GIRL ON FIRE
Hermès master perfumer Christine Nagel has created a scent that appeals to a younger generation but ultimately remains timeless.
“I CREATED A PERFUME THAT I HOPE IS GOING TO SEDUCE FOR MANY, MANY YEARS”
When Christine Nagel took up the top spot in perfumery as Hermès’s in-house nose, she was given what many perfumers spend their entire careers working towards: freedom. Freedom in everything, from where she chose to have her office (she shunned the obvious choice of a central Paris workshop, instead opting for a subdued corner office within the industrial outskirts of the city, so she could work alongside Hermès craftsmen) to the way she constructs fragrance, which is, without any regard for brief, deadline or all-important budget. It may seem nonsensical – foolish even – to disregard such factors as cost in the competitive world of fragrance, but when your track record is as sparkling as Nagel’s, it’s a relatively safe bet.
“The owners of Hermès give me their full confidence, and that is priceless,” says Nagel, who, before joining the revered house in 2013, fashioned more than 20 scents for Jo Malone as well as now-cult fragrances including Narciso Rodriguez for Her and Giorgio Armani Sì. So what does one do when given unbridled freedom to create?
Nagel is Swiss, but lived in Italy for years before her work brought her to Paris and, like most foreigners who find themselves in the City of Light, she took to the streets. After all, we’ve learnt a lot from the French: the art of couture, how to refashion vintage Levi’s 501s, the crunch-to-softness ratio of the perfect pastry. But what piqued Nagel’s interest was the way French women would take something so common as their Hermès scarf, or twilly, as it’s commonly known, and find new ways to interpret it, whether it was knotted and cascaded down their ponytails or tied nonchalantly around the handle of a vintage handbag. Nagel sought to capture this “free spirit” in her next scent. “It’s her mindset, her sort of insolence; what I found was a great source of inspiration was the fact that they make our codes their own,” she says, perched on the terrace of her office. “I was such a fantastically imaginative young girl, so I was really surprised that we didn’t reach out to young women more than we did.”
Nagel sought to rectify this with Twilly d’Hermès EDP, a fragrance that would encapsulate and appeal to this ingénue. While the scent’s starting point may seem a conscious play by the house for the millennial dollar, Nagel was adamant Twilly would by no means fall victim to the sickly sweet, bubblegum alternatives that litter the market.
“We are able to offer a perfume that is different to the others, but which is also in keeping with their design,” she says. “Young women have their own taste, their own character; they can like a perfume that is not just caramel or raspberry.”
True to her word, Nagel masterfully mixes the freshness of ginger with tuberose and sandalwood, conveying echoes of fruity freshness but ultimately delivering something much more mysterious, while remaining true to the Hermès brand. “I think contemporary is a word that’s part and parcel with Hermès’s DNA and I created a perfume that I hope is going to seduce for many, many years,” she says. “The most beautiful present for a perfumer is for it to be timeless.”
While ‘contemporary’ scents often fall victim to half-hearted citrus notes that lack the punch of a forever scent, Nagel’s clever power play between the lightness of ginger and the darkness of sandalwood provides a layer of depth to Twilly and, it seems, a respectful nod and understanding of that carefree woman Nagel observed on the streets of Paris. Twilly d’Hermès feels refreshingly like a scent that might appeal to a young, insouciant woman but, like her Birkin or Kelly handbags, is also sophisticated enough to take its place within her fragrance wardrobe for decades to come. “It’s the tiny little things that you keep liking. In perfume there’s sometimes a tone that echoes something you liked as a very small child, and it’s all about pleasure, really,” she says, recalling the talcum powder her mother used as her earliest fragrance memory and something of a reference point for her future work.
The bottle itself feels understated yet timeless, and features a delicate ribbon of silk twilly in a kaleidoscope of hues tied around the neck of the sturdy flacon housing the champagne-hued juice. “When I’m creating a perfume I dream about it,” she says studying the bottle and pushing her signature round frames back up the bridge of her nose. “When I dream about this perfume, I see a lot of girls and they are faced with a huge heap of twills and somehow they take them and make them their own, change their style.” For Nagel, it seems, dreams do come true.