All Shades Of Tuberose

2024 Author: | . Last modified: 2024-01-10 03:12

Elena Stafieva on the role of individuality in today's perfumery Every fall in Florence takes place Pitti Fragranze - one of the main exhibitions of niche perfumery. Everyone comes here: perfumers working with niche brands, perfume companies producing natural and synthetic fragrances, distributors, perfume trainers, perfumers and perfume critics. Here, in fact, the future stars of this world appear - artisan perfumery, indie perfumery, perfumery in the concept of new luxury. All that is now usually denoted by the word "niche" I come here for the fifth time in a row and remember by their names a significant part of those gathered within the walls of Stazione Leopolda - the old station, the building of the century before last, in a state of that slight ruin, which makes it an ideal place for presentation of everything artistic. And the fact that niche perfumery is an artistic and not just a craft product is becoming more obvious and more important. In the world of niche perfumery, as in fashion design, its own seasonal trends are formed - just as in fashion, everyone suddenly simultaneously remembers about frills or fringes, marker yellow-green or Cyrillic, and then everyone suddenly rushes to mint, rose or sage. How it works in fashion is roughly clear - there are trend agencies that everyone turns to. In niche perfumery, the mechanisms are more complicated - there are independent perfumers and large perfumery companies that cooperate with many brands. Perfume companies are developing new ways of extracting natural raw materials and building new synthetic fragrance molecules - they use them themselves and offer them to perfumers. But even this obvious mechanism does not fully explain why, for example, tuberose became the main heroine of the year, why suddenly there was such a powerful comeback of this classic, but not the most understandable and easy for the mass perception of the flower. At the same time, everyone showed tuberose - from big brands to the smallest companies. And the big tuberous explosion happened just at Pitti Fragranze. The two best exhibitions were made by Naomi Goodsir and Altaia, and they are two completely different, opposite in concept of tuberose. At the same time, for both, an important reference was the archetypal tuberose - Fracas, made by Germaine Selye in 1948 for Robert Piguet. Tuberose in Blue (perfumer Natalie Lorson), shown by Marina Sersale and Sebastian Alvarez Murena, creators of Altaia, is a highly refined tuberose, noble and flawless like Sebastian and Marina themselves, one of the coolest couples I know. Flowers (and this, besides tuberose, also heliotrope and freesia) are laid here on a tree - sandalwood and cedar, and this balances the totality and carnality characteristic of tuberose. This is an intelligent tuberose, oddly enough it sounds, tuberose, which does not fill everything around and does not lead to dizziness. Nuit de Bakelite, made for Naomi Goodsir by Isabelle Doyenne, is tuberose with the same intoxicating effect you'd expect from tuberose, but done in a completely modernist way. Naomi says: "At the very beginning, Isabelle and I had two paths - day and night, light and dark, but our idea of a woman was absolutely clear - this is a femme fatale." The basis of everything was the concrete tuberose of extraordinary quality, to which they got access, at the same time captivating and "disturbing", with a distinct plastic shade, which ultimately gave the name to the fragrance - "Bakelite Night". Naomi is a designer, she makes eccentric accessories and jewelry (and removes them, for example, Parisian Vogue) and loves to work with Bakelite, the main material of jewelry from the 1940-1950s. From day and night, as Naomi says, insomnia turned out - a borderline state, which is expressed here by strong herbs, cardamom and wormwood. The fact that Naomi is a designer and has her own visual concept of everything enhances the extraordinary effect of her fragrances. For each new fragrance, Naomi makes a special installation. For Nuit de Bakelite, dimmed lights, glowing balls and creeping vine-like silicone stems in a special yellow-green shade chosen by Naomi were used - made by Tsuri Geta, a textile and jewelry designer who has worked with, for example, Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier … This week Naomi will come to Moscow and present Nuit de Bakelite at the Cosmotheca store at Winzavod. In general, a strong vision - not only of fragrances, but also of the overall brand concept - in today's niche market, where hundreds of newcomers appear every year, becomes extremely important. If earlier they simply cut out bottles from crystal and decorated them with stones for Arab clients, or, on the contrary, chose typical bottles with plastic caps for hipsters, now what is called a strong identity is needed. It can become a national flavor. Two of the most striking examples here are the Japanese brand Di Ser, which appeared at Pitti last year, with a Japanese perfumer, Japanese fragrances (such as Japanese ink) and Japanese girls in kimonos at the stand, and the Turkish brand Nishane. Mert Guzel and Murat Katran have their own plantations of raw materials (for example, an amazing Turkish rose), their own perfumer and their own, quite modern, outside the cliché about the harem and the sultan, the vision of "Turkishness". At Pitti, they showed three new fragrances dedicated to three Turkish types and named after Turkish names: Zenne (it-girl and beauty), Karagoz (hipster), Hakivat (esthete and intellectual). Pissara Umavidjani chose another way of working with her own identity. Pissara is from Thailand, she came to Paris dreaming of becoming a perfumer and founded her brand Dusita Paris. Now Pissara is a real perfumer with perfume prizes, a favorite of bloggers and the press, every fragrance is awaited and vigorously discussed. At the same time, we first saw her only in 2016 - a phenomenal career in a year and a half. Here, of course, the fact that Pissara is a Thai, from an intellectual and intelligent Thai family, her father Montri Umavidjani was a famous Thai poet (and for her fragrances she chooses epigraphs from his poems) played a role - it looked exotic. Her native culture is clearly audible in the solidity and strength of her aromas, but if you need a classic French perfumery tradition, then you should go to Dusita. In Florence, Pissara did not make official premieres, but showed her friends two new fragrances - the rich floral-oriental Fleur de Lalita with rose, magnolia, jasmine, white lily and ylang-ylang and the absolutely luxurious gourmet glass Erawan. Obviously, identity can be built around all sorts of things. For example, around the place where you live, as did the two brands that first appeared at Pitti - Italian Parco1923 and Irish Waters + Wild. Parco1923 is a cosmetics brand based in Abruzzo, where a national park was founded in 1923. From there comes some of the plants that Parco1923 uses in their cosmetics and home fragrances. And now they decided to make their first fragrance, ordering it from one of the main modern perfume stars - Luca Maffei. The result is a bright green scent, simple and original at the same time. Joan Woods lives in the Irish Atlantic, her laboratory is next to her house, and her house is on the shore. And hence all the rhymes and all the Waters + Wild fragrances, built around plant-based raw materials of organic origin (the brand has the appropriate certification). The organic looks especially convincing against the backdrop of the Irish countryside, forest and Atlantic coastline, and Joan's aromas are properly uncluttered, easy to use, lively and joyful. And, what is important, they do not have the usual stamps of "organic" - herbal pharmaceutical preparations (and, by the way, it also has its own tuberose, honey-incense: Tuberose + Frankincense). Actually, today's agenda in niche perfumery - and, more broadly, in the world of new luxury - can be called so: "find yourself and show what your individuality is."The farther it is from any banality, the more modern and interesting, the better. And the fact that it is personality that displaces crystal and rhinestones is very pleasing and encouraging.