New Sibet reminds me of my wedding dress. Stay with me here–this was no sweet Eton Mess of pale airy meringue and cream, but an antique mourning gown of black silk satin, heavy and smooth with a cool slither and catch like cornflour, and a low pewter sheen among the light-swallowing rustling folds. I knew I had to have this dress the moment I saw it high on the wall in a cavern of vintage clothes. No, they said, it’s a showpiece, no one can *wear* this. It’s for collectors, for reference.
Except this mid-Victorian jacket and skirt fitted me perfectly. Even the sleeves were precisely the right length.
This never happens; I’m a little mutant.
And despite the strictures of the canvas and baleen exoskeleton that granted me perfect posture and the bustle that made getting into a taxi an entertaining challenge, it was comfortable. A costume, perhaps, but only for the first few minutes, because it wasn’t a museum-perfect piece but just my dress now. It was worn a little thin in places, a few jet beads straggling away from perished net, a tear in the underskirts, and a ghost hint of human warmth embedded in the fabric from the woman who wore this over a century ago, even an old blood stain near one of the metal clasps. By the end of the day, there was fresh mud encrusted on the hem from whirling through a rain-damp Portland park, cigarette ash on the jacket, flowers, perfume, makeup, sweat, kissing.
So, yes, this is what I thought of as soon as I started wearing this paradoxical dream of cold carnation and iris and soft ashes. It’s the whole contrary balancing act between elegant and weird, fragile and robust, formal and oddly scruffy, constrained and wild. Except this slumberhouse perfume is not going to be relegated to a dark afterlife of acid free paper, but worn over and over again*. Josh Lobb, you’re a bloody marvel**.
* this bottle is long gone, and I’m halfway through the replacement. It’s one I know I can never replace, so I’ve got cautious.
** except for the vanishing acts, the near impossibility of buying your scent these days, and the ludicrous after-market prices. But you are still an incredibly original perfumer, and I admire even when I may dislike your work.
originally posted 28 April 2019, footnote December 2025