When Nest New York set out to expand its fragrance offerings into both fine fragrance and home formats, founder Laura Slatkin envisioned more than a product launch – she imagined an immersive, sensorial journey. The result is Voyages, a six-part collection inspired by Slatkin’s travels to distant spice markets, ancient gardens and storied apothecaries. With eau de parfums, perfume oils and reed diffusers crafted by Givaudan perfumers using rare, globally sourced ingredients, each fragrance in the collection evokes a real destination, while leaving space for personal interpretation. “This collection celebrates the art of still travel,” Slatkin says. “The concept that a fragrance could transform you and transport you by accessing your memories and imagination.”
To bring the visual world of Voyages to life, Slatkin turned to legendary image-maker Nick Knight, whose career has consistently bridged technical mastery with emotional depth. Known for his ability to layer meaning through colour, texture and abstraction, Knight was the ideal partner to translate scent into image.
“Part of the idea of doing these Nest pictures was to illustrate or to hint at some sort of journey, or some sort of voyage or trip,” Knight says. “Colour is a really important part of it. You know, the psychology of colour… Colour is a super emotional device, and colour juxtaposition, of course… those are the sorts of things one plays with when constructing imagery.”
For Knight, the connection between scent and image was immediate and intuitive. In Tempting Tonka, a rich, indulgent gourmand evoking a warm South American evening, he saw “beautiful shades of dark brown and [something] sort of waxy… that richness of it you get from smelling the fragrance.” In contrast, Cerulean Coast, a fresh marine escape with salted driftwood and bitter orange, called for a visual palette of “a sea mist or something… blue-y freshness of the ocean, but with this point of orange that makes it feel a bit more electric, a bit more alive.”
Knight’s approach is tactile and performative. Though he now often shoots on an iPhone, his process is rooted in decades of analog experimentation, where breaking an image into its elemental colours – magenta, cyan, yellow – and painstakingly reconstructing it taught him how to manipulate tone to evoke emotion. This sense of physical movement, of “dancing with the image,” is central to his creative flow.
“Photography is a fantastically performative medium,” he says. “It’s the exchange of energy, like a live performance, where every shift in light or perspective can change the whole emotional temperature of the image.”
That idea of responsiveness – of allowing the subject to shape the shot – runs through Knight’s entire philosophy. He avoids rigid planning or storyboarding, preferring spontaneity and interaction. Whether photographing a dress with reflective silver fabric or a rose as its petals fall, he watches for moments of transformation. “With my photography of roses, I’m not trying to tell a story, so it’s a slight difference there… but it’s essentially the same approach to photographing things.”
Roses, in fact, have long been one of Knight’s central muses. His ongoing Roses from My Garden series, which Slatkin has admired for its painterly softness and classical emotionality, plays a quiet but significant role in shaping the aesthetic tone of Voyages. Much like the fragrances, the roses shift in meaning and feeling over time. A bloom in decline reveals new depths of colour – fading yellow petals falling into shadowy reds – each transition telling a different, entirely emotional story.
Knight is quick to note that while fragrance, music and film often elicit more immediate emotional reactions – through movement, sound or scent – photography’s strength lies in its stillness. “Photography can create images that live in our imagination,” he says. “Films or music might alter our mood in the moment, but photographs linger. They imprint themselves as lasting mental images that continue to evoke feeling and thought long after viewing.”
The six fragrances that make up Voyages are each a portal into a layered olfactory world: Rose Sublime evokes a dew-drenched garden at dawn, with modern rose softened by creamy sandalwood. Tempting Tonka, meanwhile, captures the golden heat of a South American night with indulgent tonka and spiced warmth. Oud Mystique leans into the shadowy opulence of oud, layered with labdanum and wild iris and Hypnotic Amber is all golden glow and resinous depth – Indian cardamom, incense, vanilla and dark woods. Elsewhere, Opulent Osmanthus radiates with the juicy brightness of Asian pear and apricot, anchored by jasmine. Finally, Cerulean Coast is a windswept marine escape, balanced with bitter orange and the mineral calm of driftwood.
Together, the collection and its imagery form a synesthetic experience – a dialogue between scent and sight, real places and imagined emotions. For Slatkin, Voyages is a culmination of decades of storytelling through fragrance. For Knight, it is another chapter in his exploration of visual emotion.
“This is about memory and transformation,” Slatkin says. “It’s about bringing the world to you, not just through ingredients or visuals, but through a deep emotional connection that resonates long after the scent fades.”
Through this multisensory lens, Voyages invites the wearer to embark on an inner journey – one where a single image or aroma can open entire worlds.
Photography by Nick Knight.
