L de Loewe by Loewe

I’m head over heels in love with this jewel… Since I got a miniature, I haven’t stopped smelling it every day (it’s been over four months). Yesterday I wore it for the first time to go out because I’d already bought another one… What a wonderful fragrance! What happened to Loewe to discontinue this?? A masterful floral leather. I can’t find a better description than ‘smells like an expensive perfume spilled on a good leather bag’ and it’s exactly that! I’m head over heels in love with Gala de noche and L. What masterful and mistreated fragrances. I don’t recommend buying the current bottles; I want them all for myself! It’s the scent of someone with sublime, almost inaccessible distinction. Today I bought two bottles and I’m crossing my fingers they’re in good condition; I enjoy them so much like my miniatures.

I hadn’t tried it in years, remembering it bitter, raw, and mossy, with that lingering taste of galbanum that used to make my stomach turn. Recently I sampled it and I was fascinated. Either my nose has been educated or the memory was fuzzy; what I found was a stepchild of Givenchy III, Madame Rochas, and Fidji, a tear-jerkingly beautiful, comfortable, velvety, and super-functional treasure with a herbaceous-floral sweetness that lifted me to the clouds. The first thing I noticed without looking for notes was a hint of narcissus and lots of jasmine, very soft and green, to the point of wondering if it wasn’t an eighties white floral instead of an urban green chypre. That idea flew away quickly because both narcissus and jasmine in Loewe L have a soapy finish, not a sticky, jammy one. The heart is a bargain for your nose at the price of JLo’s bottom, a very light leather, as if you’ve been carrying that supple handbag for years, with domesticated country notes, like feeling the breeze of wildflowers in a luxury shop or a well-kept apartment from the late Franco era. It is so similar to the ones I mention that blind, I couldn’t tell them apart except for the base, where it shows its personality. To the country breeze and educated herbs joins that abstraction called ‘green notes’, with white, synthetic acidity; on my nose it smells like hyacinth and hyacinth, effervescent, with a greasy green and artificial cleanliness. That is the key to differentiate it from Givenchy III or Fidji, which at some point lean more towards the lair of happy dormice sleeping a siesta. As you say, Loewe’s first perfume did justice to the brand, letting itself be carried away by trends but adding a touch of its own thing. In a word: divine.

For me, it has been the best perfume that ever existed, by far… The day they stopped selling it, I was devastated. Elegant, with beastly longevity, it was incredible.

I would like to add how representative Loewe L is of seventies Spanish design, an era when Spain got its act together in marketing and graphic design, achieving a very defined image that today seems a movement with a name and surname: window display design, interior design, product, and typography halfway between functionality and classicism. Beige and earth tones, textured woods, luxurious austerity, glazed ceramic grilles, relief glass, linen, burlap, the entrance to a building of ‘proper’ people with a large Adam’s rib in a graphite parterre… all that style of a still-Francoist Spain with a desire for modernity is perfectly represented in the bottle of Loewe L and in the shops designed by Javier Carvajal. I remember the perfume very vaguely, a floral that made you think of Siena-coloured notes with greasy aftertastes as you point out… The bottle was beautiful; I keep a miniature that I have had since I was a small child, who knows how.