The New York fashion brand ties up with natural fragrance house Abel to bring its first-ever scent to life. We sit down with founders Amy Smilovic and Frances Shoemack, and perfumer Isaac Sinclair, to unpack its creation.
Paris in late September: what an interesting place that is. The city is flooding with newness, as the Spring/Summer collections take over the runways. And with people, as the fashion crowd descends to watch it all unfold. It’s loud, busy, ever so glamorous.
But this time around, in a small corner of cool-kid favourite Le Marais, all that hecticness seemed to dissipate into calmer waters. You feel it in your senses as you walk through a cobblestoned courtyard leading to the space New York’s Tibi has selected to showcase its latest collection, first presented during New York Fashion Week and now making its way to European customers. As your eyes hit the rails filled with Creative Director Amy Smilovic’s chic, polished designs, your nose gets a whiff of Tibi by Abel – the brand’s debut fragrance, created in partnership with the Amsterdam-based fragrance house that is slowly but surely becoming a darling of the beauty industry.
“The most amazing thing that’s happened now is that when we had this at the runway show, we’ve had it with us in Vienna, and I was in London before that,” Amy starts. “Everyone who smells it says, ‘This is exactly what I thought this would smell like,’ without knowing what it would smell like. And that’s the ultimate compliment.”
The creation has been a labour of love. For the past two years, the Tibi founder has been working closely with Abel’s Frances Shoemack and master perfumer Isaac Sinclair to understand what the brand itself would smell like. “I had always wanted to do something,” she continues. “And it’s interesting, around 20 years ago we did a candle. And we went through this process, but [our starting point] was more like, ‘What do you like right now? What are you wearing? Okay, we’ll try and make a scent similar to that.’ And I realised, you go through so many stages, things that you want to try, and all of a sudden we had done this scent that was so cloying and just not me at all.”
Chill, modern and classic were the coordinates given to the Abel team as a first step on the drawing board, a territory both Frances and Isaac are used to inhabiting, with their creative direction sitting comfortably outside the trend-led world of traditional fragrance.
“We had a session in the lab, just running different raw materials, and straight away pepper was quite clearly [a winner]. And then it just connected with the vetiver…” Isaac explains, before Frances gives me some context on the note. Gabe Smilovic, Amy’s son, is a huge vetiver fan, and wanted to make sure Tibi’s first scent carried its olfactive signature.
Fragrance heads might picture a pepper-centred fragrance with a darker, feistier side. But for Tibi, Shoemack and Sinclair took a deep dive into the world of the spice to find a specific variant that would balance the formula to perfection: Timut pepper. “It’s a special kind of Sichuan pepper,” Isaac explains. “It’s not from China, it’s from Nepal. And Sichuan is more lemony, whereas Timut is more grapefruit, or passionfruit [leaning]. It’s really nice, kind of juicy somehow.”
Vetiver for classic. Timut pepper for modernity. So, what’s the chill element of the concoction? South American yerba mate, a rich, herbaceous green ingredient that brings extra grounding and a hit of bitter freshness.
The result is a deliciously balanced, clean and timeless fragrance; the kind of grown-up freshness and minimalist scent profile you’d expect to come from the neck of the best-dressed person you know. It’s subdued but never boring, its spice sitting more as a confident afterthought than an obnoxious first impression. Definitely one to have on your radar this autumn.
Words – Sofia Ferreira
