Serge Lutens Boxeuses

She was just passing through, on her way to Alaska on her motorcycle with her black-and-tan Chihuahua dog tucked into a sidecar that served as his doghouse. I can’t remember her name, only what she looked like: a tall, big-boned woman with a wide, smiling face—her long dark hair pulled back into a ponytail—wearing leather chaps over her jeans and a leather vest over her denim shirt. Her motorcycle was tricked out in all kinds of things: leather fringe, chrome-studded leather guards, a couple of those little American flags on sticks attached to the back of the bike where they fluttered in the wind, and a handmade sign on the front that said “Alaska or bust.” She was an immensely attractive woman—there were dimples in the corners of her mouth when she smiled—and her build, sturdy leaning towards thick, worked in her favor; she looked like she was built to ride in the saddle of that motorcycle.

I was working for a small weekly newspaper in upstate New York, my second job in the six years I lived there and my favorite job ever, perhaps because it was the kind of newspaper I‘d never encountered before and certainly a relic, even in those days, the mid-eighties. In addition to the items most people consider newsworthy, this paper had a fair amount of “social” news, owing to its graying readership, and regularly published items that read like such: “Mrs. Elsie Wood and her niece, Miss Josephine Shawley, attended an afternoon tea and bridal shower at the Woodstock home of her cousin on the last Saturday of April. Tea and assorted sandwiches were served….” It wasn’t that I found the social items particularly endearing, but this quaintness extended to the staff of the newspaper and to the way the whole affair was put together. Oddly enough, I didn’t write for the paper, but did everything else, from selling and designing ads, to being in charge of the newspaper layout—which was not done on a computer but by pasting everything up with the aid of light tables—to proofreading columns, and even to managing the paper boys and mailing out subscriptions. Don’t ask me why I found all of this so exciting, but I did. I loved staying up until 10:30 pm on a Tuesday night “putting the newspaper to bed” before it went to the printers in the dawn hours of the next morning. Working elbow to elbow with the editor, a sixty-year-old country gentleman who loved Manhattans and regaled me with his stories from a lifetime of working at the paper. And then having the entire next morning off to do as I pleased until the freshly-printed papers arrived back from the press, all smelling of ink and ready to go.

It’s funny to think that when the motorcycle lady rolled into our parking lot, her story of riding to Alaska, from whatever Southern state she rolled out of originally, was deemed important enough to be a feature story, but it was. This smiling Amazon in leather, with her tiny-dog sidekick, charmed the country-gentleman editor, who wrote the story on-the-spot himself and quickly arranged for his best reporter to take photos. And she thrilled the rest of us too, being that free-as-the-wind American dream that each of us had squarely tucked up in our heads but had never taken out to contemplate for ourselves, for all of life’s valid reasons. The motorcycle lady didn’t have a husband or kids, and she didn’t mind looking for odd jobs that she could do on the way to help support her trip. (The oddest of odd jobs, not in terms of uniqueness but availability, because she was intent on moving on—and how many restaurants only need a dishwasher for one or two nights?) Who knows if she even made it to Alaska—at some point she might have turned around and headed back home—but that thought never crossed any of our minds, and even if it did, I’m not sure we would have cared. She was living the dream we wanted to believe in, and everything about her (including her pint-sized dog, which, come to think of it, had his own leather gear) seemed larger than life.

Over the past couple months I’ve been wearing the gorgeous plum-leather fragrance Boxeuses, by Serge Lutens, quite a bit. Boxeuses is French for “lady boxers” (yep, women who box), but when I wear it I have a hard time conjuring up such an image. The fragrance is leathery, yes, but it’s a little too fun, a little too breezy to make me think of a lady boxer, or anyone in the heat of combat. This leather has a green-tinged (almost absinthe-like) anise coolness on initial application that spurs the image of my motorcycle lady to come riding into my consciousness. Give it a few minutes, and this leather is as fringed and tricked-up as her ride, with its dried-plum yumminess enhanced by a hint of chocolaty patchouli. If I were to use only one sentence to describe Boxeuses, I’d call it leather in the guise of a Fruit Roll-Up (that densely chewy, pectin-based confection approved by mothers for inclusion in school lunch bags because they think it fulfills the requirement of “fruit” while being, hey, conveniently portable!).

Leather is one of my favorite notes in perfume. Sometimes it reminds me of men (really good-looking men!) but often times it reminds me of freedom (equally intoxicating), as it does here. Green-tinged, slightly woody, and sweetly prune-like leather: oh yes, Boxeuses is that far-out-of-the-ordinary leather that tugs at my heartstrings with its free-wheeling beauty.

Boxeuses eau de parfum is a Paris-exclusive fragrance from the perfume house of Serge Lutens, where it can be purchased: 75 ml for 120 euros.

My generous decant came from perfume blogger Ines of All I Am - A Redhead.

Image: photo entitled Yahama Venture Windshield View is from Motorcyclecruiser.com.

Posted by Suzanne Keller, 4/17/2011.

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