From the Pages: A Scent of Place and Time

ROUGE Comme des Garcons

“It is a joy to return to our terrace, to breathe the fragrance of the orange flowers – while above us bends a sky– in whose pure depths ship-like clouds glide – and the moon hangs luminous, a pendant of silver fire.”

Mary Shelley
(on the Bay of Naples, in Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842 and 1843, published 1844)

GABRIELLE Chanel

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.”

Joan Didion
(on Hemingway, Faulkner and other traveling writers, from The White Album, published 1979)

VANILLE 44 Le Labo

“What, after all, is London to a man who thinks of the whole middle east as just another bad neighborhood and the coast of South Africa as simply the Beach?”

Fran Lebowitz
(on Brazil, from “People who think of themselves as citizens of the world”, in The Fran Lebowitz Reader, published 1974)

PURE MUSIC Narciso Rodriguez

“The greatest wealth and magnificence reigns among the insects, and the butterfly rivals the hummingbird. When night falls on this green world, the animal world lights its beacons.
Air, vegetation, and earth fill me with splendor and illuminate the sea.”

Adelbert von Chamisso
(A Voyage Around the World, published 1836)

UNE ROSE Frederic Malle

“… then I will become a migratory bird, somebody who is not at home anywhere, a person who is vagrant and fugitive on this earth.”

Milli Bau
(from Silk Road, 1956–1974)

BLANCHE Byredo

“It was as though I stood at the topmost point of the earth, where the glittering winter sky is forever unchanging; as though the heath were rigid with frost, and adders,
vipers and lizards of transparent ice lay slumbering in their hollows in the sand.”

W.G. Sebald
(on Suffolk County, from The Rings of Saturn, published 1997)

BOIS D’ENCENS Armani Privé

“I have seen the greatest wonder which the world can show to the astonished spirit; I have seen it, and am more astonished than ever – and still there remains fixed in my memory that stone forest of houses, and amid them the rushing stream of faces, of living human faces, with all their motley passions, all their terrible impulses of love, of hunger, and of hate…”

Heinrich Heine
(on London, from Travel Pictures, published between 1822–1828)

MARFA Memo Paris

“The furious wind whistles so loudly between the columns that one could think they are a living forest. It shakes the blue air, sucks in the air coming from the sea, mixes it violently with the scents that rise from the hill covered with tiny,
fresh flowers, and makes blue cloths woven from light and air flutter ceaselessly.”

Albert Camus
(on Cape Sounion, Attica, Greece, from Notebooks March 1951–December 1952, published in 1989)

Photos BELA BORSODI
Production SINA BRAETZ

From our S/S 2020 “BIRTH” issue which can be ordered here