L de Loewe by Loewe

I’m absolutely in love with this jewel… Since I got the miniature, I haven’t stopped smelling it every day (it’s been over 4 months). Yesterday, I wore it for the first time to go out because I had already bought another one… What a marvel! What happened to Loewe to discontinue it? A masterful floral leather. There is no better description than ‘smells like an expensive perfume spilled onto a good leather bag,’ and it’s exactly that! I’m in love. I’m living in love with Gala de Noche and L. What masterful fragrances, so poorly treated by Loewe. 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 that they are good, because I enjoy them as much as my miniatures.

I hadn’t tried it in years, remembering it as bitter, raw, and mossy, with that galbanum aftertaste that makes me gag. Recently, I sampled it and I was fascinated. Either my nose has been educated or my 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 gem 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 where I wondered if it wasn’t an 80s white floral instead of an urban green chypre. That idea flew away quickly because both narcissus and jasmine in Loewe have a soapy finish, not a sticky, jammy one. The heart is a bargain for your nose at the price of JLo’s butt—a barely-there 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 store or a well-kept apartment from the late Franco era. It’s so similar to the ones I mentioned that blind, I couldn’t tell them apart except for the base, where it reveals 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 hyacinths and hyacinths, frothy, with a porky green and artificial cleanliness. That’s the key to distinguishing it from Givenchy III or Fidji, which at some point lean more towards the den of happy little toads 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 identity. In a word: divine.

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

I’d like to add how representative L Loewe is of 1970s Spanish design, an era when Spain stepped up its marketing and graphic design game, creating a very defined image: 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, canvas, burlap, the entrance to a building of ‘well-off’ people with a large Adam’s rib in a graphite parterre… all that style of a Francoist Spain eager for modernity and openness is perfectly represented in the bottle of L Loewe and in the stores designed by Javier Carvajal. I remember the perfume very vaguely, a floral that evokes Siena-colored notes with greasy aftertastes. The bottle was beautiful; I keep a miniature that I have no idea how I’ve had since I was a child.