Whence this exuberant, full-bodied liberation? Jones grew up in a strict religious household in Spanish Town, Jamaica, as she recounts in the subversively titled I’ll Never Write My Memoirs. The 1985 Island Life album cover, with a sleight-of-hand elongated silhouette by Jean-Paul Goude. “I think God was an artist, if you want to put it that way.” “I mean, a nice dick to go with it is also good.” (A limousine is in fact what pulls up in her lyrics.) “Pussy is also pretty,” she adds, in a genderful spirit. “Who doesn’t like a nice ass?” she reasons, as she sweeps burnt red eye shadow across her lids. I tell Jones I’ve just finished reading a forthcoming book on butts-a subject that brings to mind her song, “Pull Up to the Bumper,” off the 1981 album Nightclubbing. “After it rains in Jamaica, there’s a smell that is just so, ah! It just brings everything back from my childhood.” Alongside that wet-stone accord (a hard-to-pinpoint phenomenon known as petrichor), there are musky notes that evoke salt on skin. “He kept dipping into my brain to provoke what smells I remember,” Jones says. The new candle, Grace, conveys that sensuality entwined with place, as translated by perfumer Jérôme Epinette. Jones, as Helen Strangé, in 1992’s Boomerang. No one else was being summoned was it the fragrance? That’s why her character, Helen Strangé, is so outrageously delicious in 1992’s Boomerang: The fictional model-who demands that her celebrity perfume capture the “essence of sex,” offering her freshly removed underwear as inspiration and tossing out possible names like Love Puss and Afterbirth-was written as a camp homage to Jones. “Every time I wore this perfume when I was filming, I would be asked to come and look behind the camera,” Jones tells me. “I was like, ‘Top notes are treble, and base notes are bass.’” She cooed in response, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, baby.” Working with an icon means speaking her language: ’80s leather Alaia, marine notes from the Caribbean, the old-world opulence of a once-beloved Norman Norell scent. In an early conversation with Jones, Herman pulled out a musical analogy to explain the layered construction of modern perfumery. “And that’s a big part of queerism.”Įven with all the projects that have floated Jones’s way-she has turned down makeup opportunities, and, famously, Lady Gaga-it was Boy Smells’s perspective that clicked. “She’s so unapologetically and ruthlessly authentic to herself and just doesn’t give a fuck,” Boy Smells cofounder Matthew Herman says, under the lilac-tinged glow of a disco ball. Stage costumes (she is slated to perform in Seattle, Oakland, and Los Angeles later this month) lay bare her gleeful celebration of skin, never mind the matter of age. Geometric haircuts and high-beam blush have proved her fluency in, and disregard for, masculine and feminine codes. In her half-century in the public eye-lighting up catwalks and gay clubs and sold-out concert venues, creating culture-defining images with the likes of Antonio Lopez, Andy Warhol, and Jean-Paul Goude-the musician has defied the usual constraints. “I’m sorry-we are making up at the same time,” Jones says of the necessary multitasking, as if this weren’t the beauty tutorial to end them all.įor Boy Smells, a six-year-old fragrance brand that rallies behind the term genderful (as opposed to the neutered genderless), Jones is a surreally perfect partner. Soon, the first guests to the Boy Smells launch party will make their way down a staircase lined with the new Grace candles, the scent simulating a rainy Jamaican landscape. It’s Wednesday evening, on the cusp of New York Fashion Week, and Jones is camped out in the green room of the Public Hotel’s lower-level event space, a ten-minute walk from her late friend Keith Haring’s former studio. This is a woman who occupies a microclimate of her own-supremely cool, eternally hot-and she doesn’t need a jet stream disturbing her slow-fade cat eye in the making. “Can that come down just a tiny bit? It’s blowing in my eye, and I can see it’s starting to cry already,” she says, more cajole than command. Grace Jones, dressed in a cotton-print robe with black eyeliner in hand, has a request about the air-conditioning.
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