LearoyBlack
Most of the Indonesian fragrance scene knows him by another name. A tailor’s son who could not afford a camera, so he learned to keep his life in smells, and then spent years asking everyone else to close their eyes and try to imagine.
Fifty conversations made the first season of Interviews. For the first issue of the second, we wanted someone who did not need an introduction, which is a strange thing to say about a man we are about to introduce. If you follow fragrance in Indonesia, you already know Learoy Black: the voice, the laugh, and the two words he opens with. Coba bayangin. Try to imagine.
What fewer people know is where those two words come from. Steven is the man behind him, and he asked us to start there.
“I’m Steven, but in the fragrance world, most people know me as Learoy Black. It’s the happier, louder side of me. Learoy Black became my way of putting those memories somewhere outside my head. I don’t just talk about perfume. Sometimes, I talk about the things hidden inside it: nostalgia, youth, loss, love, and the passing of time, with the words ‘Coba bayangin.’”
Photographs, without a camera
“I grew up in a family that believed a man should always look dapper. My father was a tailor, so my childhood was surrounded by the smell of freshly pressed fabric, old wooden drawers, starch, cologne, polished shoes, and men getting ready to face the world. Elegance was simply part of the environment I grew up in.”
“But outside that little world of tailoring and dapper men, life was very different. We were poor, and cameras were a luxury I couldn’t afford. So I learned to photograph my life without ever taking a picture. I kept the scenery in my head instead: the places I lived, the faces I saw, the conversations around me, the music playing somewhere in the distance, and most importantly, the smells.”
The tailor’s shop, developed
six frames, no film“Even now, decades later, I can sometimes close my eyes and go back. One particular smell can bring an entire moment back to life. I can remember the room, the weather, someone’s voice, the song that was playing, even the feeling I had at that particular age. It is almost as if my mind has been keeping photographs all these years, just without a camera.”
“Maybe that’s why fragrance became so important to me. I never really learned to remember through photographs. I learned to remember through smells. A fragrance can take me somewhere I haven’t been in years, sometimes even somewhere I thought I had forgotten.”
Which is how coba bayangin works, once you know where it comes from. It is not a catchphrase. It is an instruction from someone who has been doing it his whole life: close your eyes, the picture is in there, you only have to smell your way back to it.
“And perhaps that’s the real beginning of Learoy Black. It was never really about collecting expensive bottles or knowing every note in a fragrance. It was about preserving pieces of a life that time keeps trying to erase: childhood, family, places, people, music, and the different versions of myself I’ve left behind.”
The fragrance became a grave
He answered this one as a poem. We have set it as one, and left every line where he put it.
We asked for a scent that takes you somewhere. He sent the one he cannot go back to. Most answers in this series run toward a memory. This one keeps a bottle closed so that a memory cannot run toward him. There is nothing in a marine fragrance’s formula for grief. He put it there, on an ordinary sunny day, and the glass has kept it ever since.
We have nothing to add, except that we are grateful he let it be printed.
“I don’t just collect fragrances. I collect memories. And sometimes, I collect the ghosts of who I used to be.”LEAROY BLACK
That Iris Guy
“After downsizing my collection, I realized I still reach for the same one.”
“I’ve worn so many fragrances, chased so many new memories, but Dior Homme somehow stayed with me through different chapters of my life.”
“Maybe that’s why I always come back. It doesn’t just smell like me, it reminds me of who I’ve been. That Iris Guy.”
Chapters of a shelf
drag through the yearsDior Homme arrived in 2005, composed by Olivier Polge, and it did something men’s fragrance had mostly avoided: it put iris in the middle, powdery and faintly like lipstick, over cocoa and soft leather. It was a tailored idea of a man rather than a sporty one, which, for a boy raised in a tailor’s shop, might be the whole explanation.
He calls himself That Iris Guy the way other people name a version of themselves they are fond of. After a downsizing, it is the right bottle to be left holding. It is not the loudest thing he owned. It is the one that kept being true.
Ten minutes, with coffee
“My morning routine. A cup of coffee, jazz or bossa playing on the record player, ten minutes of staring at the clothes and perfumes that I want to put on that day.”
Ten minutes of staring is the tailor’s son again. In his father’s shop, getting dressed was the point, not the errand before the point. He still gives it the time.
The ten minutes
drop the needle- 0:00Coffee first.Before anything with a label goes on, a cup.
- 1:30Needle down.Jazz or bossa. The room gets a tempo.
- 3:30The clothes.Standing at the rail, looking. Not choosing yet.
- 6:00The bottles.The same look, turned to the shelf.
- 8:30The choice.Whatever the day will be, it gets dressed first.
“Actually, on top of that, anything Sinatra, Jobim, Sergio Mendes will be inside.”
He sent a playlist and then widened it in the same breath. Sinatra, who dressed like the music sounded. Jobim, who wrote saudade into chord changes, the Portuguese word for missing something that may not come back. Mendes, who took it to a party. For a man who keeps his life in smells and runs a happier, louder version of himself for everyone else, it is hard to imagine a better three.
What stays
“Good taste isn’t what others admire, not expensive or even rare. It’s knowing what stays with you when everything else fades, and choosing the things that still feel like you, aged with you.”
Let time do the choosing
drag the yearsIt is the same answer as his shelf, reached from the other side. Admiration, price and rarity are all things other people hand you. What aged with you is the only list you write yourself.
Remember both
The first half is very old: remember that you will die, so you stop wasting the day. The second half is its reply: remember to live, so you stop wasting it the other way. After his poem about a sunny afternoon that did not know what it was, it is not hard to see why he will not let one be said without the other.
Interview 51