On Fear + Flower Porn

Wearing: Vivienne Tam mesh maxi dress + Naked Wardrobe bodysuit, feat. photography by Irving Penn

This past week has been especially dreary. I’m restless, and no matter how hard I try to sleep off the inner imbalance, I can’t: somehow, my body is bearing the brunt of this nameless stress. I knew it wasn’t cabin fever (I’m a homebody at heart), and the stormy weather couldn’t be blamed entirely for this mood, either. For days I slept without sleeping, and read without reading—and it wasn’t until this morning when I realized the cause. Every fiber of my being knew before my brain could compute the root of the listlessness: my body knew that I had all too quickly accepted this way of life as my new norm.

It’s an unsettling realization, to say the least. Of course it’s frightening: just a month ago, none of us could have imagined that a pandemic would sweep the nation, that our world would feel so dystopian. Every time an ambulance drives by, my heart drops. When I don’t check in with my parents for a day, they panic. And when they don’t, I do. Everything is off—covered in a filmy, eerie grey—and just when I thought I could get through this, I’m faced with reality. No matter how independent, fearless, or introverted you are, this will affect you. Living in fear of losing to COVID-19 will fog your eyes and pollute your heart if you let it.

My mistake was refusing to acknowledge that these feelings would exist.

Heretic Parfum Flower Porn fragrance, feat. campaign photography by Maurice Harris + The Invention of Nature

Starting tonight, I’m taking my own advice and allowing myself the space to just be, and be present. So far I’ve been indulgent, misting a precious sample of Heretic Parfum’s Flower Porn onto my wrists so it seeps into the fabric of this archival Vivienne Tam dress. How apropos, no? A sheer, mesh maxi with Chinese-inspired embroidery outlining the most sensual parts of a woman—the décolletage, wait, hips—in an hourglass formation, can coupled with an explicit (yet clean!) floral fragrance? It’s almost too kitsch, but I am who I am.

I’m hardly a votary of floral perfumes and yet for this one, for Heretic, I could be a strict devotee of Flower Porn. If not for the name, then for its story: what could be more evocative than a fragrance inspired by the back rooms of a flower market? It’s flower-on-flower at its finest, capturing a bouquet at its most fragrant, dewy form and after it’s been sitting in water for just a little too long. Think summertime in New York’s flower district; Dutch Flower Line in June.

Spicy. Dirty. Green, but gritty. Florals gone bad. 

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xx