Aesop fragrances are a unique bunch. The way this brand develops scents has always been a little alternative. Take, for instance, the rose-centred Rozu launched last year, which took unconventional inspiration from the French architect and designer Charlotte Perriand.
This year, Aesop has launched not one, but three new eau de parfums – Miraceti, Karst and Eremia – in a collection called Othertopias. The idea is one of the wandering mind, and these are developed to transport the wearer by way of scent to what the brand dubs liminal spaces. That is, imagined places that blur the lines of what is or isn’t real.
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The concept’s a little dense, but the brand has brought in a visual collaborator in the form of the artist Davide Quayola to illustrate the idea.
In three video works by Quayola, landscapes like bushes, a forest and a seascape start off as photorealistic video, before morphing – rather like a technological glitch – into impressionistic blobs of colour and undefined shapes.
Visually, it captures the idea of these perfumes starting out, perhaps, from realistic settings and then morphing into something more mysterious.
To achieve this concept in Othertopias, Aesop worked together with its long-time perfumer Barnabe Fillion. In Fillion’s words, smells, “whether in the air, on our skin, or on our clothes, creates a world within our world” that “engages our senses, asks us to look differently and encourage us to image.”
This new collection is now available at all Aesop boutiques and online. Below, a breakdown of the three scents in the Othertopias collection.
