A fragrance about a single street
Most perfumes try to be a feeling. A few try to be a person. Bond No. 9's Bleecker Street tries to be a postcode, and that is the bit that has either delighted or irritated collectors since it launched. The whole brand is built on this conceit. Every bottle is an ode to a New York neighbourhood, and Bleecker Street is the one that smells like a Saturday afternoon in Greenwich Village before the tourists figured out where the good wine bar was.
You can argue with the premise. You cannot argue with the staying power. Twenty years on, Bleecker Street is one of the most-worn fragrances in the Bond No. 9 line-up.
The house: Laurice Rahme's New York project
Bond No. 9 was founded in 2003 by Laurice Rahme, a Lebanese-French perfume executive who had previously run Annick Goutal's American business and the US arm of Creed. She named the house after its first boutique at 9 Bond Street in NoHo, and pitched it as the first fragrance brand devoted entirely to New York City. Each bottle was a love letter to a specific neighbourhood, intended to be sold the way a souvenir is sold, except priced like a luxury watch.
The bottles themselves are unmistakable. Heavy round flacons, swathed in star-spangled patterns and bright colours, designed by Rahme to look like collectibles before you even sniffed them.
The Bleecker Street story
Bleecker Street launched in 2007 as Bond No. 9's homage to Greenwich Village, the patch of lower Manhattan that once housed Bob Dylan, the Beat poets, the Velvet Underground and most of the artists who could no longer afford SoHo. The brief was straightforward. Capture the smell of a bohemian neighbourhood on a slightly damp evening. Brick, woodsmoke, espresso from a pavement cafe, a hint of rain on warm pavement, a young couple walking too close together past a bookshop.
The composition, top to base
- Top: bergamot, neroli and blackcurrant, a bright lift that sets the tone for the first ten minutes
- Heart: jasmine, plum and a haze of woody florals, the part that does the geographic storytelling
- Base: vetiver, vanilla, musk and warm woods, the long dry-down that earns the perfume its evening-wear reputation
The trick of the composition is its restraint. The opening is bright but never citrus-sharp. The heart is fruity but never sticky. The base is woody but never heavy. Bleecker Street manages to be a niche fragrance that does not announce itself as a niche fragrance, which in Bond No. 9's catalogue is something of an exception.
Why it endures
Bond No. 9's catalogue is famously inconsistent. Bleecker Street is one of the handful that consistently lands. It is unisex without trying. It compliments well without trying. It works in summer and in late autumn. It works on a thirty-year-old in a leather jacket and on a fifty-five-year-old in an Italian suit.
The price problem
The friction with Bond No. 9 has always been the cost of entry. A 100ml bottle of Bleecker Street retails in the UK at around 275 pounds, with 50ml hovering near 200. The brand sells through a small number of department-store counters and its own boutiques. Finding it on offer in Britain is rare. Finding it in stock in the size you want, rarer still.
The Aromara alternative
Bleecker by Aromara is our interpretation of the same Greenwich Village brief. Bergamot, neroli and blackcurrant up top, jasmine and woody florals through the heart, vetiver, vanilla and warm woods in the base. Built at 35% Extrait concentration, the highest disclosed in the UK, with the 7+ hour wear we guarantee and the 60-day money-back if you can tell the difference on skin. Forty pounds for 50ml instead of two hundred.
One last thing
If you have the budget for the original, by all means buy it. The bottle alone is a piece of design history. But if you just want to smell like a Saturday in the Village without paying for the airfare, we have a forty-pound shortcut.
