Etat Libre D’Orange Exit The King Review – Ralf Schwieger & Cecile Matton; 2020

If the length of time it takes to figure out a perfume is directly proportional to its quality, then Etat Libre D’Orange Exit The King needs to be on everybody’s must-try list. I’ve now spent several days with it, and whenever I’ve felt myself veering towards relegating it to that vast category of scents labelled ‘pleasant but forgettable’, something has caused me to pause and reconsider. To be precise: I can’t decide whether, at its core, it is profoundly trashy, or, if you’ll forgive the facetiousness, it’s trashily profound.

In terms of structure, it’s a woody-mossy floral with a peppery top, which I guess means that it earns the chypre tag ascribed to it by the brand. And yet, at first sniff, it doesn’t appear to share a great deal in common with the likes of Guerlain Mitsouko or even with more modern chypres such as Amouage Jubilation 25. Perhaps because of the addition of what ELDO are calling a “soap foam accord”, the whole feels planed and scrubbed to within an inch of its life, as though Schwieger and Matton were determined to reveal the metallic skeleton holding in place the fleshier aspects of their composition.

Sure enough, if the characteristically opaque prose on the ELDO website is anything to go by, revelation was very much on brand-founder Etienne De Swardt’s mind when he fashioned this release. And by revelation, I mean exposure. The name Exit The King appears to be a call to action: a determined attempt to display the shortcomings of the old guard, oust it from the position of power it has occupied for too long, and welcome the arrival of… what? Well, a queen, I suppose.

And maybe this is why the scent proves so hard to pin down. It keeps flitting between gender codes, at times coming across as staunchly masculine (in the manner of some of the more diffusive men’s scents of the early 90s) and at others plunging into almost parodically feminine territories (with its whiffs of hair spray and supermarket-aisle white florals). Somehow, amidst all this shape-shifting, it also manages to express a novel take on the familiar chypre form, pushing all the requisite elements to steelier, more bitter extremes than we’ve smelt for a long time, from the super-charged sharpness of the pepper to the none-too-subtle dosage of Orcanox (aka Ambroxan) in the base.

In short, for all its outward seriousness, Exit The King is a playful, subversive piece of work, calling to mind the spirit of Delicious Closet Queen and Don’t Get Me Wrong Baby, Yes I Do. In fact, I’d say this may be the most openly Drag Queen-channeling scent we’ve had from the brand, which brings us right back to where we started. Because of course the very source of the disruptive power of Drag Queens is their ability to combine the profoundly trashy with the trashily profound. The king is dead; long live the undefinable.

Persolaise

[Etat Libre D’Orange Exit The King review based on a sample of eau de parfum provided by the brand in 2020.]

—
If you’ve enjoyed this post, please consider supporting my work
by ‘buying me a coffee’ using the panel below.
Thanks very much indeed.

—