Viktor and Rolf Flowerbomb, Yves Saint Laurent Opium, Daisy by Marc Jacobs, Chanel No 5 – fashion and fragrance are inextricably linked. A designer fragrance is often a first designer purchase, an accessible way into an otherwise unattainable luxury brand. Perfumes by fashion houses often become symbols of style in their own right.
But what floats up your nose and into your mind when I ask you what New Zealand fashion smells like?
Is it a faint starchy sniff of tissue paper being crisply folded around a garment – long coveted and finally purchased? Is it that effervescent fruity sweetness fizzing up and out of a flute of free prosecco grasped at an in instore event, the rim stained with red lippy?
Maybe it's the slightly desperate smell of sweat emanating off an industry hustling hard, to do alchemy despite local market conditions and global competition, Rumpelstiltskin-ing creativity and innovation on the smell of an oily rag.
Amorphous, emotive vignettes might be called to mind but there are more crystalline outlines that define the scent of the scene too. I know because I've done a deep dive, nose first if you will, into 15 fragrances produced by NZ fashion brands to ascertain what unites our fashionable sprays.
I chose to take them and their fragrances at their word, detangling the narratives of each fragrance as listed in the product description – plotting the top, middle and base notes on a very rudimentary spreadsheet to pinpoint characteristic aromas.
Just as some attributes – pluckiness, a free-spirit, dogged determination, a pre despondency to the colour black – tie together the many threads of the NZ fashion industry, there are some shared shirthands that run through the heart, top and base notes of our fashion fragrances too.
Overwhelming, floral notes perfume our country's fashion adjacent perfume offering (florals for fragrance: ground breaking). Daddy by Lela Jacobs, $420, is the only perfume amongst our cache not to list a floral note in their descriptor. The other 14 namecheck an eclectic bouquet of blooms.
Inspired by a Grandmother's garden, Gloria’s eponymous Parfum, $260, has jasmine, freesia, mimosa, camelia and lily of the valley set against clovebud, sandalwood and ambergris, creating “a poetic floral bouquet, fortified with woody spices and grounded by a dark, dirty earthiness”.
Some become something of olfactory signatures for brands. Four of the eight scents produced under the Karen Walker fragrance umbrella list rose among the smelling notes. Lily of the valley crops up in three of Walker's fragrances as well as in Gloria. Walker’s A spray, $205, is a sparkling floral, “sparkling, bright, herbal and fresh”. B, $215, is a “delicious floral gourmand” and C, $215, a “creamy floral” blending gardenia, magnolia, mandarin and bergamot, heart notes of tuberose, orange flower.
In one of her EDPs, Ingrid Starnes focuses on a single stem, making a hero of Hellebore, $69, “the first flower of winter”.
Bergamot is the citrus du jour, lending its zesty sunniness to four perfumes. Amber too is ever present, found all around the fragrance wheel, be it in mossy aromatic woody form in the “dank, forest floor” of Lela Jacobs’ Daddy and a softer, incense forward version like the warm “combustible sensuality” of Karen Walker’s Runaway Azure, $219.
Forestry is an important sector for New Zealand that’s reflected in our perfumes too. Eight perfumes list a wood in their fragrance notes, Karen Walker has guaiac wood in Monumental, $199, and Jimmy D’s ‘sexy lazy’ Morning Wood, $295 (though sold out), namechecks varnished wooden floors amongst “lots of suggestions of hard wood without being too literal.”
If NZ fashion lived in the spice cupboard you'd find it nestled amongst the peppers. There's pink peppercorns (Karen Walker Hi There, $215, and B), chilli pepper (Monumental) and Sichuan peppercorns (Daddy).
Not all the descriptors conjure something that can be directly tied tightly to an aroma. Ingrid Starnes' Vetyver Bergamot, $69, Gloria's eponymous Parfum, Jakob Carter’s Carribean Dream, $99 and Monumental each use ‘modern’ as conceptual descriptor for their amalgam fragrances.
And while some notes come from well-thumbed books checked out from the fragrance library, we also buck trends. Vanilla, one of the most accessible notes from the gourmand family and touted by many as a trend that will define fragrances in 2024, is baked into only five of our recipes.
Given we're a close knit community, NZ fashion smells too like collaboration. Ingrid Starnes’ trio of roll on perfumes are designed as a family of three to “wear separately to suit different moods and season or layered to create your own personal fragrance”.
Gloria designer Kristine Crabb collabed with Curionoir’s Tiffany Witehira for her scent, while Lela Jacobs’ Daddy and Jimmy D's Morning Wood are made in collaboration with Of Body’s Nathan Taare. The Wellington-based “multimedia artist and autodidactic scentsmith” is also behind the buzzy limited edition Road by Karangahape EDP inspired by the iconic street that is itself an essential part of NZ fashion history.
Releasing its first branded foray the fragrance world last year, local fashion juggernaut Zambesi worked with Brooke Lean of New Plymouth perfumery The Virtue to create 1979, $275, a gender neutral scent they describe as “another textural layer to the Zambesi story”.
When, in December, on the eve of the launch event for the parfum stock hadn't yet made its way to Auckland, Zambesi co-founder Neville Findlay drove halfway down the North Island to meet Lean and pick up the collection of heavy square glass bottles himself. NZ fashion also smells like people going the extra mile, even 45 years into their careers.
