Message in a bottle: spend a night in this perfume’s memory motel
Sure, Andy Warhol may have been at the vanguard of pop art with his soup can paintings; influencer culture with his entourage of ‘superstars’; reality television with his stream-of-consciousness films; and brand collabs with his Jean-Michel Basquiat partnership. But what is less known is his side hustle as a landlord to slebs.
Over the years Warhol rented his Montauk getaway — an ocean-front clutch of weather-beaten cottages in the Long Island hamlet — to starry buds such as Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli and Halston. It was Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ bunk-up at Warhol’s beach house in 1975 that inspired not only the Stones’ song ‘Memory Motel’, but the decadent perfume of the same name by Une Nuit à Montauk.
The nose behind Memory Motel is Annick Ménardo, a master of romantic kink as evidenced in the honeyed myrrh of her Dior Bois d’Argent, the sweet rubber exhaust of Bulgari Black and the sticky ripeness of Dior Hypnotic Poison. In Memory Motel, Ménardo conjures charred driftwood with the hazy thrum of smoke and carnations. While the carnation flickers between spicy floral and clove like a broken neon sign, incense heightens the ritual, tobacco deepens the mystery and vanilla lends the tenderness. The whole effect is androgynous and occult — ‘a memory of a love’, as Mick and Keith so wistfully sang in their haunting ballad.
Une Nuit à Montauk Memory Motel, £122 for 100ml (unenuitnomade.com)
