, and an opulent marble statue of Venus rushing to cover her naked body.
This is one of those perfumes where I think the design, the scent and the whole feel aligns and lives up to exactly what you probably expect. The bottle is designed to look like a pink sexy “bomb” where you have to pull the black satin ribbon and “detonate” the perfume in order to spray yourself. The way the bottle is shaped and the size make it extremely satisfying to hold, perfectly fitting in the palm of your hand.
The notes of Agent Provocateur, at least according to Fragrantica include Indian saffron and magnolia, but I have to say the rose and cedar dominate. It’s a bit of magnolia on the periphery in the very beginning, but then it’s all roses and roses and roses….
Agent Provocateur is classically sexy, from a time when women would wear garter belts under their skirts and silk stockings with a line running down the leg. Agent Provocateur is for the woman in red lipstick, a call to eros that is somewhat old-fashioned, like a dusty Parisian boudoir, like erotica written in the 1920s by Anais Nin. Sensuality from another time and another place. When sexy was an exposed ankle and an unnatural flush in the cheeks from rouge.
Agent Provocateur has been discontinued for some time now but you can find it inexpensively secondhand online. This is a cheap and powerful dirty rose for the true retro sensualist and the bottle alone is worthwhile in its own right, it truly feels as if lingerie were a perfume.
There is little else more I can say about Agent Provocateur, it would just be more roses, more foreplay, more desire, more pleasure and then…
Give me kisses-a thousand, then a hundred,
One more thousand and then another hundred,
Then one thousand again, and still a hundred.
After that, when we’ve run up many thousands,
let’s destroy the accounting and forget it,
so no envious character can hurt us
when he hears we have had so many kisses.
- Catullus 5