The new Hermès perfume is inspired by a mysterious garden in Venice
The French fashion house is back with an airy, fresh scent you must check out
Close your eyes and imagine your favourite scent—the smell of the earth after the first rain; sweet, voluptuous roses; the aroma of your mother baking her special chocolate brownies; or the comforting musk that reminds you of an ex lover… a scent can take you on fantastical adventures or down nostalgia avenue without you ever having to move an inch. And the new Hermes fragrance does exactly that—the crisp airy blend of musk, magnolia and lilies takes us on a scintillating sensorial journey to a mysterious garden. Christine Nagel, creative director, Hermès, and the brains behind the juice, tells us how she bottled the essence of a garden.
The inspiration
Every year, the house of Hermès is inspired by a theme that irrigates creation in all of its métiers, including fragrance. The theme for 2019 is dreams, a reservoir of emotion at the gates of the imagination. A theme synonymous with escape for the mind and senses, it gives free rein to imagination and otherworldly concepts, and tells a story between nature and culture, between real and imaginary, woven with values that are dear to the house.
Un Jardin sur la Lagune expresses a dreamlike dimension: the dream of an Englishman who was mad about gardens and Venice. A garden in Venice, dreamed of, conceived, reclaimed from a mud bank swept by the winds of the lagoon. For this dream, I was drawn by the history of this mysterious garden. I interpreted and recomposed, in olfactory terms, the idea I had of the garden on the lagoon. Un Jardin sur la Lagune belongs to the garden-fragrances collection and is part of the art of experiencing the Hermes fragrance universe.
The discovery
I was seeking a garden but I did not know where it was. One day I read about one in Venice, Italy, which had been planted on the lagoon and has inspired generations of artists. I wanted to visit it, and I discovered that this garden was completely a secret, inaccessible, impenetrable. It was much discussed, but no one had really seen it. To create this fragrance is to give this garden another life, an olfactory reality; it is to enable everyone to imagine and to dream of it, to enable everyone to open the gate and discover this secret oasis.
The fragrance
It is like a floral breeze between dream and reality, carried by the softness of white musks and woods that melt into one another. An evocation of magnolias, pittosporums and Madonna lilies, the woods, roots, flowers and earth swept by sea winds. Water is the founding link in the collection. From garden to garden, we have navigated many waters. It guides us to the heart of garden-fragrances and encourages us to experience them fully and differently. The paths followed by water become sources of inspiration for a new expression. In Venice, the water is the lagoon—a lagoon that is not just a simple hydraulic ecosystem but a marvel that invites dreams.
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