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| Winston Churchill wore this? |
When I hear the name "Town & Country," I think of Chrysler's minivans, the ones with the frumpy front ends and disproportionately small-looking tires. Seeing it printed on a Clive Christian bottle sends me spiraling into cognitive dissonance. This is another niche house where the packaging looks like it was designed by a small army, mostly by committee, but at least in part by someone's gay cousin. It's flashy, colorful, gaudy, and Rococo, a combination of aesthetics that is in equal measure alluring and repulsive.
Fifty milliliters of the stuff will set me back $450, which is a blah zone for niche nowadays, although the brand is known for asking up to and beyond $1k for some bottles, in part because, again, flashy packaging, and also due to their supposed historical pedigree (they own the Crown Perfumery Company). At its price, my expectations are for nothing short of the absolute best, a Katara Tower of scent. Town & Country opens with a pedestrian top accord of bigarade and crab apple, which bites until the fruitier elements have morphed into an exceedingly dry and aromatic clary sage. So far, so meh.
Within twenty minutes, this sagey phase bulks up, until the full thrust of the composition's heart has emerged, a robust woody amber with slightly retro connotations, thanks to a familiar old-school musk undergirding it all. It's that apple-pie musk of the late eighties and early nineties, the sort of thing found in designer masculines of that era, except here it is smoothed out, its rougher animalic edges sanded down, with only the drier and woodier elements remaining. There's a soft mineralic quality in there also, a touch of real ambergris, just enough to add a bit of texture and shimmer. Not bad.
Sadly, there isn't much else to this stuff. After six hours, Town & Country evolves in linear fashion into a lighter version of its woody and ambery heart, which elevates the musk and lends it a somewhat cheap feeling. Whoever composed this perfume did not want it to smell spicy or loud, but opted for a blended and discreetly stuffy vibe, and while that makes every stage feel serious and mature, it lacks distinction, and has no sense of fun. It's a very "churchy" scent, something you'd wear to a requiem mass or while fasting, i.e., not something you'd bring to a picnic. For this kind of cashola, I need to be smiling.