Travis Leonard Drinkwater
A Very Important White Man You Should Know About
Travis Leonard Drinkwater, known by close associates as Tray, is a man about town if you happen upon the highbrow hilly landscape of Greenwich. Popular amongst men and irresistible to the opposing sex, Mr. Drinkwater likens himself to a contemporary Frank Sinatra. “I’m like the Sinatra of Greenwich. Everywhere I go, people look. They just can’t help themselves,” he wryly told me on a sunny afternoon at the kitschy hotspot, Dorian’s Attic on Bandwith Street.
Mr. Drinkwater has the assured sophistication of James Bond, but the mysterious scent that would be more fitting for a Bond villain. That scent is called nouveau riche (all lowercase by design) and is available exclusively at the up-and-coming Sag Harbor cat cafe Kisses and Scratches. When I ask about the inspiration for nouveau riche, Mr. Drinkwater pulled out his cigarette and sucked on it dry. “Most would probably describe it as sandalwood and musk, but it is more than that. Much, much more. I would say that more than anything else, it is about despair and horror. It is the second haunted house you’ve ever been to. Like, the first time you go to a haunted house as a kid, you don’t know what to expect. You’re scared and excited and maybe even a little turned-on. But, then the next year, you go back, and you start to notice that all the goblins are really just out-of-work actors embroiled in an early mid-life crisis and that you’re paying to be scared. It’s all very transactional.” The waiter, a bronze statuesque man of no more than twenty, interrupts us to caution about the cigarette. Mr. Drinkwater returns the cigarette to his pocket, but he is jumpy, so we excuse ourselves from the table to take a cigarette break by the curb.
“This is my city,” Mr. Drinkwater smiles as he gestures toward the discreetly elegant row of boutiques and cafes, serving the elite of the Greenwich suburbs. Mr. Drinkwater moved to Greenwich as a spry nineteen year-old after his mother divorced his second step-father, Henry Gables Jackson (of the Jackson steel empire). It was around this time that Mr. Drinkwater attended Connecticut College for a year, but found the courses too dull and his classmates to be a cross between “inane and insane.” However, his year at university was not all for naught as it inspired his latest venture. While at college, he encountered classmates from every state, but those who stood out to him the most were his middle-class peers. “I couldn’t believe how much they cared about labels,” Mr. Drinkwater said as he slid a second cigarette out from his tweed blazer and smoothed it between his index and middle finger as though scratching an itch. “It was like drowning in a sea of Lacoste polos.” It was not only the fashion choices that repulsed him. “All they ever talked about was studying and finding corporate jobs. In the course of a year, I didn’t meet a single person who had ever been been further east than Spain.”
As we worked our way back into Dorian’s Attic, he went on to explain how his upbringing that consisted of shuttling between the house of his father, a partner at Bogush, Bangush, and Bozus and his mother, an heiress to the diamond mines of northern Rhuhipnil, may have underprepared him for the social aspects of college. “Woefully unprepared,” he remarked. “But, at the same time, there is so much more to life than passing your classes and working in an office. That’s what my classmates didn’t understand. And, they certainly didn’t seem to appreciate my bigger ideas about the world.”
As we settled back into our chairs to dig into the avocado and kale soup that our bronze waiter eagerly rushed to our table, Mr. Drinkwater explained why he would name his newest venture after the classmates that he found so blasé. “I wanted a scent that was erotically trashy. Like a busty cyclops. I want nouveau riche to represent everything that is wrong in the States and everything that is sexy about the States at the same time.”
So, is nouveau riche a product or a statement? “Both,” Mr. Drinkwater asserts. “When you wear nouveau, you will smell a bit like trash. But, then it becomes normal to you, so you don’t actually know that you smell like trash after a few hours. It is a way to experience the world as a member of the nouveau riche, to desperately claw at culture without the good taste. Of course, some will buy the fragrance without knowing what it actually means. That’s the thrill of it for me as an entrepreneur. I have to attract the actual nouveau riche to make the effect realistic. This is part capitalism, part social experiment.”
At $75 for four fluid ounces, nouveau riche certainly makes a statement. It has the lightness of a body spray with the after-punch of a cologne. An online store is in the works, but for now, the exclusive retailer is Kisses and Scratches, 63 Overall Road, Sag Harbor.