The Tamesis
Inside that crowded store in midtown Manhattan, there were crowds of people and little space. There’s a tower of tiered cookies in the corner, mostly ignored. Visiting speakers are the main attraction here: Icelandic musician Jónsi, better known as the leader of Sigur Rós, and two of his three sisters, Lilja and Sigurrós (the namesake of the band, known as Rosa). Lilia walked to the center of the room, wearing a long black dress with a white Peter Pan collar and long, thin hair. She looked like a cheerful, grown-up Wednesday Addams.
“Close your eyes,” she instructed as bookmark-sized notes of scent-soaked paper were passed around the room. “We’re so good at analyzing everything in the world with our eyes.” And then the story begins: “Brand new sneakers, crushing flower stems on hot asphalt. Mouths full of lemon drops, fingers sticky with motor oil,” she intones, “damp pine forests, arctic wind blowing through hair.” If you were wandering the streets, you might think this was a call to an experimental new literary magazine rather than the siblings’ family-run fragrance company, Fischersund. With the launch of a new fragrance, it’s understandable.
This is the state of perfume today: everything has a story – and that story is often more important than the composition or composition of the perfume. To be sure, the phenomenon of elaborate origin stories is not new. Chanel No. 5, born in the 1920s, was partly inspired not by the blooming flowers that most people associate with it, but by the icy freshness rising from frozen rivers and lakes (observed by the Russian-French noses employed by Gabrielle Chanel when she was stationed above the Arctic Circle). In the 1990s, Issey Miyake commissioned perfumer Jaques Cavalier to interpret Japanese bathing rituals, such as adding orris leaves to steaming water during the Children’s Day holiday, a task that later evolved into his famous L’eau D’Issey.
But if perfumers of the past drew inspiration from memory and tradition, today’s perfume makers offer a more pared-down narrative. On a windy day last fall, I met with the elegant perfumer Christopher Sheldrake and Véronique Spoturno, the great-granddaughter of François Spoturno (Coty, the father of modern perfumery), to learn about the Spoturno company, which was quietly founded in 2021 and arrived in the United States last fall. Fresh and lively Alphée is my favorite of the new fragrances. It is inspired by the rocky coast of Corsica, with aromas of juniper berries, myrtle leaves, cardamom and coriander. But this is Sportuno’s vision of sailing life, with friends under the blue sky, on a boat also known as Alfie— the interior design by René Lalique — is a real hit. Veronique carefully looks through an antique Bode Daily News Written by French writer Paul Morand, it includes travel notes and yacht photos. I sprayed the perfume on my wrists and felt like I was floating on Tyrrhenian waters for the rest of the day.
The urge to connect smell and story is understandable—perhaps smell is more connected to story than any other sense. We may absorb smells through our nostrils, but the processing occurs deep in the brain, where smells and emotions are deeply intertwined. But contemporary perfume has become so They put so much effort into storytelling that they began to rely on reference points with little connection to the actual smelly thing. (There’s precedent here: Marc Jabob’s Daisy, a popular fragrance launched in 2007 based on a flower without a strong scent. Many fragrances reference tulips, a flower with (mostly) no discernible scent.) Le Labo launched a candle inspired by Japanese indigo dyeing in January. Frederic Malle’s latest collection features “desert gems” as a theme, one of the popular ones is called “Moon”. If you want to smell like a real rock, jewelry company Mateo offers scents based on turquoise, mother-of-pearl and malachite.
