Monte Carlo Rose Ball

The 2019 Monte Carlo Rose Ball - a function instituted by Grace Kelly in (wait let me check it up on Google... ...I think it was 1959 from memory) nope it was 1954 - just finished a couple of days ago.

'The Ball' is more than just one evening, as you can gather from the phrase 'just finished.' I mean, how long is the thing after all, for it to only 'just finish?!'

Well, put it this way - if you are Amanda Harlech, one of the real brains and business muscle behind Chanel, you go from the Paris Fashion Week (she has a base in the Paris Ritz), and on to the Monte Carlo Rose Ball without missing a beat, don't you.

Princess Caroline of Monaco is the other half of the 'big hitters' who were as much part of 'Karl Lagerfeld' as Karl was himself. They are not silly people, and by no means ignorant or illiterate. Karl's real substance was made up in large part by his collection of books, hand-written texts and drawings, and even scale models and samples of the work of the greatest fashion designers and stylists of Europe over at least a 100 years. 

This is what a Russian-crafted car with German mechanicals looks like -
looks a bit like 'Captain Black' himself, old Karl Lagerfeld!
This is a Russian coachbuilt, V12 BMW. Available right now.

Now I can tell you something about Karl Lagerfeld that the public accounts will not say, or disclose, or maybe even know. 

And for those of you participating in the up-coming Australia national elections, there is a broadly similar story that applies to the billionaire candidate Clive Palmer.

Both Lagerfeld and Palmer are part Russian, and part CHINESE.

Their families have been in Russia and China doing trade and diplomacy for CENTURIES.

If you think Caroline of Monaco and Amanda Harlech hung out with Keiser Karl just because he was a genius designer and stylist you are mistaken.

Setting for the 'Rose Ball' of Monte Carlo

Karl's father was a diplomat for the Russian government in Paris for years - he is one of these ever so slightly 'displaced' Bohemians, or in his case, more Pomeranian, of noble blood and birth, whose prospects were dimmed on account of the final destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the end of the Russian Tsar. But deep back in the ancient past, he was of the Swedish-Russian aristocracy. Today's fake 'elites' don't want to admit it partly because, as you all know, today's ruling elite are utter and complete rascals and usurpers of the first water, taking advantage of many criminal events, including the massacre of the French aristocracy and then the murder of the Russian Tsar and his family.

Karl Lagerfeld, in my own view, was considerably older than he made out, and even more so than the most conservative public assertions by 'responsible' records.

Today, modern people have this ludicrous gullible credulity about there having been ANY records left after WW's I and then II. This is plain insanity to any self-respecting decent historian.

1930 was the Great Depression following the Crash of '29, but more to the point, if there had have been records maintained in Hamburg then to do with Russian court diplomats and the birth of their children from 'someone' it is the most inane thing to make no comment at all that Hamburg was bombed to the ground during WWII.

No, my friend, I can trust my own private and personal network's accounts - Karl was Russian, or part Russian, part French, part Swedish, and in more ancient times, of even more exotic Asiatic blood. If he was German at all, it was only because those types of people were the rulers in the old Pomerania, near Sweden.


  

Paris Fashion Week

The end of March marks the formal end of 'Paris Fashion Week' for another year.

I haven't seen any references being made by any of the houses to the quite famous now, Paris 'gilets jaunes.' 

What not too many people know, even supposed fashion journalists - is that the major houses send out highly selective programs to their clients: and these will pick out what they are really trying to propose to the client, rather than what they are splashing out to the hoi poloi. Consequently, you will read much nonsense in the press about what will be leading the fashion trends next season... Yeah yeah, blah blah blah.

Alfred Dunhill presented this year.

Alfred Dunhill - 2019

Mark Weston and Kim Jones are the key creative directors responsible for the current 'cut' at Dunhill Bespoke.

The House of Chanel paid tribute to the recently passed Karl Lagerfeld. 

Fashion has always been exploited as a platform for bad politics and such was also in evidence this year. We have to disregard that kind of nonsense and steer towards the codes more or less fully-established by Brummell - and the codes of Brummell apply for women too.

Really, this is pure 'Dandyism...' The unlearned eye will
misunderstand, but this is excellent, and no question - 'Dandyism.'

Sunday, March 3rd, 2019 (extract):

"1. The Emir of Qatar owns the House of Balmain, Paris;

2. The Emir is close friends with the Germans I was telling you about;

3. Bugatti is owned by that German group and its shareholding is spread among some Qataris and a few others like Proton Malaysia, and Red Bull and Petronas.

...And so you see, African-American rappers like to drive Bugattis, see, and they like to drink champagne owned by German Industrial Trading Houses, and Justin Beiber sings songs with DJ Khaled and Kim Kardashian and and and and."

Oh dear.

Sputnik News: Emir of Qatar leaves Saudi conference abruptly.

All News: L.A. Rapper Nipsey Hussle shot dead.

(...Might have to delete this post shortly - we get our information from key individuals out in the field, obviously, because it ain't me personally who goes 'round the world in twenty seconds each day!).

Confirmed: some parts now have been deleted.

Modern Advertising And Marketing

...Just a quick passing note - April 1 is the day when some major countries of Europe adopted the 'Gregorian Calendar' from previously having used the Julian Calendar. This officially took place in 1583 for the first time counting one full year under that system.

The Julian Calendar itself is missing some forty-odd years from the prior Roman Calendar. Where did they go? LOL

Lots of politics going on which obscure what actually transpired - don't forget, dozens of Romans committed the assassination of Julius Caesar, and then, they all 'mysteriously' died... Augustus Caesar wrote, of course, just whatever he wanted to about the events and the events afterwards. And that is the 'history' of it all we have left to us today.

***

It's been a long time since David Ogilvy (perhaps as long as whatever including another missing forty years...) penned the words designed for the advertising and marketing world: 'aim for the company of immortals.' 

Marketing is marketing, dude! It's important.

Today we might have to look at Brie Larson to attain an understanding of what an 'immortal' implies to Madison Avenue.

The reason I am talking about advertising and marketing is because I want to point out to you the difference between what someone knowledgeable in an industry may regard as 'the best' of something, and what if bought now could put on significant dollars into the future.

The three genuine best bottled perfumes or fragrances in the world today are the following:

Stefano Ricci SR8

Roja Dove Diaghilev

And Areej Le Dore Koh-i-Noor

Of the three, in terms of absurdly outstanding quality of ingredients and skillfulness of composition - the last one in that list, compared to its current price, should be worth thousands of dollars in years to come. But it might not get there because those people do not have the extravagant sense of advertising that would catapult it to the world stage the way it deserves. Yet, nevertheless, it is possible. 

 

Is It Only 'Emotional Value' That Is The Key Component Of Luxury Pricing?

One of our correspondents here sent us some info on the latest million-dollar escapade in Dubai - the Asgharali Shumukh: the world's most expensive perfume. 

All the general media coverage repeats basically the same press release content, namely that it is the world's most expensive perfume.

As far as public information goes, up until Shumukh, Clive Christian of Londonistan held the crown as the producer of 'the world's most expensive perfume.'

It appears that the price of Shumukh is around $1.3 million.

And a word should be said about the tendency at the present time, for commentators and 'experts' in the field concerned, to place some kind of important emphasis on the longevity of the perfume on a person, once it is 'deployed.' They use phrases like 'beast mode...'

Arabic perfumes and Indian essential oils are not the same as perfumes that most of us would be familiar with, which use perfumer's alcohol and quite sophisticated techniques to make the olfactory ingredients in them miscible into the virtually always clear carrying liquid. And you generally cannot mix Arabic oils and attars into any alcohol to 'extend' it or even dilute it.

'Little' Ali - Asgharali - the house that makes Shumukh, also makes oh I dunno, hundreds, maybe, of other Arabic perfume oils and attars.

As soon as they announced their 'world's most expensive' perfume - the sales of all of their other perfumes went up considerably, especially in the Middle East.

This is a nice Western cologne-style item from
Asgharali - not expensive...

When luxury brand marketers look at brands such as, for example, Rolls Royce, they place a large component of the pricing under the heading 'emotional value.' In the time of Margaret Thatcher this was used almost to destroy the brand itself and ended up in seeing the company go to German owners, and away from its traditional English owner group.

If the emotional value is authentically there, then for a short while, you can smash the underlying craft and materials and content value and exploit the intangible 'emotional value' in order to make an exaggerated profit.

Asgharali, albeit having been in existence for over a hundred years, and I think begun in Bahrain, is not a known brand in the West. And there is no basis to think that anyone in even the cognoscenti strata can have had that much pre-existing knowledge of the actual fragrance of Shumukh itself, to consider it or to deem it 'the BEST' perfume ever - and certainly there is no basis for a real product emotional attachment value component to its pricing.

Again, the impact of temperature and atmospheric conditions plays such a huge factor in how the human brains senses fragrance, that something heavy in England, makes no impression at all in the humidity of Brazil; there is literally a kind of improbability to really, such a thing as globally 'the world's actual best perfume.'

In any case it is more the bottle and plinth which comes with Shumukh that actually has the physical materials that are expensive - hundreds of diamonds and some artistry and so on.

Now there are other 'secrets' to do with the scientific differences between perfumes as made and used in the West, and typically, the compounds that make up 'oudh' oils which are traditionally the format for fragrances in the extremely hot Middle East. And I'm not going to be going into them here...

Oudhs and Arabic perfumes have the status and variances that here in the West one might associate with bottles of vintage wine...

As I once told you all, the recent Chateau Angelus - at the time selling at $30 a bottle, was easily as good as any of the major brand names everyone knows: Lafite, Latour, Haut Brion, Mouton Rothschild. 

So now we are talking around $1,000 a bottle.

LOL

Yet there is such a thing as arguably 'the world's greatest perfume' or perhaps the world's three or four greatest perfumes of all time (and which are still available if you know where and how). And there are definitely ones that will make you feel like a million dollars and give those around you the same impression.