
Anglophiles Rejoice
Penhaligon’s, the perfumer of the modern English gentleman, brings its clubby refinement to Sydney.
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It’s little wonder that Penhaligon’s—which speaks in a plummier English accent than Stephen Fry—is enjoying another moment in the fashion sun. Classic Anglophilic tributes such as The Crown rule the culture and post-colonial takes like Bridgerton rip at the bodice of our imagination as British high fashion once again commands global attention. If fine fragrances are part of the canon of masculine connoisseurship, alongside cars and cigars, it is in no small part due to Penhaligon’s.
Founded in 1870 by William Penhaligon, a barber from Penzance who moved to London and hung out his shingle at St James Street and Jermyn Street after working on Piccadilly Circus, Penhaligon’s is a mainstay of British luxury. As resolute as a London leasehold, its lotions and potions have been favoured by potentates from Winston Churchill (a fan of Blenheim Bouquet, the fragrance created for his grandfather, the Duke of Marlborough) to the Shah of Persia.
Since being granted its first Royal Warrant from Queen Alexandra in 1903, Penhaligon’s has stuck to the royal family like Corgi hairs, having subsequently been awarded Warrants from the Duke of Edinburgh in 1956, and King Charles (then Prince of Wales) in 1988. Though the company is tight-lipped about its clients, court gossips whisper that the King has a hair pomade made exclusively for him.
Not surprisingly, given that the fin-de-siècle rise of the brand coincided with the advent of the egoiste-as-saloniste, a moment in time when scent aesthetes like Stephen Tennant refused to enter a room before it had been spritzed with his signature trail, the brand has also been catnip for literary dandies such as Oscar Wilde. The great wit was famously enamoured of Hammam Bouquet, the company’s oldest fragrance, inspired by the fragrant Turkish baths of Mayfair, where a striving William Penhaligon’s once took his ease.
Now, with the opening of the company’s first Aussie flagship in Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building, local dandies and anglophiles no longer have to cough up for a ticket to London to stock up on their favourite fragrance. The gem of a store brings to mind a blokey laboratory-cum-playroom and stocks the full range of the company’s signature fragrances—46 if you’re counting—as well as a nascent collection of body products and candles.
From May, the store will also be selling the company’s latest fragrance AlUla. A rousing unisex addition to their Trade Routes collection, it is named after the ancient Saudi city of AlUla that was one of the stops on the incense route in the 19th century.
Penhaligon’s has since been collected by the European fragrance powerhouse Puig, but the list of celebrities and influencers drawn to the company continues unabated, including Tom Ford, Stella McCartney and Kate Moss. Like all conspicuously inconspicuous trendsetters, they’re no doubt drawn in part by the company’s seeming allergy to bombast and hype, to say nothing of its unimpeachable provenance. Though everything about the brand—from its locations at London addresses Nancy Mitford would have recognised as “U”, to the grosgrain ribbons and glass bottles with stoppers—is redolent of old-money elegance, it is not tethered to the past. The company was among the first in the capital to introduce electricity in their stores, and more recently they have been pioneers in newfangled breakthroughs such as C02 extraction and nature print technology. Regardless of what the ineluctable forces of fashion may augur, though, it’s a safe bet that the essence of Penhaligon’s is not changing anytime soon.
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