Frieze London has never smelt so good. The biggest week in the capital’s art calendar got underway Monday evening with the launch of a Loewe Perfumes pop-up. Open until Sunday inside a townhouse on New Bond Street, spread across three floors, the experiential event features glass-blown sculptures, a bubble-tea bar and a chance to engage with the brand’s new Crafted Collection.
The maison’s nose, Nuria Cruelles, built each of the fragrances in the trio around a single note – oud, iris and vanilla – working with various, sometimes off-kilter ingredients, to uplift the core of each scent in exciting finishes. Like the house’s fashion arm, which is experiencing its own evolution under the new direction of Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, creating these three scents saw Cruelles adopt new ways of working.
“The collection is representing the classic ingredients into the modern and contemporary perfumery, but we work around each with craft and an artisanal [approach],” she says, likening the construction of the fragrances to building a sculpture. (Fittingly, the scents’ bottles are blown-glass wonders of their own, each with naturally-formed bubbles and a tasteful granite cap.)
“Because they are the most expensive and top ingredients in the perfumery palette, this was an exclusive launch,” says Cruelles. “I wanted to create something very elevated because the ingredients give you the chance to do it.”
Take Iris Root, a gentle scent which takes a core ingredient Cruelles describes as “very creamy, soft and elegant” and contrasts it with timut pepper – “it has this dusty, bubbly top that enhances the beauty of the iris,” she adds.
A similar approach was applied to the second fragrance Roasted Vanilla: “because the vanilla itself is very dry, we needed a kind of sweetness and warmness,” she says. Oakwood was brought in to ground the scent, while the introduction cognac enticed a spicier side to the fragrance. “Almost like a vanilla bourbon,” says Cruelles, with a laugh.
Bittersweet Oud, the boldest of the fragrances, brings in a twist with the spike of bitter orange layered with sandalwood. The result is rich, textural and animalic, rounding off the most elevated expression of the Loewe scented universe to date.
Photography by Tim Elkaim.
