Can Banana Be Chic? Abel Fragrance Thinks So.
- Savannah Bradley
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
Abel founder Frances Shoemack talks natural perfumery, pop art, and why consumers are increasingly drawn to fragrances with personality.
Burnt caramel, green banana, white oud. The notes of Miami Split read more like ersatz fragrance pitches from the depths of Fragrantica than the architecture of a luxury scent. The newest release from Abel Fragrance — the Amsterdam-based natural perfumery founded by former winemaker Frances Shoemack — opens with almost absurdly bright, creamy fruit before collapsing into darker territory: smoke, resin, leather, heat. It is, fittingly, inspired in part by Maurizio Cattelan’s 2024 piece Comedian, the infamous Art Basel banana duct-taped to a wall, sold for six figures, then eaten by another artist shortly thereafter. Like Comedian, Miami Split seems interested in asking if good taste comes from the sticky feelings we rebuff, like sincerity, irony, and provocation, or the lacunae between all three.
It’s not for nothing that the most compelling perfumes are not the clean, algorithmically pleasant skin scents dominating FragranceTok, but stranger, more specific compositions — fragrances with texture, contradiction, and even (shockingly!) a sense of humor. For over a decade, Abel Fragrance has challenged the idea that natural perfumery must feel austere, crunchy, or overly precious. And with Miami Split, the brand doubles down on something riskier instead: the proposition that sophistication and playfulness can be dance partners, banana split and cigarette waiting at the table.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
SAVANNAH EDEN BRADLEY: Miami Split carries a winking tension. Sweetness and smoke, that pop of brightness with all the darker depth. Was contradiction the starting point for this fragrance, or did it emerge during development?
FRANCES SHOEMACK: Contradiction was always the premise, not the accident. I'm drawn to things that don't fully resolve, that sit in the gap between opposing ideas and just live there. Miami itself does that. It's this place of total maximalism and strange sophistication, real heat and a kind of performative cool. The sweetness in Miami Split isn't decorative, it earns its place against the smoke, the leather, the weight underneath. I wanted something that smelled like a good time with a dark sense of humour.
SEB: The reference point of “Warhol-esque banana” is fabulous. What drew you to pop art as a scent-language, and how do you translate something visual and cultural into perfume?
FS: Pop art interests me because it took the vernacular, the soup can, the banana, the tabloid image, and asked you to look at it differently. Not to elevate it into something it wasn't, but to hold it up to the light until you saw its inherent strangeness. That felt like exactly the right lens for this. A banana in perfumery is almost a dare. The Warhol reference wasn't self-conscious, it was instinctive. There's something in that flat, almost graphic quality of the note, the way it reads as image before it reads as scent, that felt genuinely pop. The cultural shorthand becomes the material.
SEB: Banana is a note many people associate with novelty or nostalgia. What interested you in reclaiming it as something sophisticated, sensual, or even subversive?
FS: Banana has this incredibly loaded history in fragrance, mostly in the context of things you wore as a child, or novelty items, or things that smell of something rather than simply being something. Which is exactly what made it interesting. There's real subversion in taking a note with that kind of baggage and placing it somewhere unexpected, somewhere with depth, with edge, with intention. The sophistication isn't in sanitising it, it's in trusting it. Letting it be a little strange, a little funny even, and finding that the darkness underneath actually makes the sweetness more interesting, not less.
SEB: Abel has long challenged the idea that natural fragrance must feel somber rather than luxurious or playful. Twelve years in, how do you think the conversation around natural perfumery has changed?
FS: When we started, natural perfumery was largely positioned as wellness-adjacent, virtuous, gentle, a little apologetic. The conversation has genuinely shifted. There's now a generation of wearers and creators who understand that natural materials are not a constraint, they're a starting point with extraordinary range. What's changed is confidence, I think. The best natural perfumery today isn't hedging. It's not saying For a natural fragrance, this is quite good, it's just saying This is good. Miami Split exists in that space. The upcycled banana note we work with is green, sharp, and pithy. More evocative than its fossil fuel counterparts. There's nothing compromised about it.
SEB: There’s a growing appetite for fragrances with personality; maybe they feel strange, or hyperspecific, or a little mischievous rather than broadly pleasing. Why do you think that is?
FS: I think people are exhausted by the algorithm. The inoffensive option, the thing that was risk-managed into acceptability, people can smell that lack of conviction, quite literally. What's happening now feels like a correction. Fragrance as actual self-expression rather than background noise. When something is hyperspecific, when it smells like a very particular memory or a very specific idea, it creates this strange intimacy. You either recognise it or you don't, and both responses are interesting. The people who get it, really get it. That's more valuable than broad appeal.
SEB: Fragrance is invisible yet intensely tied to identity and style. What do you hope someone communicates, consciously or not, when they choose to wear Miami Split?
FS: That they understand a joke can also be serious. The reference point for this fragrance is Maurizio Cattelan's The Comedian, the banana duct-taped to a wall at Art Basel Miami, sold for a remarkable sum and then eaten by another artist. What that work does so brilliantly is ask where the value actually lives. Is it the object? The idea? The provocation itself? Someone wearing Miami Split is asking a version of that same question. The banana is the first thing you encounter, bold and almost absurdly present. But it's a facade. Underneath is something much darker, more resinous, more complex. Choosing to wear it signals a comfort with that kind of layering. You're in on it. You find the contradiction interesting rather than unsettling.
SEB: Looking ahead, what feels most exciting to you right now in the natural fragrance space? And what's up next for you?
FS: Dave, my husband and long-time collaborator, has just stepped into the CEO role, and that shift has been clarifying in the best possible way. Having him lead the business means I can move closer to the creative again. We're also back in Amsterdam, where Abel started, and returning here has felt like coming home to the original idea. It's a city that takes design seriously [and] values substance over spectacle. As for what's next, the ingredient conversation is only getting more interesting — upcycled materials, biotech-derived molecules, a level of precision that simply didn't exist when we launched. We're not done. 🌀
Savannah Eden Bradley is a writer and fashion editor born in 1999. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the fashion magazine HALOSCOPE. Her first book, Ladies of the Canyon: Fashion and Fear in Los Angeles, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press. You can stalk her everywhere online @savbrads.
