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According to NYFW, if there is a future, it is not one of rebirth or transformation — but of oblivion. L-R: Grace Ling SS26, Meruert Tolegen SS26, Who Decides War SS26 The cries this season are loud as ever about the death of New York Fashion Week. It is an event for an industry increasingly dominated by large conglomerates and content mills, featuring collections showcasing luxe variations of the same ensemble: an expensive-looking figure-flattering pant and a vaguely interesting top, the go-to outfit of wealthy white women dominating New York City living and snagging every Greenwich and West Village apartment. According to Rent Hop, the average rent for a Greenwich Village studio in October 2025 is $4860, a nearly 40% increase over the last three years. In the West Village, the average studio is $5000 a month, a dystopian 70% increase since 2022.  SS26 is primarily catering to the uniform of the new generation of New Yorkers taking over the West Village, as outlined in Brock Colyar's article “ It Must Be Nice To Be A West Village Girl , ” published in The Cut earlier this year. It is a polished look with something expensive to say, but not anything particularly interesting, leaving viewers, critics, and New Yorkers alike searching for something more. One could argue that the New York of independent, working-class artists and laborers who fiscally and socially dominated the city's landscapes is dead, like many facets of modern American identity and industry. Fashion, like all media, is a reflection of the culture it is produced in. The broad strokes of current New York culture fall into a revived dadaist realm, from constant content creation, transplant champagne socialists, up-and-coming literary figures building careers on the provocation of absurdity, and the infringing use of a fascist politic as a semiotic device.  Historically, NYFW is known for its modern sportswear and its ability to innovate minimalism, simultaneously appealing to workaholics, materialists, and grunge enthusiasts. Beyond the sea of heavily reported boring luxury, though, there are shows highlighting the cultural and aesthetic tension of New York in this present moment. A distinct visual language has emerged on the SS26 runway in response to the growing monotony and cultural dissolution associated with New York City. On the runway, excess serves as a celebration, highlighting the spatial and social disorientation of an ever-growing population, illustrated with high shine textures, feathered accents, and massive proportions.  Area SS26 Shows like AREA  have leaned into the absurd aesthetics of wealth and spectacle, showcasing high-concept collections filled with surrealist pieces. The show notes at Nicholas Aburn's AREA debut last week are a collection of musings about the constant mobility of New York social life, and a celebration of the disorienting nature of getting ready for a never-ending party. “New York, an American city. Beautiful, despicable.” By the end of the mini screenplay unfolding in the show notes, the narrator monologues a series of questions: The first is “What if I never stop getting ready?” ending with “What if the confetti never stops falling?” to which the narrator finally answers “Even if it's over, I’m ready.” The show begins with black, then white looks consisting of hoodies and turtlenecks — staples for any New Yorker — accented by silver, highly reflective materials. By the end, dresses are multicolored or entirely made of silver material, a perfect look for the girl who never stops getting ready. She’s over the top and always pushing the envelope, always ready for what's next, even if it's already over. The Area runway creates a distinct mix of textiles and proportions for a Bataillean party girl's existential-crisis-turned-celebration. Aburn shows viewers they cannot escape the speculated downfall of New York, but must plunge toward it with complete boldness.  Where Area sees evolution, designer Grace Ling  sees tensions between future and history. Instead of showcasing excess, the garments emphasize expansion of form and reduction of space. In the SS26 collection titled “Future Relics,” Ling creates an archive for the future, combining minimalist silhouettes and monochrome palettes with ultra-modern textures. The opening look worn by East Coast native Debra Shaw consists of a metallic 3-D printed top resembling a flower and a long skirt that slinks with her as she walks. Ling’s collection plays with negative space, utilizing unique cutouts and button configurations to highlight what gets left behind in the absence of fabric. Another standout is a recurring textile in the collection with a burnout effect, causing variations in sheerness and opacity throughout a singular garment. The closing look is also a 3D printed top that looks as if it has been forged from fire and welded to Abény Nhial’s body. “Future Relics” is brilliantly of the moment; it captures this point in time where visual language and artifacts are constantly being generated and erased, proving that the only time is now. By combining the ideas of ancient and future, a living archive is walking down the runway, transcending time and trend.  Deconstructed garments were a central component at many NYFW shows, but Who Decides War  managed to strike a unique balance of flashy excess and raw materialism this season.  Their SS26 collection, titled “Read the Room”, consists of a series of looks envisioning fashion from the point of view of a decaying house. Even the title and concept alone are suggestive of the complicated state of New York City's affairs regarding social events, housing, and fashion. The housing crisis in New York is at an all-time high: natives have either been pushed out of family homes due to gentrification or are watching those homes crumble. Those who strike out on their own for housing make due with the decay of a poorly maintained home. Who Decides War showcases clothes that are deeply textural — rich, romantic forms start from a place of restraint, then completely dissolve into the spectacular chaos of material deconstruction. Look 44, worn by Grace Seeger, calls to mind a fallen crystal chandelier, while look 21 (Bernard Amoah) evokes a well-loved leather chair. A concept that could easily become cloying never does, as designers Ev Bravado and Téla D’Amore remain true to their vision of rugged American textiles, highlighting the beauty in the chaos of decay.  Designer Meruert Tolgen  also calls on the viewer's notion of time through her SS26 collection, featuring 21 looks of flawlessly tailored garments in a neutral color palette. Her clothes conjure a dark fairy tale, where the heroine's disillusion with pastoral life leads her on a path of feminine destruction. Tolgen relies on the re-imagining of vintage lingerie silhouettes and jackets to create an aura of darkness that never feels heavy, as garments are deconstructed and then reconstructed. Her use of volume is simultaneously enchanting and disruptive, while the era of the clothing is eerily unplaceable. The result is a collection that feels otherworldly, as if the cottagecore girl from Hudson Valley moved to the East Village and became a communist. Tolgen has provided a very grounded collection for the disenchanted New Yorker's delight.  While many collections explored destruction through concept and form, there is no speculation about what comes after. The process of life after decay remains in the dark. According to these collections, if there is a future, it is not one of rebirth or transformation, but one of oblivion. If New York Fashion Week really is dying, it is because the seams of New York City life are ripping. Its artists are disillusioned and disoriented; they have the style to prove it.  🌀 Ruby Ann Robison is a multidisciplinary artist originally from rural Oregon. She has lived and worked all over the United States as well as in Amsterdam as a writer, model, actor, and media researcher. Her creative process includes socratic seminars in the back of an Uber and sleeping 10 hours a night. Links to a variety of her works can be found on Instagram @darlingmsbaby .

During SS26, New York designers crafted a free-flowing woman in a time of intense political restraint. L-R: Anna Sui SS26, Diotima SS26, Anna Sui SS26 If there was ever a time to bring the myth of burning bras to reality, now may be the time. And it seems New York will lead the way. Amidst sustained tensions across America, New York City hosted its Spring / Summer 2026 presentations, business as usual. Except, of course, for the designers using their platforms to stitch commentary and resistance into their newest collections, like Rachel Scott and Grace Ling.  New York designers are crafting a free-flowing woman in a time of political restraint. Save for a few designers, silhouettes are highlighting the feminine figure in a softer, more liberated manner than in past seasons. This idea opposes the continued popularity of styles favoring a “ trad wife ” aesthetic across social media. TL;DR: corsets are out; mesh, flowing fabrics, and showing a little skin are in. Female creative directors — present at Anna Sui , Khaite , Sandy Liang , Diotima , and Grace Ling , to name a few — are particularly tapped into this movement. Designs from these creatives for the SS26 showings leaned into less structured bodices, still following a feminine silhouette. If there was a corset involved in a look, it’s built out to literally allow the wearer breathing space.  While there isn’t much confirmation that these designers are intentionally crafting looks rooted in political opposition, the correlation certainly isn’t lost on the viewer or wearer. Women and gender historian Einav Rabinovitch-Fox suggests that feminism has long been a fashionable idea in America, harkening back to the dress practices of suffragettes and their predecessors. However, in contrast with styles that have coincided historically with waves of the Women’s Rights Movement, the feminist wave metaphor, and thus associating specific clothing with swells, has become more problematic. “I think it might be more productive to think about [feminism] not as in waves, but where the conversations are,” says Rabinovitch-Fox. “In recent years, we see a lot more conversations about the body, for example, that we didn't have for years. Of course, the Dobbs [ v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization  decision], and trans rights, and all is part of that conversation. And I think even going through a pandemic that the idea of [the] body is really becoming tangible.” And the woman’s body is always center stage during New York Fashion Week. This season, Rachel Scott was a standout in the move towards womenswear’s free flow. As the newly appointed creative director of Proenza Schouler , her collaboration with Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez infused a new idea of femininity into the brand. This woman is just as sophisticated as Proenza collections past, but feels less constrained and more vibrant.   As if Scott’s new appointment wasn’t exciting enough, she also made a runway debut with her own brand, Diotima . The collection showcased cherry red and seafoam green tones paired with feathered, sequined, and netted textures amidst a landscape of minimalism across the designer’s contemporaries. In a statement made to Vogue , Scott said the SS26 Ready-to-Wear collection is “a moment of resistance that’s rooted in exuberance, joy, and sensuality, and is against any form of domination.”  L-R: Proenza Schouler SS26, Grace Ling SS26, Proenza Schouler SS26 Another attention-grabbing look was from Grace Ling  — a floor-length gown, whose broad shoulders glide down the chest and torso to cinch at the hip front, leaving much of the midriff bare, as the top connects to a slinking skirt. The cut of the bodice gives the illusion of the hourglass silhouette, but the gown itself offers no point of restriction or manipulation to the body. The model gracefully, sexily glided down the runway, commanding authority in her bodily freedom. It can be difficult to place attention and importance on fashion in a country losing democratic ground with each new policy proposal . However, clothing offers an everyday opportunity for resistance through bodily autonomy. The ideas of dressing an unrestricted woman, as crafted during the recent NYFW showings, carry political weight and ideas of hope that contrast with invasive government and policy happenings, like the Supreme Court’s current consideration of ruling against Colorado’s conversion therapy ban . “Why are we dealing with fashion, right? When the world is on fire and there are really serious things to worry about?” asks Rabinovitch-Fox. “But I also think that fashion is a really powerful tool of resistance and of making statements in that world of fire.” From the fashioning of the Suffragettes  to win the vote, to asserting sexual freedom with the mini-skirt , style markers of cultural change are woven into the fabric of American history. Even in the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg fashioned resistance via accessorized collars  as she contributed to groundbreaking decisions supporting gender equality, people with disabilities, and the LGBTQ+ community, amongst other marginalized groups. As of last month, Connor Ives’ Protect the Dolls t-shirt  has raised over $600,000 for the Trans Lifeline nonprofit, once again proving the power of clothing in political resistance.  Fashion can operate as a unifier on both sides of the political aisle. In our cultural environment, perhaps the power of absent corsets on the New York runway functions as an act of political resistance through bodily autonomy.  The body is a political battleground, and fashion adorns this front. New York runways are too important not to keep an eye on in the present moment. Designers like Rachel Scott, Grace Ling, Sandy Liang, Ulla Johnson, Anna Sui, and their contemporaries are infusing their clothes with resistance — one gentle silhouette at a time. “Even fascists understand the power of fashion,” says Rabinovitch-Fox. 🌀 Kaitlyn Rutledge is a writer, photographer, and Fashion Studies graduate student at Parsons School of Design. Though usually scouring the streets of New York City for the perfect lavender latte, she’s often covered in oil paints or finding zen at the yoga studio. Find her on socials @kaitlynsrutledge .

The Spanish-American artist kept a fashion diary of one whirlwind NYFW season — including a leopard-print midi dress. New York Fashion Week is as much about the stolen hours between shows as it is about the clothes themselves. Few people embody that divide — the grit and the spectacle, the exhaustion and the dopamine rush — quite like Alexa Dark . Singer, songwriter, DJ, and a fellow believer in animal print being a neutral, Dark's work blends the noirish, Old Hollywood-inspired pop of early-10s Lana with the fuzzy monotone of Mazzy Star. She's also a brilliant dresser, naturally. Over three days during the city's busiest fashion season, Dark kept a fashion diary for HALOSCOPE — a lived-in record of late nights, quick changes, and the surreal blur of Fashion Week as it unfolded minute by minute. Here's what she wore. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 I kicked off this year’s NYFW at the Prada Paradigme event wearing a stunning MISA Los Angeles dress paired with my Ottolinger bag — such a perfect start to Fashion Week. SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 For street style, I hit the buzzy NYC streets in an Ioannes dress, styled with my Alexis Bittar jewelry and purse, Prada sunglasses, The Great Frog ring, and my Cartier watch. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 A moment for this chic black-and-white look: an Empresa leather skirt with a crisp Ralph Lauren shirt, finished off with my Verafied NY bag. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 One of my favorite highlights was The Champion Event—the energy was unmatched, and I met so many amazing people. I wore a Contessa Mills shirt-and-skirt set, elevated with my Dior bag. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 The Cynthia Rowley Show was absolutely amazing—I wore a gorgeous cheetah-print dress with knee-high boots, paired with my favorite sunglasses. 🌀 Savannah Eden Bradley  is a writer, fashion editor, gallerina, Gnostic scholar, reformed It Girl, and future beautiful ghost from the Carolina coast. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the fashion magazine HALOSCOPE. You can stalk her everywhere online @savbrads .

Biker boots ran hot in scorching temperatures, begging an essential question: will the controversial shoe take over this fall? L-R: Boots from nhògirl, Balenciaga FW23, Saint Laurent FW17 It’s been hot and humid and bothered in New York City. With heat waves  hitting earlier in the season than usual and climate change causing record-breaking temperatures, I’ve done everything in my power to wear as little clothes as humanly possible, head to toe. The less coverage, the better. Bikini bra as a top, anyone?  However, the oppressive heat has not stopped the fashion kids from breaking out their black leather, often knee-high, platform biker boots, and hitting the ground running from DUMBO to the East Village, from Washington Square Park to the Upper East Side. Boots in this style were being sold at all levels of retail, from Shein — where I checked because unfortunately the kids still shop there — to ASOS, another popular retail outlet. Shein’s   “Womens Over The Knee Stretch Boots Chunky Block Platform Wedge Lace Up Thigh High Boots Biker Goth Punk High Heel Boots” (LOL) had a splashy graphic calling them “HOTSELLERS” and were discounted from $72.00 to $37.80. An ASOS DESIGN  mid-calf option sells for $74.99, comes in three colors (black, camel, and brown), and features a buckle design on the ankle. ASOS also carried a $429.00 option from AllSaints , now sold out, which came in a taller fit and featured chunky soles and buckles at the top and bottom. Pointed toe, square toe, round toe; silver buckles, laces, side zippers; heels or platforms; in any of their variations, these boots were everywhere.   The Lower East Side vintage shop Rogue, known for its outfit breakdown videos of shopgoers on social media, featured this diva  in T.U.K boots and this queen  in a square-toed, slouchy Fidan Novruzova pair. The two brands featured have a higher cool-factor than ASOS and carry a certain air of fashion know-how. These iterations of the trend are the kind that can get you featured on Rogue’s Instagram or photographed  by Johnny Cirillo of @watchingnewyork.  Biker boots were initially developed to prevent injuries from motorcycle accidents, making the hop to fashion when brands like Prada featured them in their collections. These Prada boots  are selling on Etsy for $699, with the seller claiming they are from the FW99 collection. They were also listed on Elevated Archives  for $537. While I couldn’t find clear enough photos to confirm that these boots were featured in the men’s FW99 runway show, tags like “rare find” on these online resellers present them as a highly coveted item in the secondhand market.  Another high-fashion brand that has appropriated the biker-inspired and motocross boot design, not without controversy , is, of course, Balenciaga. A pair of Biker Over-the-Knee Boots by the brand retails on Saks Fifth Avenue for $8,700, and while this pair does not feature the stiletto heels by the aforementioned Spanish luxury house critiqued in the Motorcycling outlet RideApart, they likely aren’t meant to be worn on the road.  In the Winter ‘23 collection, the brand incorporated these boots, stating in the shownotes  that “The Biker Boot, a design based on motocross footwear, is seen with extreme sport detail and in monochrome.” The Balenciaga take on items like these is rarely focused on function: the boots feature stylized, pointed toes, and appear almost comically oversized around the models’ skinny legs. One look , pairing the boots with short shorts and a tight long-sleeve shirt with shoulder pads, features the boots in an outfit formula that has taken over the streets of New York: often in all-black, the eye is drawn down to the heftiness of the shoes, whose weight increases the gravitational pull of the scorching pavement, which can reach temperatures of 130°+  Fahrenheit.    Initially, the trend prevailed in Fall/Winter collections, and even in the Balenciaga 2023 show: the accessory seems to have been conceptualized for cooler temperatures. Whether brands intended this to happen or not, this style of shoe was a summer accessory this year, bleeding into the early fall that like the heat that won’t give. Undeniably, the appeal of contrasting the heavy nature of the shoes with extreme heat is the added drama.  L-R: Boots from Miu Miu FW22, Miista With this in mind, what shoe trend will take over the streets as the weather cools? I’ve already spotted plenty of kitten-heel slingback shoes and mules. Perhaps, exhausted from all that coverage, a more feminine and revealing shoe will take over. I think we can expect the usual suspects of knee-high boots, Mary-Janes, loafers, dad sneakers, and clogs, with an added flavor of ballerina sneakers and flats. I expect to see more ballet flats with socks.  But it would be fabulously outrageous if peep-toe booties made a comeback. This 2010s favorite recalls times when we were all glued to our TVs watching Gossip Girl (2007-2012) and Pretty Little Liars (2010-2017). It was a wardrobe staple, along with skinny jeans and the “going out” top. Currently, it is available for purchase at retailers like Nordstrom  and Macy’s , and only time will tell, but perhaps if this trend gets a lot of heat, we will be reading pieces about a new recession indicator  — fitting, given the “recession indicator think piece ” has   become   a trend   in itself .   🌀 Laura Rocha-Rueda  is a Colombian fashion and fiction writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in HALOSCOPE, Vestoj, The Inquisitive Eater, and The Territorie. She covers runway, trends, and pop culture, and will gladly chat about why dismissing these themes as frivolous is misguided and sad. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School.

In perfume, nostalgia tends to rule: sweet gourmands, memory-laden florals. But when fragrance borrows from the cerebral world of chess, it opens a stranger, more imaginative territory. Frassaï's 2025 fragrance, Ajedrez, composed by Ralf Schwieger. Of the perfume, the brand says, "Time can move forward, or backward. Time is inverted. Sometimes, it seems to stand still. The pause gains importance. In standing still, there is movement." En passant  is one of chess’s more esoteric rules, referring to a pawn's ability to capture another pawn when special conditions are met. I learnt this mostly against my will when I sampled Frederick Malle’s fragrance of the same name . It dawned on me soon after reading the definition that the title must refer to the French phrase’s direct meaning,  passing through , not the chess rule – and yet I found myself captivated by the idea of trying to distill and communicate the essence of a player enacting the move in a game in scent. En Passant was inspired by   a spring garden in full bloom, filled with the scent of lilacs and the freshness of vegetation lingering after a short, heavy storm breaks the day’s heat. Why couldn’t it refer to an opportunistic pawn, drawing a parallel between the ephemerality of what happens on a chessboard and lilac’s notoriously short blooming season? In a way, both are passing through.  Though I was mistaken about the connection between En Passant   and chess, other fragrance houses have ventured there directly. Frassaï’s Ajedrez , translating literally to “chess,” is a journey to a darkly lit chess room in the 1960s. Tobacco, dry spices, and iris conjure images of a chess player, sharply dressed; the notes of dark wood, moss, and lavender evoke the materials a chess board is made from, the room it lives in. Vilhelm Perfumerie’s Morning Chess  situates the game during the summer months in Sweden’s coastal Falkenberg, verdant and succulent, with only an echo of leather and spice. Both are memoristic, elegant tributes to chess-playing grandfathers. Perfume is not immune to trend cycles. Even its resurgent popularity as a category within beauty is cyclical, and the current boom – though sustained – is likely to dip at some point. Chess’s presence in pop culture is more curious. It’s a game with a 1500-year history, but not exactly a mainstream interest or pursuit, until 2020 when The Queen’s Gambit  entered the cultural imagination at a time when, for many, TV was the main source of entertainment. Captive audiences couldn't get enough of the chess prodigy Beth Harmon, with her preternatural talent and dramatic character arc; the show quickly became one of the most-streamed on Netflix. The Queen’s Gambit  stepped outside chess’s entrenched symbology. Harmon was beautiful, stylish, sexy, transgressive, ambitious, an addict, a woman. She bore a whole host of dramatic attributes to find interest in beyond the inherent unfamiliarity of chess, while simultaneously immersing audiences in the appeal and tension of the game. The Queen’s Gambit  rendered the closed, internal experience of chess explicit; Harmon would look up to the ceiling to envision her next move, the chess pieces celestial objects she mastered at will. Searches for chess surged as did sales of chess sets, and in an amusing turn of events, The Queen’s Gambit  board game  was born, a simplified facsimile for Harmon wannabes.  More niche, though an indisputable event  in the literary world, was the 2024 publication of Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo . The hardcover features a fallen rook, which can move any number of squares in a straight line if not blocked by another piece, representing the protagonists’ tribulations and the freedom — with the right strategy — to move beyond them. An intermezzo,  an Italian term translating to “in between moves,” is an unexpected action in the game that disrupts an opponent’s strategy and necessitates an immediate response. Readers of the novel will be able to make the symbolic connection between those metaphors and the narrative arc of the two protagonists, though it’s the humanistic Peter, and not the chess-playing Ivan, who most embodies the cover’s clues.  Chess has long served as a metaphor for anyone looking to explore and express complexity. So why not fragrance, too? In the aptly titled novella Chess ,   also known as The Royal Game , Stefan Zweig asks us to consider whether chess is “not also a science and art [...] a unique link between pairs of opposites: ancient yet eternally new, mechanical in structure, yet made effective only by imagination; limited to a geometrically fixed space, yet within unlimited combinations; [...] no one knows what brought it to down to earth to vanquish boredom, sharpen the senses and stretch the mind.” It’s a fitting description for the art of perfumery, particularly when it draws attention to the function of imagination — it’s imagination that connects what’s inside a perfume bottle to its narrative and visual identity.  The high conceptualism of chess and the average nescience towards its nuances can only be a good thing for fragrance. A perfumer could start by translating each of the 32 pieces on a board into individual fragrances or reach for the thousands of chess openings, the oldest of which are named after nationalities of players who advocated for them; all ready-made genesis nodes for olfactory exploration. So many of the most popular scents today, even in niche spaces, over-index on nostalgia and gourmands, the two often present concurrently. Sweet and sticky, they harken back to places and memories stripped of contextual complexity and therefore negative associations. Chess, then, presents a new opportunity for perfumers and perfume enthusiasts alike.  Perfume house Mind Games  is putting this theory to the test. Launched in 2022, Mind Games “links the complex artistry best embodied by the strategy and brilliance of chess with the innovative and hypnotic effects of perfumery.” Naturally, the collection is divided into black and white flacons, adorned with a sculptural topper corresponding to different chess pieces. Scents mirror “the significance behind every move a player makes [...] Each note is carefully considered and selected, performing an essential role in the grand scheme, comprising a collection as layered, nuanced, and insightful as the ideas that inspired them.”  At Mind Games, this isn’t mere marketing. It’s a gamut of ideas striving to coalesce into a narrative detached from nostalgia, free from predetermined parameters. By building a brand around the concept of chess and all it encompasses, Mind Games has created an olfactory playground for the perfumers it works with. Grand Master, unexpectedly, opens with rose water, blackcurrant, and peony. The initial softness is bolstered by coffee and violet before the fragrance reveals a robust foundation of ebony wood, myrrh, and incense. Grand Master is unisex – if anything, it leans feminine – the soft, powdery flower petals concealing aromatic woods until a gust of wind blends them. Meanwhile, Gambit is herbaceous and spicy. Cloves and lavender open, leading to a cardamom and geranium middle, while patchouli, sandalwood, and ambrostar ground. I can extrapolate how the spicy opening notes translate to a player making a calculated sacrifice at the start of the game, as the fragrance transforms into a stable, animalic base, the player waits to reap the gambit’s advantage. Is it ontologically true? I don’t care – it’s fun to experience the notes like colours and brushstrokes in an impressionistic scape, conjuring previously unexplored and unexpected associations.  Julian Wasser, Duchamp Playing Chess with a Nude (Eve Babitz), Duchamp Retrospective, Pasadena Art Museum (1963) I often think about a 1963 photograph by Julian Wasser of a nude, youthful Eve Babitz playing chess with the besuited, aged Marcel Duchamp. An absurd contrast transpires between them, the game, and the Ferus gallery setting, surrounded by Duchamp’s artworks, including the famed Fountain . I long to know what the scene smelled like. Did Babitz arrive smelling of “swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds,” as she described her hometown of Los Angeles to smell like in Eve’s Hollywood ? Maybe Duchamp was wearing classic French cologne, or his suit was freshly laundered for the opening of his retrospective. The gallery must have had a smell, they always do, of expanse, and the recently installed artworks. Why not add a salty, aquatic note, courtesy of the Fountain ? The chess game between Duchamp and Babitz didn’t last long. “I tried my best, moving a knight so at least he knew I had some idea what a knight was, he moved his pawn and the next thing I knew, I was checkmated. ‘Fool’s mate,’ they call it when you’re so stupid that the game hasn’t even begun and you’ve lost,” Babitz recalled  of the experience. Sadly, there’s no fool’s mate fragrance, though I’m not surprised. It’s the fastest checkmating pattern in chess, predicated on white making awful opening mistakes, leading to a checkmate in only two moves. Perhaps in a fragrance, it would be embodied by two discordant notes, quickly going nowhere. It wouldn’t smell good, necessarily, but it would be fun to experience.  In The Queen’s Gambit , chess was a refuge for Beth Harmon, the process through which she transformed herself. It may be a conceptual refuge for perfumers too, a new semantic circle to play in. By centering chess, perfumers and perfume appreciators can, per Zweig, “sharpen the senses and stretch the mind,” vanquishing the boredom of revisiting well-worn olfactory concepts. To thrive as an art form, perfume has to look in directions other than the past; to concepts and ideas that uncover possibilities: cerebral, delightful, unexpected – without this move it may grow stale, blundering into a fool’s mate. 🌀 Zhenya Tsenzharyk is a writer and editor living in London, covering (most) things sensory through a culturally critical lens. She loves to over-intellectualise her ever-growing perfume collection.

Some perfumes feel like déjà vu. Dandelion Butter, the latest from Chicago’s Clue Perfumery, is one of them: an olfactory whisper that tugs at a half-forgotten childhood memory. The smell is faint at first. A delicate green whisper with the tender bite of early summer air. Then it deepens, unfurling into something creamy and salted, like butter pulled from a cool ceramic bell on a kitchen table, soft enough to spread with the back of a knife. The moment is fleeting but disarmingly vivid, as if it’s been waiting in the wings of your mind for decades.  This is Dandelion Butter , the newest creation from Chicago-based Clue Perfumery , a fragrance that smells not only of its ingredients but of a childhood game passed in whispers from playground to playground, generation to generation: hold a dandelion under your friend's chin, and if it casts a yellow glow, you must  like butter. Laura Oberwetter, co-founder and perfumer of Clue , first heard of the game from her business partner and fellow founder, designer Caleb Vanden Boom. She had playfully dismissed it at first, convinced it was some eccentric tradition unique to his school. But then, years later, it resurfaced, as mentioned in passing while filling studio orders and listening to The   Virgin Suicides  audiobook. What once seemed like an obscure oddity began to feel like a collective memory. “It was so nonsensical, yet unexpectedly catchy and sticky,” she recalls. “The kind of thing that burrows in your brain.” Dandelions, as it turns out, don’t have an essential oil. Perfumers can’t simply reach into a kit and pull out “dandelion” the way they might with vanillin or Iso E Super. This made Dandelion Butter both a creative puzzle and an irresistible challenge. Oberwetter began with research, ordering every perfume she could find that listed dandelion as a note, only to discover that most relied on conventional “perfumey” interpretations rather than the real scent of the flower. She needed the raw thing. So, in the depths of a Chicago February, a grower in Atlanta shipped her fresh dandelions overnight so she could study them in person. What she found surprised her: the flower’s greenness was more prominent than its floral character, with a vegetal, yeasty, almost bread-like aroma touched by a watery citrus quality. She layered hay-like notes with subtle powder and earth to construct it from the ground up, blending 42 materials; 16 dedicated solely to building the dandelion accord. Then came the butter. Inspired by her parents’ kitchen, she sought a note that felt cool or room temperature, not hot; mild, creamy, and faintly salty. Butter in perfume can easily tip into cloying territory when paired with rich vanillas or caramelized notes, so she stripped it back, avoiding anything that might veer rancid. As the scent of Dandelion Butter fades, it leaves behind a ghost of warmth and green. An echo of that strange, sticky playground game, refracted through artistry, discipline, and a refusal to play by the rules, the final effect is uncannily lifelike, bolstered by a subtle nod to human skin’s own “butyric” warmth under sunlight. It is a scent of impossible familiarity: a game you may or may not have played, a flower no perfumer can bottle, a moment that feels like yours even if it isn’t. In Clue’s world, perfume isn’t just what you wear; it’s a clue to who you are, who you were, and who you might remember being. Laura Oberwetter and Caleb Vanden Boom shot by Kate Doyle and Breakfast For Dinner. That strange blend of nostalgia and surrealism, the slippery space between the familiar and the uncanny, is the essence of Clue Perfumery. Founded in 2023, Clue has quickly become one of the most talked-about names in the indie fragrance scene, not through celebrity endorsements or sleek corporate campaigns, but by crafting scents that read like dream fragments, anchored in precise, tangible detail. The Clue studio is tucked in Chicago, where Oberwetter and Vanden Boom do nearly everything in-house: formulation, packaging, fulfillment. They are, in their own words, equal parts “perfumer and email person,” “designer and box packer.” This end-to-end approach allows them to maintain the balance of thoughtfulness and playfulness that has become the brand’s signature.  Their bottles — elegantly structured, smooth, with a bold, keyhole-like silhouette — stand out as much as their olfactory compositions. They are objects meant to be handled, displayed, and loved, but never treated as too precious. (And the scents inside are IFRA-certified, built from both naturals and synthetics without a trace of pretension.)  From the beginning, Clue positioned itself not in the crowded space of luxury exclusivity, but in a rarer, riskier territory: conceptual scents that spark joy and curiosity while refusing to cater to trends. “We’re not chasing the rarest rose oil or glorifying the materials for their price tag,” Oberwetter says. “We’re chasing an idea, a feeling, a moment you can’t quite name.” When Clue launched its debut trio in 2023, the reaction was instant and effusive. Morel Map conjured the deep earthiness of a forest floor after rain, mushrooms threaded with balsam fir and oakmoss, a fragrance that radiated like a living thing. Warm Bulb was a cozy vignette of dust-dappled light and yellowed paper, sweetened with vanilla and sandalwood (my favorite scent, by the way). With the Candlestick leaned into ritual incense and melted wax, cherry wine over labdanum and musk, evoking candlelit mystery without descending into gloom. The scents were cerebral yet wearable, drawing a devoted following that Oberwetter affectionately refers to as “the club”. Both she and Vanden Boom resisted the temptation to ride their momentum to rapid expansion, choosing to instead preserve their control and integrity. “It takes dedication not to sell out,” she says. “But for us, it’s not even a question.” Clue’s work occupies an unusual emotional register; mysterious but never joyless, nostalgic but never syrupy. “We’re drawn to concepts that are a little surreal, but always playful,” Oberwetter explains. Even With the Candlestick, arguably the most shadowed of their creations, approaches darkness from the perspective of childhood fear, tinged with innocence rather than menace. This ethos extends to their limited-run “Slipper Series,” which allows them to release experimental “sketch” fragrances that don’t fit the mold of a full Clue launch. The first, Like Mesh, was literally composed in a dream — an unbalanced but beguiling neroli-heavy formula that sold out quickly despite minimal fanfare. The series, Oberwetter says, is like uncovering an artist’s demo recording: imperfect, ephemeral, and treasured by those who seek it out. Clue’s audience is geographically diverse but concentrated in Brooklyn, Chicago, and, unexpectedly, Minnesota. They’ve resisted international shipping so far, instead partnering selectively with independent retailers who share their ethos. A Greenwich, Connecticut boutique, also frequented by Hamptons clientele, was one of the more surprising stockists, and Oberwetter still delighted in the juxtaposition of her surreal vignettes sitting on the same shelves that attract reality-TV stars. Pop-up events have become a way to connect directly with customers, though demand has sometimes outstripped their expectations. “We thought, Who’s going to come?  And then it sells out before we’ve even caught our breath,” she says.  For someone who spent her teenage years scouring Fragrantica, Oberwetter has, in recent years, stepped away from the churn of perfume content and online trends. “I don’t read our reviews anymore. I don’t go on TikTok. I don’t want to know what the trend is, I’m waiting for it to be over,” she says. This isn’t contrarianism for its own sake; it’s self-preservation for the brand’s creative core. “I don’t want to be tainted by it. I want to find inspiration somewhere else.” Still, Clue often finds itself inadvertently aligned with trends (lactonic “rice” notes, for example), only to pare them back to avoid being lumped in. In an industry that can sometimes feel like an echo chamber, this kind of selective isolation is both rare and, for Clue, essential. Looking ahead, Oberwetter hints at materials she’s eager to use: Peru balsam, for one, "because it smells like a cinnamon roll,” and even a sweaty “B.O. accord” inspired by hot yoga studios. They're just awaiting the right context. The possibilities, she says, are less about keeping pace with the market and more about finding the right story to tell. For now, thrice sold-out Dandelion Butter feels like the purest distillation that bypasses the intellect and lands directly in the body, like the way certain songs can make you feel something you can’t quite articulate. 🌀 Allison Skultety  is a PR Coordinator, writer, baker , and occasional funny girl.

The Mobular founder talks architecture, Margiela, and challenging overconsumption through functional jewelry and homeware design. CONCRETE. SLAB. STONE. BLISS. The first time I laid my eyes on Mobular  — the hybrid 3D-tech and craft studio based in Le Marais, Paris — I was ensorcelled by Franco-Portuguese founder Mariza Joana Gomes Rodrigues ’ ability to provoke rich emotion via rigid geometry. Borne from Rodrigues’ desire to “merge minimalism with the cosmic vastness of space,” Mobular counts homeware and jewelry among its spate of offerings, from brutalist ashtrays and spherical candles to bangles, earrings, and rings that jut over the body like cubic halos.  This past January, I sat down with Rodrigues to discuss Mobular’s design ethos, playing The Sims, and what comes next for the emerging brand.  This interview has been edited for grammar and clarity. SAVANNAH EDEN BRADLEY:  I’m curious about the genesis of Mobular — as well as your personal genesis as a creative director. Take me to the beginning.  MARIZA JOANA GOMES RODRIGUES:  I've always been this creative child. I played instruments, liked to draw, [and] liked to create homes on The Sims, but never really played afterwards. I was basically super interested in creating singular universes in general. I think I was born with this creative energy in me. Growing up, I found a big interest in graphic design, without knowing it was graphic design at the time. I liked to create beautiful layouts for school [and] for my personal interests in general. I always loved to curate a beautiful Instagram feed, and my friends used to give me a lot of compliments about my vision of aesthetics and harmony. I knew that, at some point, I would have to take this seriously and initiate my own creative project, but I never knew what and when exactly. I tried different things, helped friends with their own projects, [and] helped family decorate their homes. At around 18 years old, I started to be really interested in interior design and architecture, but didn't [study] at all. I went straight to work after a few months of studying foreign languages. So I documented myself a lot, visited a lot — living in Northern France gives me the opportunity to explore a lot of different countries and environments that literally are pioneers in terms of design, like Belgium, for example.  I curated some inspiration pages on Instagram about fashion, design, [and] architecture. And then all this knowledge kind of intertwined perfectly with my intuitive insights. I woke up one day in 2023, after a solo trip to Lisbon, [which] inspired me a lot — being a mixed Franco-Portuguese child — and [I] was like, “OK, I'm gonna design rings that can also be used for homeware and  furniture.” This is how I created Mobular [...] the brand name came naturally, too.  SEB: One of the things that struck me about your work is how it coalesces classic brutalist forms with organic textures — these pieces don’t feel cold or stark, but instead pleasing and warm, made to be cherished. What goes into the design of every Mobular piece? How does the process differ between homeware and jewelry? MJGR: Working with bio-sourced material was super important to me. As an immense Earth lover, I wanted to create objects that wouldn't hurt our environment. After long research, I found that organic polymer looked like the perfect compromise. I think that their matte and soft texture gives this “second skin” feeling, and we have to cherish our skin, right?  I started to draw the first three rings in 2023; they were inspired by furniture at first sight. Then I introduced myself to 3D design. I am 100% self-taught in [all of this]. So, I decided to [model] and print them in this organic polymer. Thanks to 3D printing, this process also gave me the chance to be fully independent in the production process. Every other piece unfolded intuitively and naturally from one another. I play a lot with 3D design to envision my different works, and the whole collection is the perfect ecosystem to me; [all the] pieces are relatives.  What differs from jewelry to homeware is the material and scale choices. When you design homeware pieces, you have to make sure that they are solid, practical, and safe to use for their different purposes. As a brutalist lover, I always wanted to work with concrete. This is how I also introduced myself to molding and casting techniques. SEB: You’ve described your work as “the new ornamentals.” What does that mean to you, and how do you see ornamentation evolving in design today? MJGR: I aim to transcend the law of “form and function” through my designs. I wanted to break the rules of aesthetics in terms of jewelry, getting out of this “elegance must be delicate” law. We are able to create chunky pieces that are very elegant and delicate, too.  I also want to invite people to expand their vision of an object being stuck into one exclusive function. I find this so reductive. In our era, to escape this overconsumption society, we need to create designs that are versatile. For me, versatility is timelessness and longevity. For example, the Dome earrings  can transform into the Dome Incense Holder , playing with its scale and material. SEB: How is your own style reflected in the work that you’re doing? What inspires you? MJGR:  The biggest inspiration I have is all these [timeless] references we know today, whether from fashion like the Martin Margiela years, sculptors like Brâncuşi or Noguchi, or, of course, architecture. I really appreciate the minimalism of John Pawson or Álvaro Siza, a Portuguese modern architect who excels in perspectives and proportions.  I love how strong simplicity can be so efficiently drawn in different fields. Finding the way to express strong simplicity is a holy grail to me. This is how society can save itself from overconsumption. I like to play around with my style, of course, as a fashion lover, but I tend to buy less, stay away from temporary trends, and work on building a timeless capsule wardrobe year after year. SEB: We often associate 3D printing with functionality over beauty — Mobular seems to subvert that expectation. How do you approach making technology feel deeply human? MJGR:  Very true. At its essence, 3D printing was created to compensate for production shortages in the mechanical engineering industry. It's still very young compared to traditional savoir-faire . I think that Mobular subverts that expectation thanks to my desire to share the whole human scale process behind it and how I handle this creative project by myself, as an independent self-taught woman. People can resonate with it, [and] it feels more natural and reachable in a way. You can buy your own 3D printer nowadays and play with it at home, [and] make your own creations tangible if you're familiar with 3D modeling. And that's fantastic. SEB: What’s next for Mobular? Are there specific scales, mediums, or ideas you’re excited to explore in the future? MJGR: As I introduced the homeware scale lately, working for the first time with concrete, I'm looking forward to [expanding] the collection with more pieces and [transforming] more jewelry designs into homeware ornaments. The Dome Incense Holder [has been] a success, and I am so grateful for that. I already have ideas on how to transform this particular design into a bigger scale. A sink that works like a fountain, for example. I also envisioned one of the rings as a beautiful bedside lamp. So many ideas [are] popping in — honestly, I can't wait to be able to work with bigger resources. I am also currently working with a 3D architect to create beautiful immersive renderings of my pieces in [curated] environments. I would love to expand Mobular as a creative studio that works with different mediums and with different creatives of their own or on collaborative projects. Saint Heron by Solange is the perfect example to me. SEB: What advice would you give to yourself one year ago? MJGR:  What I would say to myself is: always trust in a good and healthy process, don't try to be overproductive, don't be scared of voids, and embrace those contemplative moments without feeling guilty — because they feed your mind and body with space to receive tons of new ideas and inspirations. Don't doubt too much; actions always lead to a new level of creative expansion. I would like to give this advice to any creative reading these words. Owning and running a creative project is such a blessing — don't let those negative thoughts ruin the whole process behind it. It is a catharsis before becoming a potential full-time job.  🌀 To view more of Rodrigues’ work, visit MOBULAR , as well as on Instagram  and X . Savannah Eden Bradley  is a writer, fashion editor, gallerina, Gnostic scholar, reformed It Girl, and future beautiful ghost from the Carolina coast. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the fashion magazine HALOSCOPE. You can stalk her everywhere online @savbrads .

The four perfumes — Mons Venus, Dauphine, Viva Maria, and Josephine in Furs — demonstrate a perfumer setting a dazzling precedent for an up-and-coming fragrance house. All photos by Roxy Lee . Faux Rose ’s perfume collection is a look into the inner sanctums of desire. Fronted by fashion designer and stylist Amelia Rose , the collection invites you to gaze into a boudoir triptych, a sun-soaked lactonic, an ode to the endless symbology of women and their erotic power. Inspired in part by Rose’s work in visual culture and experience as a stylist for Vivienne Westwood , Rose’s perfume collection puts visuality at the forefront. What transpires is an olfactory journey through the senses. The four perfumes — Mons Venus, Dauphine, Viva Maria, and Josephine in Furs — demonstrate a perfumer setting a dazzling precedent for an up-and-coming perfume house. After meeting Rose by chance at her place of work — an erotica shop based in North London — I became acquainted not only with her, but her perfumes. Taking inspiration from mythology, erotica, and the matrixial folds of desire and the body, Faux Rose invites you into their parlour of pleasure. This interview was conducted in June 2025 and has been edited for grammar and clarity. M.P.S. SIMPSON: Hey Amelia, it’s lovely to get to talk to you like this, although I know we’ve been chatting on and off for weeks over text. I wanted to start here: what’s your favourite perfume?  AMELIA ROSE: Vivienne Westwood, Boudoir. M.P.S.: Why do you love it?  AR: It was one of the first perfumes I felt instantly connected to, and I fell in love with the concept and visual aesthetics of it. Since then, I have always searched for perfumes that emulate this powdery and animalic feeling. Westwood used to have a range of Boudoir products during the ‘90s/2000s,  and I have the pearlescent pink dusting powder, which still smells incredible. The whole bottle design and packaging are beautiful, too. It’s so sad that it has been discontinued! M.P.S.: I agree, it is such a shame. I’m inclined to believe that our experiences — which not only shape our entire worldview — very much shape our interests in terms of perfume, and the types of olfactory experiences we lean towards. What’s your most vivid scent memory? I think mine has to, unfortunately, be the smell of cigarette smoke on skin, when the person’s been smoking so long it almost seeps out of their pores.  AR:  My most vivid scent memory is from when I worked at a morgue. I didn't last more than a day there as I could not get over the smell, which was like a salty, high-pitched amber intertwined with lactonic, raw meat and chemical bleach. It was like a scented hum in the background, humming in tune with the sound of the fridges while I was physically there, but once I left, it did not fully leave my nose for days, and the scent would reappear out of nowhere like a phantom ghost. A fter some time had passed, I was in a garden centre, and that smell hit me again. I had a rush of adrenaline and felt like I was going to vomit instantly. When I turned around to see what it was, there was a butcher's counter. So yeah, that one has probably been etched into my brain forever. M.P.S.: That’s fascinating. I can only really begin to imagine what effect coming so close to such an abject scent had on you, not only in terms of your perfumery journey, but as a shaping personal experience more broadly.  I remember you saying how you purchased Cadaverine — the scent that emulates certain abject bodily odours  — in an initial interest in creating perfumery along those more provocative lines. I’m interested as to why you decided against this?  AR: Yes, that was the first aromachemical I purchased with the scent descriptions as “sperm, dead animal, animalic”. I bought it out of curiosity, which then led me to Secretions Magnifiques , which I  loathe. I tried smelling it once diluted at 1% but it was so repulsive that I felt like I was going to vomit again, so I put it in a plastic bag and hid it in the drawer, as I didn’t know what to do with it. It made me realise that I wanted to make perfumes that people actually want to wear and not smell like death. Although I am really curious if anyone has been able to use Cadaverine in a perfume. M.P.S.: Besides your experience working in the morgue, I’m curious if there’s anything else t hat inspired your start in perfume?  AR:  I remember just before COVID, I wanted to turn my boyfriend's natural body odour into a perfume; we joked that we would sell it and call it SWEAT. I bought a bottle of perfumer's alcohol, and it sat in the drawer for over a year before I started experimenting with it. And then the day at the morgue happened, which was when I became fascinated with the power of scent and what visceral reactions it can have on someone. It almost felt like a forgotten sense to me that I had rediscovered through this experience. M.P.S.: I’m always enamoured by stories like that. It’s not only experiences that shape us, but the people we find along the way, the communities we develop, and the connections we forge. It brings to mind how we actually met by chance, as I was writing an article for Jouissance Perfumes  and I referenced your place of work — the erotica shop Ram Books  in North London. I’ve only been to Ram twice, but it feels like such an enclave of the weird, strange, and perverted. No wonder I feel so comfortable there. But how does Ram, and working with erotica more broadly, shape how you approach perfumery?  AR: My favourite category at Ram is the 1950s and ‘60s glamour magazines, featuring icons like Pamela Green and photographers such as Harrison Marks. I love everything about this era of erotica — from the dreamy neon pastels on film to the nostalgic set design and furniture that you would find at your Nan's house. The models appear ethereal and have a glow-like aura, photographed in saturated boudoirs with exaggerated, sculpted hairstyles; they are so vivid you can almost smell the hairspray. Immersing myself in this imagery has shaped my approach to perfume — not just in the scents, where I like to explore the duality of femininity between primal and delicate, but also in the visual worlds that surround them. M.P.S.: In my opinion, the duality of these images really comes across in your perfumes. And, on that note, how does your experience working with erotica shape your interests in perfumery?  AR:  I think it deepens my love for vintage scents, including the bottle and packa ging design — so many of the bottles are artworks in their own right. So metimes, while flipping through the magazines, I will spot vintage perfumes used as background props — some I've never heard of before — or I’ll find a cover featuring a woman standing semi-naked next to a bottle of Bandit . Or, if I get lucky, I will find an original sealed perfume sample stuck between the pages, like a little scented time capsule.  M.P.S.: Your visuality is an element of the perfume that really strikes a chord with me. Alongside your experience in the erotic, I know you worked in fashion — particularly for Vivienne Westwood — for a number of years. Does your experience in fashion shape your approach to perfumery?  AR:  Yes, I think it does — I see scent in colour and I like to feel the textures, so I work in a very similar way to designing a collection. I usually begin with visual research and then start matching the perfume materials to these references, in the same way I would select fabrics to reflect a mood or theme. Compounding formulas is also similar to the trial-and-error process of toiling garments, except instead of sewing, I'm using a scale to weigh out formulas.  M.P.S.: You described to me that Mons Venus, Dauphine, and Josephine in Furs as representing a boudoir triptych — could you expand on that for me? What sort of a boudoir? What sort of fabrics? Silks, velvets, pinks, reds, blacks? These scents bring to mind Belle du Jour  on a CRT television.  AR:  A lot of my research for Dauphine came from oil paintings of Marie Antoinette poised in her early years as the Dauphine of France, dressed in blue-lilac silk and frilled lace-corseted gowns, with lilacs and ribbons woven through her powdered hair. I imagined her chamber filled with vases of lilacs and framed by pale blue satin drapes. I wanted the scent to feel coquettish and blue-toned, like a powdery, plastic lilac. Josephine in Furs represents the peach boudoir with champagne-gold accents. It has soft peach silk curtains, plush carpets, a champagne bedspread, and a big gold chandelier in the centre. There's definitely a white fur rug on the floor, and a vanity scattered with used makeup and a powder puff. And there's probably some light sandalwood burning in the background.  Mons Venus represents the purple, velvet suede-like boudoir. I envisioned it like the yin to   Josephine in Furs’   more angelic yang. It’s almost like an alternate dimension,  where while the dressing table in Josephine in Furs is perfectly poised and pretty, the one in Mons Venus has shattered glass and snuffed-out candles. It has a dusty-violet note and a darker undertone. It feels like smoking a long cigarette in soft black leather opera gloves. Photos by Roxy Lee . M.P.S.: Josephine in Furs is one of my favourites, the aldehydic, sweet peach opening that dries down to a musk is very reminiscent of iconic scents like Guerlain’s Mitsouko , and other “old-school” feminine fragrances like Naomi Goodsir’s Cuir Velours . It holds this incredible aura of vintage glamour. What was the inspiration behind this fragrance?  AR: A lot of the inspiration behind Josephine in Furs came from the idea of Old Hollywood and the platinum blondes of that time — Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Diana Dors, Jean Harlow, and Mamie Van Doren. That era had this heightened, almost surreal sensuality and darkness that I endlessly obsess over. Josephine is actually a reference to my Nan, who I've always seen as this cinematic, Marilyn Monroe-type figure in terms of her aura, beauty, and talent — they were also born in the same year. When she passed away, I kept her makeup bag, and now the scent of her makeup powder and lipstick is like a portal — it takes me back to watching her get ready at her dressing table, which I also kept and have in my bedroom now. M.P.S.: Speaking of Josephine in Furs, you sent me a wonderful selection of reference images that inspired your perfume collection. I was beyond excited to see several images of Diana Dors in the Josephine in Furs folder. I could clamour on about the enigma that is the Siren of Swindon for days. Do you know she claimed to have auditioned for Powell & Pressburger’s Black Narcissus , which, if true, means she auditioned for one of Britain’s most iconic erotically charged films at the age of 15? What about Diana Dors — and other iconic women like her — inspires you and your perfumes?  AR:  No, I didn't know that! The images I sent you are from a tiny magazine called Diana Dors in 3D . She is photographed nude, wrapped in this white fur stole, and the images are printed in this neon acid-peach tone that gives them a fuzzy, radioactive quality. I wanted Josephine in Furs to emulate this visual feeling of these images. Diana has always been a muse alongside Marilyn, whom I feel most enamoured with.  M.P.S.: I have to say that another one of my favourites is Viva Maria. Now, this is pretty big coming from me, as I have never been a lactonic enthusiast. But there’s something about the salty brine, the crushed seashells, the sand in-between toes, sticky sweat-slicked and sun-kissed skin motif that I am absolutely in love with. It’s especially good on top of sun cream. In terms of notes, it’s creamy, lactonic, and salty. We spoke about this fragrance in reference to Secretions Magnifiques, where you hoped Viva Maria was a more palatable fragrance that indeed possessed similarities whilst being wildly different. Given its lactonic motifs, how did you navigate the more provocative angle with something so subtle and beautiful?   AR:  Viva Maria is rooted in Italian iconography — I’ve spent a lot of time in Italy over the last few years, especially in Rome and in the South. I am always drawn to the deep symbology [there], especially in the Madonna, the ultimate matriarch, where there is this interplay between purity and sacrifice, life and death. There is a subtle lactonic jasmine note that was my way of referencing the breast milk — something both sacred and bodily, nurturing and animal. I contrasted this with a salty seashell accord to represent that same duality between the maternal and the erotic. And although I hate Sécrétions Magnifiques , there’s still something [addictive] about the way scent can evoke bodily fluids, intimacy, and revulsion.  M.P.S.: What really fascinates me about the collection is the ideas of artifice and interiority. The perfume simultaneously constructs fantasies of the self, whilst also expressing inner desire and the inner self. It's bold yet secretive. Was this something you were considering when creating the perfumes?  AR: It’s interesting — while I always begin with the intent to create a mood, a feeling, or [an] alter ego, scent is so subjective that I can never control how it will be perceived. When someone who doesn’t know me smells my work, there’s a vulnerability about it. The way you described the perfumes to me — without any context —  felt like you were giving me an eerily accurate psychic reading. It made me realise I may have revealed more of mys elf through the perfumes than I ever int ended to. M.P.S.: Scent is a portal — but you never really know where you’ll end up. You told me that a friend of yours described one of your scents as similar to “opening a package of vintage stockings”. I find it really interesting that in your olfactory expressions of sex, sensuality, and pleasure, there’s a real focus on objects  and materials  of sexuality, rather than just the bodily materials.  AR: I really love the stocking analogy. I think this has been unconscious, but I guess it must link back to my background in fashion design, and from being a visual person. It is a concept I want to continue to explore.   M.P.S.: We’ve spoken about your visuality as a key cornerstone in the perfume’s construction, and I wanted to further that point. One of the elements of perfumery that I love, and I think is utilised even subconsciously by perfumers, is the ability to transcend the more traditional sense of the “gaze” as found in visual culture. As it’s not a visual medium, but an olfactory and thus sensorial one, the whole idea of the gaze shifts significantly. In actually wearing a perfume, the visual sense is overridden by the olfactory sense. Given the inspiration behind your work, I was curious to hear what you think of this?  AR: That’s such an interesting observation. I do think perfume shifts the power dynamic of the gaze in a compelling way. Unlike visual mediums — where the body is looked at and often consumed passively — scent is invisible and difficult to control or define; it can trigger memory or desire without explanation. What I love about perfume is that it can be provocative without being explicit in a visual or literal way. Unless someone understands what certain notes or materials reference, it leaves more room for provocation. For example, indole occurs naturally in faeces as well as white flowers such as jasmine; therefore, how do you know if the perfumer intended the perfume to smell just like a beautiful flower, or if they were adding a darker layer to it? In this way, perfumery can push boundaries far more quietly and interestingly than visual culture allows. M.P.S.: Yes, exactly. I find this fluidity in perfume so fascinating; the line between the abject and the sublime is often crossed, something like a Janus-head, always influenced by each other.  But, speaking on abjection and the splendid, I’m really interested in the moment we’re having culturally, where it seems that sexuality is both at the forefront but also intensely scrutinised from all angles, particularly expressions of sexuality from women. We have photographers like Roxy Lee shooting wonderful campaigns for Martine Rose  (and also for Faux Rose , of course), books by fetishists like Anastasiia Fedorova published through Granta  on fetish and kink, and Kylie Jenner collaborating with designers like Dilara Findikoğlu . And yet, Sabrina Carpenter’s album cover wreaks complete havoc on social media . Given your clear interest in erotica, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on this, especially with creating perfume art inspired by erotica.  AR: That theme of duality definitely comes up again here. I don’t think the tension or division around sexuality is anything new — it’s always been there — and it will probably only get more intense with the upcoming and confusing internet censorship laws enacted in the UK this year . I think what's shifted the most is how immediate and visible people’s reactions are now because of digital media. Expressions of sexuality and erotic autonomy have always existed in this strange space between freedom and control, and I think that duality is just as present today. While you’ve got kink and fetish aesthetics becoming more accepted in mainstream fashion, music, and media, there’s still this discomfort when people express sexuality on their own terms. M.P.S.: And finally, just because I’m curious, what’s your favourite scent in the collection?  AR:  Right now, it’s Viva Maria as it reminds me of summer in Italy, but otherwise it’s   Josephine in Furs. Faux Rose’s perfumes have been a feature of The Hard Sell  — a women-centric design pop-up based in London — for both installments, most recently ending in June of 2025. Going from strength to strength, the Faux Rose collection is now also available for purchase at Melbourne’s Sanguin Studios , as well as featuring alongside a host of iconic designers and pave-way renegades through APOC Store’s London shopfront  from the 18th of July. Or if that’s not your style, buy straight from the source . M.P.S is a writer, zine-maker, part-time urban researcher, full-time perfume over-thinker, maximalist fashion enjoyer,   and creature from East London. You can find her looking gorgeous on Instagram as @_femmedetta  or giving unsolicited opinions as  @cyberyamauba  on X.

Fashion FYI’s in the Chi. Chicago sits as the third-largest city in the USA, making it one of the many nationwide fashion capitals outside of NYC. Chicago fashion is unique  — not as cutting edge and “trend-setty” as New York, nor as basic and athleisure-driven as L.A. Any Chicagoan will correct you if you dare call it a Midwestern city. The city   transcends Midwesternism, distancing itself from its own Lululemon and PacSun suburbs, and instead prides itself on its working-class culture via (vintage) Carhartt and Dickies.  If you’re looking for fashion in Chicago, you should explore three neighborhoods: the Gold Coast, the West Loop, and the infamous Wicker Park. GOLD COAST The Gold Coast (as you can tell from the name!) is home to the city’s millionaires, billionaires, and dozens of luxury shops for them to peruse. At the north end of the infamous Magnificent Mile , you can escape gawking tourists and chaotic traffic and seek a peaceful refuge at The RealReal, get lost in Aritzia, or window shop for Lamborghinis. From Chicago Avenue, you can zigzag your way, smelling the exuberant amounts of wealth this neighborhood has to offer. WHERE TO SHOP TheRealReal specializes in preloved luxury. Having recently downsized, the vibe has become very relaxed and intimate. TheRealReal embraces a wide variety of styles in its well-curated sections. Their sections include Modern Luxe, Street Maven, and the ever-so-classy British Countryside. They also actively buy luxury items!  The Loewe store is a brand-new addition to Chicago’s booming luxury scene. As soon as you walk in, you’ll be greeted with the most beautiful collection of buttery leather bags. Also, HUGE shoutout to Lo, who gave me a tour and showed me her faves (including their new Campo denim boat shoes that are now on my wish list!).  The boutique is on Oak Street, a street lined with many more high-end retailers covering a variety of styles from BAPE to Hermes. Kith is a streetwear lover’s dream. Coming soon to the neighborhood, Kith will open its first doors in the Midwest to join its other locations throughout NYC, L.A., and Miami. Housing the coveted Coperni and crisp Casablanca, Kith is set to make a mark in Chicago’s fashion sphere. WHERE TO EAT 3 Arts Club & Café ($$) is if IKEA was reinvented by RHONY’s Brynn Whitfield. Have a delicious brunch at their opulent restaurant and then explore the six floors of interior decor inspo 3 Arts has to offer. If you’re particular about how you like your steak, go to Gibson’s ($$$). This Chicago staple will give you a luxurious dining experience that will truly make you feel like money. If you have room for dessert, you can't skip their macadamia turtle pie that stands nearly as tall as the Hancock Tower. It’s a level of decadence you can’t find anywhere else in the city. If you want some Chicago-style deep dish, head to Lou Malnati’s ($). Every Chicagoan will tell you it’s not  true  Chicago-style (it’s pizza cut in square slices), but we all recognize deep dish as a tourist trap. It’s worth a taste, but by Chicago Law, if you live in Chicago, you can never have it again. WEST LOOP The West Loop has changed a lot in the past 15 years. It’s gone from an old industrial district of warehouses to luxury lofts and corporate offices for the likes of McDonald’s and Google, while the bars, shops, and restaurants offer a playground for Gen Z and Millennials. Oh, I forgot to mention: Soho House Chicago is tucked right off Randolph Street. WHERE TO SHOP Between Randolph Street and Fulton Market, locals dine, drink, and shop their hearts out. Aside from chain faves like Free People and a flagship Patagonia store, every local streetwear enthusiast knows about Notre and SVRN . West Loop is also home to several bars and world-class restaurants such as Au Cheval and Bisous , establishing West Loop as Chicago’s favorite social playground.  Notre houses brands such as Acne, Entire Studios, and Ganni. The store’s vibe is cozy and free, with an open lobby perfect for exclusive in-house events and spaces allowing you to immerse yourself throughout the store. In the back, you can find a room of freshly curated vintage finds, including classic Levi 501s and varsity gear from the ‘70s. SVRN is a boutique with phenomenal editorial direction from its site alone. The store gives the ultimate boutique experience, complemented by the smooth aromas of Margiela Replica fragrances. If you like a Rick Owens kind of vibe, this is the place for you. SVRN has proven itself to be on the pulse of fashion, catering to a customer with an edge. If you love a classic style with a bit of edge, they carry Dries Van Noten. If you like more edge, they have Willy Chavarria, too! WHERE TO EAT The Drip Collective ($) has an amazing feel. It’s a super casual coffee shop with great music, and it even hosts networking events sometimes! Often airing anime or old movies on their projector, Drip Collective establishes a cozy feel for Chicago’s most eclectic and fashionable. Their Turon drink (made with banana milk) is something I didn’t know I needed until I had it. Au Cheval ($$) isn’t your average burger joint. This spot is great for after-work drinks, a date night, birthday dinners, or whatever! With a rustic feel and a homey vibe, Au Cheval won’t disappoint for a night on the town. Whatever you get, go ahead and ask for bacon. You’re welcome. Trivoli Tavern ($$$) is perfect for anyone who wants a moody yet whimsical ambiance. Hidden away in an alley, Trivoli will transport you to 1920s Chicago. The menu has something for everyone, from savory pasta to fresh sushi selections. The drinks are amazing (my personal fave is the Bella Punch). If you’re ever in Chicago during the three months of spring/summer we have, def get a table in the alley. WICKER PARK Wicker Park is essentially Chicago’s answer to Williamsburg (take that as you will). The Milwaukee-Division-Damen triangle and surrounding area are home to Chicago’s premier indie boutiques and vintage shopping. Vintage pop-ups, such as curations a la Olio, are scattered up and down Milwaukee Avenue. If you crave a sneaker, hit up Saint Alfred . They have your Asics, New Balances, and Salomons. If you have a wicked taste and want a unique boot, visit John Fluevog . And you’re bound to find stellar second-hand streetwear finds at Round Two . You also can’t miss the dimly lit dives in the area. (If you can make it to the bathroom without getting sidetracked by a beer-boozed patron at Gold Star or Rainbo , you’re not doing it right.) WHERE TO SHOP Away from the Milwaukee Ave. bustle, you can find a more curated experience. On Division, there are three boutiques that neighborhood locals and tourists love: Gemini , Independence , and Penelope’s .  Independence is for denim lovers. If you like a classic all-American flare with a twist, this is the place. They also carry Japanese denim and one-of-a-kind designs that you can’t find or compare anywhere else in the city.  Gemini and Penelope’s are sister stores for those who value fun, freshness, and sustainability. Penelope’s is for that playful young adult finding their way through fashion, experimenting, but on the right track. Gemini is for that same person who has found their unique sense of style and owns it through and through. They express themselves through their Wax London cardigans and Paloma Wool skirts, always leaving room for wardrobe development. WHERE TO EAT After a fun day of vintage shopping in Wicker, you’re bound to develop an appetite. If you’re craving a cheap, greasy burger and fries, then Devil Dawgs has your order. If you want to enjoy some of the best French dining in the Midwest, Le Bouchon is right at Six Corners (the busiest and most daunting 6-way intersection in the city). The Chicago food scene is indubitably one of the most diverse food scenes in the country, and the options available in Wicker Park are just colorful examples of that.  Phodega ($$) is pho -nomenal. Just across the street from Penelope’s, Phodega has some of the best pho in the city. Their portions are big, so it's lunch and dinner served. The restaurant also carries some Vietnamese drinks and snacks right by the counter (which are also cheaper than regular snacks at a convenience store). If you’re not in a pho mood, their fried chicken fried rice is delicious — even more so with their sauces mixed in. It’s broiled perfection. Bongo Room ($$) is an absolute brunch go-to, especially for people with a sweet tooth. The pear and apple challah French toast is scrumptious and will guarantee to fill you up and power you for a day of shopping. Established a block away from the Shit Fountain (real thing), Kasama ($$) has earned itself the reputation of being the premiere restaurant on the near west side. Kasama specializes in putting zesty twists on Filipino cuisine. Having gone viral on TikTok for their now-infamous longanisa breakfast sandwich, it’s no wonder there are 2-hour waits on any given morning to get in (you can’t make breakfast reservations either). 🌀 Ken Downs  is a writer, fashion stylist, and certified hater who, in high school, was nominated as Most Likely to Be on Reality TV. He is a fashion writer for HALOSCOPE. You can follow him here on Instagram and TikTok .

Their logoless, retro-inspired, 100% cotton basics are designed for the conscious athlete. Tennis whites in New Rochelle and East Hampton. Loose linen pants designed for 10 AM yoga and 11 AM brunch at Sant Ambroeus. White-trimmed, pristine basketball shorts paired with beat-up sneakers, or, for the contrast obsessive, patent leather ballet flats. For the past year, athleisure has oscillated into old-but-make-it-new territory: comfortable, simple garments, made from premium fabrics, built for your body to breathe, move, and live in, free of plastic and pretense.  The brand doing it the best, naturally, is H-O-R-S-E , the brainchild of Herbs for Relaxation  founder Sue Williamson . Made in California, the über-soft brand harkens back to midcentury athletic wear with vintage silhouettes to boot — I was first introduced to H-O-R-S-E when I spied the perfect popped collar polo sweatshirt  on a woman in my Pilates class. “We were active outside. We moved our bodies with the simple goal of wellbeing,” writes Williamson. “And we wore loose-fitting clothes made from natural fibers — not plastic.”  This interview has been edited for length and clarity. SAVANNAH EDEN BRADLEY: You've had a rich career in fashion editorial. What inspired the leap into creating your own athleticwear line, and how have your past experiences shaped H-O-R-S-E? SUE WILLIAMSON:  I have always dreamed of having my own line — I actually started out in fashion school at Pratt — but it was never the right idea at the right time. I really started H-O-R-S-E out of a personal need. I was cleaning up my diet and home cleaning supplies and realized a lot of my clothing, especially workout clothing, was made of synthetic materials that have been linked to PFAS and other things that are not so great for our health. I started searching for cool, loose, but not sloppy activewear made out of natural materials, and couldn’t find anything that suited my style or specifications. My past experience has been so key for H-O-R-S-E. I learned so much in my time as an editor, getting up close and personal with designers and clothes. And as a brand consultant, I've gotten to learn the do's and don'ts of business that I could not have learned anywhere else. Even my internship knowledge has come in handy from my days in magazine fashion closets! I learned very quickly to have a "no job is too small" attitude and that comes in handy every day.  SEB: On a more specific note: how has your time at Herbs for Relaxation informed the founding and launch of H-O-R-S-E? SW: Herbs for Relaxation is still such a special project for me and something that’s taught me so much! The biggest lesson I learned from Herbs has been that if you make something you really believe in, you’ll find a community who believes in it, too. It gave me the confidence to think big with H-O-R-S-E and take it from something I was making just for myself and my boyfriend and turn it into a real brand.  SEB: I love that the brand's designs nod to P.E. uniforms and vintage sportswear. What eras, touchstones, and personal memories have influenced the brand's aesthetic? How is your own style reflected in the work that you’re doing? SW: Thank you! The earliest inspirations were actual P.E. uniforms I sourced on eBay and some old gym clothes of my dad’s from the ‘70s. He had these old cotton basketball shorts — very tiny! — from his college, Florida State, and my sister and I were always stealing them. I love old '70s basketball style, I love the look of a short short with a Converse High-Top, I love simple colors and ringer tees. The look is just very classic and cool — never too done. I love old public service videos, old P.E. videos, and old Richard Simmons videos. My personal style definitely influenced these pieces. I was trying to make something I wanted to wear but couldn’t find. I just want to feel comfortable and put together, which is a hard combination to hit. I wanted to make something beautiful and classic that you could throw on and just know you’re going to look and feel good. Basically, I wanted to make no-brainer clothes that didn’t feel thoughtless. SEB:  In an era dominated by synthetic activewear, what challenges and benefits have you encountered by choosing 100% cotton and natural materials? SW: The biggest challenge in making clothes from cotton is, by far, the price. Oh my gosh, once I saw the price of 100% cotton fabrics and making the clothes in America, I understood why so few people do it. It’s definitely more expensive than the alternative, but to me, it’s worth it.  There are so many benefits, including softness and quality. The fabrics are SO soft. Another benefit has been being able to rethink what activewear looks like outside of the standard bra-legging sets. H-O-R-S-E pieces are really a marriage of the fabrics and silhouettes that help them shine. The shorts, for example, have a bit of a flare in the legs, so you get optimal airflow through them as you run, work out, do Pilates, whatever. They really work together that way. SEB: Current Kit offerings — shorts, a tee, and a sweatshirt — are radically minimalist and, crucially, logo-less. That's a bold decision in such a brand-centric athleticwear market. What motivated this choice, and how do you believe it impacts the wearer's experience? SW: I got so much pushback on this as I was working on it, but not having a logo was so important to me. First, I really designed these from the customer’s perspective. If you want workout clothing with a logo on it, that already exists. But logoless cotton clothes can be hard to find. Some people don’t want to be a billboard for your brand. I get that, and I also feel that way.  Second: I really wanted the kit to be timeless, classic, and easy to pair back with items you already have. When I was working on them, I didn’t just think: What would make someone buy this piece?  I was thinking: What’s going to make them keep it?  I think logos can make things less versatile, and date the piece, and I don’t want these to end up in landfills just because the logo or font or whatever doesn’t look cool anymore.  SEB: The name H-O-R-S-E evokes nostalgia for a simpler time in physical fitness. How do you see the brand contributing to a broader conversation about the state of wellness today? SW: Like a lot of people, I’ve been on my own journey of trying to figure out what wellness looks like for me. The wellness industry is massive and crowded and complicated, and I’ve truly tried everything, both as an editor and as a consumer. Over the past few years, I’ve found myself veering away from the more commoditized version of wellness and more towards movement of any sort — as much as I can every day. I’m trying to listen to my body and push it using more time-tested movements like running, swimming, lifting, yoga, hiking, et cetera. It’s why I’m so interested in P.E. class, too. Getting outside in a park and doing push-ups, jumping jacks, and jogging is so good for you. Even better with a friend or group of friends! Why do we make it so complicated? I’d love to get more into this concept as the brand grows. SEB: How do you envision H-O-R-S-E evolving in the next five years? Are there specific silhouettes, mediums, or ideas you’re excited to explore in the future? SW: I’m excited to work with wool for the colder months and winter sports, and natural waterproofing that doesn’t involve Teflon. There are so many silhouettes I’m playing with right now, but I definitely want to grow the line slowly and thoughtfully.  SEB:  Lastly: what advice would you give to yourself one year ago? SW: “Prepare for success!” I’m really risk-averse and try to prepare for worst-case scenarios, but I often forget to prepare for things to go really well, which they so often do. 🌀 Savannah Eden Bradley  is a writer, fashion editor, gallerina, Gnostic scholar, reformed It Girl, and future beautiful ghost from the Carolina coast. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the fashion magazine HALOSCOPE . You can stalk her everywhere online @savbrads .

Dossier’s dupes have disrupted NYC’s niche fragrance district. In Nolita in early April, a “coming soon” sign popped up in a storefront on Elizabeth Street announcing the opening of a new perfume store. This is not an unusual occurrence in the area, which is colloquially known as “Perfume Alley” due to the concentration of fragrance retailers located there. Le Labo  was the first perfume store to open on Elizabeth Street, back in 2006, followed soon after by Aesop  and Diptyque . Over the years, more retailers moved into the area: Scent Bar , D.S. & Durga , Olfactory NYC , Osswald , Naxos Apothecary , Elorea , and Mizensir . Stéle  opened their second location on Mott Street at the end of 2024; Commodity  opened around the same time, and Granado , a Brazilian outfit, opened on Spring Street a couple of months ago. The neighborhood has grown into a veritable perfume shopping paradise. Typically, the opening of a new store would be a cause for celebration for fragrance enthusiasts, but this one may be controversial. The new store is the first physical location for Dossier , a company that mainly (though not exclusively) sells what are commonly known as fragrance “dupes.”  A dupe is a fragrance meant to replicate the scent of another, a sort of “smell-alike” of a popular (usually expensive) perfume. Dupes are not a new phenomenon. Dossier is the Gen Z successor to earlier brands such as Designer Imposters , a company founded in 1981 whose fragrances come in towering cans labeled with the phrase, "If you like ___,  you'll love ___" (e.g. "If you like Giorgio , you'll love PRIMO" or "If you like Obsession , you'll love CONFESS"). Dupes are a contentious topic in the fragrance community. Some defend them as an affordable way for people to try scents that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive, or just a smart hack for those who want to save money. Others believe they exploit the labor and creativity of people working in the fragrance industry, opportunistically capitalizing on successful works of fragrant art. Since fragrance formulas are not protected by copyright or patent laws, they are uniquely exploitable in the luxury goods market — there is no legal mechanism to stop Dossier or any other company from recreating a particular fragrance and selling their own version of it.  Fragrance has been used to indicate class status for hundreds (and even thousands) of years. Perfumes made with costly, imported materials were an important status indicator for European aristocrats. Following advancements in chemistry and manufacturing, personal fragrances were made commercially available to people outside of the nobility. “Taste” and “appropriateness,” shaped by the values of the dominant classes, emerged as standards for judging a fragrance’s aesthetic value. Fragrance continues to be an indicator of cultural capital to this day, signaling that one understands what to purchase in order to convey good taste, trendiness, and status. In an era when perfume consumption has absolutely exploded , good taste is more socially important than ever, with an unending array of options to choose from — and the ability to edit and curate has an even greater importance than in the past. As a dupe company, Dossier essentially operates as a curator of the wider fragrance industry. The fragrances they choose to dupe have already been “pre-vetted” for popularity and wide appeal, winnowing down consumer options to the scents that already have a degree of approval from Gen Z tastemakers. Thus, Dossier presents an array of smells to the consumer that mimic fashionable tastes while circumventing the actual material investment required to purchase a particular luxury fragrance (you can buy Dossier’s Floral Marshmallow  and smell the same as someone wearing Kilian’s Love Don’t Be Shy  for about $200 less, for example). Essentially, we’re looking at one facet of taste: authenticity. When considering authenticity as a sign of taste, a name-brand product is typically considered distinct; a knock-off or generic product is considered vulgar. This is as true for breakfast cereal as it is for fragrance. However, the brilliance of Dossier from a branding perspective is that they have managed to sidle up to authentic, brand-name luxury while also repudiating it, thus sidestepping this accusation of vulgarity. They justify their business model with an appeal to equity couched in the language of social justice, rejecting the luxury fragrance industry as a system that exploits consumers, proclaiming: “We believe that access to premium fragrances shouldn’t be a privilege for just the 1%, but the norm for all.” Dossier describes their fragrances as fair-priced, claiming that they offer lower prices because they don’t add the unjustified markup that designer and niche brands use to generate massive profits. The extent to which this is true is, of course, up for debate. The retail price of a luxury fragrance can be many times the cost of its ingredients, but there are other costs incurred to bring a fragrance to market aside from the materials used to make it. By copying existing fragrances, Dossier profits from the creative labor of the perfumers whose fragrance formulas they copy and the work that others in the industry put into marketing and building a customer base for their fragrances, thereby avoiding incurring those costs themselves.  Blending moral signaling into their marketing language positions Dossier as an ethical disruptor. Their value prop to customers is that Dossier’s products are high quality and desirable, just like the luxury niche brands’ — and they smell the same, so buying them is a smart, cool choice: you have good taste, understand luxury, and you’re maybe a little subversive, too. This opens up a pathway to a new consumer relationship with the concept of authenticity, where finding the perfect replica of an expensive fragrance becomes a status symbol rivaling owning the real thing. Parallels exist elsewhere in high-end fashion, for example: “superfake” handbags mimicking luxury designs with exacting precision have become a status symbol in their own right, a sign that one is familiar enough with the markers of the original to know what will convince even the most discerning audience that it is  the original. Dossier also integrates the language and character of the fragrance community into their products. The Dossier customer is presumed to have some knowledge of fragrance that a casual buyer may not. The company promotes the fact that their fragrances are produced in Grasse, France, the epicenter of luxury fragrance production — a fact that would be apparent to a fraghead but not necessarily to someone only casually interested in fragrance. Dossier’s naming convention for their fragrances repurposes the jargon used to describe fragrances, accords, or notes, “Ambery Saffron”  or “Woody Sandalwood,” for example. For the fraghead who is immersed in the world of perfume, these descriptive names will immediately click and provide a very basic understanding of how the fragrance will smell (if they are not already familiar with the original version Dossier is duping), essentially operating as a sort of shorthand for someone literate in the language of fragrance notes. For the uninitiated, the descriptive name serves as an educational tool — one will learn over time what “ambery” smells like from repeated exposure (presuming the customer buys more than one Dossier fragrance of that type). The descriptive names also position each of Dossier’s fragrances as a type  of perfume, part of a continuum or an aggregation of similar fragrances, subtly deemphasizing that it is a copy of a specific product. And Dossier is correct to point out that numerous “ambery saffron” fragrances are very close to the scent of Maison Francis Kurkdjian’s Baccarat Rouge 540  — essentially, the distinction between other fragrances that capture this scent profile and theirs is that Dossier explicitly calls out that their Ambery Saffron smells like Baccarat Rouge 540. Dossier also co-opts the minimalist luxury styling conventions of trendy niche brands like Byredo  with their packaging — each fragrance is housed in rounded glass and labeled with an attractive sans-serif font, ideal for posting on Instagram. Dossier’s decision to open their first physical store in the specific location they chose feels very intentional. It is located next to Scent Bar, where many of the original fragrances they copy can be purchased. There are, of course, purely economic reasons for Dossier to open here (it’s likely to have a high concentration of people who want to buy perfume because of the cluster of existing fragrance stores, so presumably they have a ready-made customer base). However, and perhaps more importantly, their location is socially tactful, as Nolita is the center of the local perfume hobbyist scene in New York — a place where people interested in perfume meet, socialize, and network. Many of the stores there serve as third spaces for the fragrance community, and it’s not uncommon to see sales associates and others in the industry socializing off-duty at an event in another shop. Choosing this area to open their first store is an attempt to further embed Dossier’s brand within fraghead culture. Previously, dupe brands were typically sold in humble locations — the bottom shelf at a drugstore or in a big box outlet like Walmart. Opening an independent boutique in Nolita distances Dossier from the downmarket status of past dupe brands. Dossier’s move to Elizabeth Street allows it to profit from the area’s cachet without contributing to it. In the same way they mine the creativity and business acumen of other companies by copying their products, they’ve wormed their way into their physical realm to further eat away at their business (“Why buy the $300 fragrance at Scent Bar when you can come to us right next door  and get the same scent for $50?”). The existing businesses worked to build the area into the destination that it is today, and now Dossier is coming in to capitalize on it.  It may be easy to suggest that Dossier moving into Perfume Alley is a sign that fragrance culture has reached its saturation point and is cooked. The ever-burgeoning industry has been copying itself for decades now and growing into a model where the primary directive is hyperconsumerism, so why not throw a dupe store right next to the biggest multi-brand niche retailer in the area? After all, trend cycles have always existed in fragrance. Angel by Mugler , released in 1992, started a trend for “fruitchouli” scents — characterized by floral and fruity notes atop an earthy, mossy base. The trend gained steam throughout the 2000s and became a dominant style for women’s fragrances for over a decade. Luxury brands such as Chanel , Dior , and Viktor&Rolf  all launched their own versions of the fruitchouli fragrance. The trend eventually trickled down from the luxury fragrance market to affordable brands such as Britney Spears , saturating the market at all price points. Perhaps today’s dupes are just an extension of this phenomenon. Dossier presents a version of fragrance artistry that is prepackaged — the "important" scents have been curated for easy consumption. But the shops in the fragrance district can offer endless options to experience fragrance beyond what does numbers on TikTok, hidden gems from independent and niche artisans that a fellow fraghead or studied sales associate can uncover for you. In the fragrance community, niche fragrances signify a particular type of cachet — an awareness of lesser-known brands and artisans that indicates seriousness and expertise similar to how knowledge of obscure bands functions for record collectors or awareness of unknown authors operates for people in literary scenes. This expertise extends into knowledge of the perfumers behind the fragrances and the history and evolution of the fragrance industry. It is a type of embodied cultural capital that can only be obtained through study and time. It’s not surprising that the people I’m acquainted with who know the most about fragrance and have the best-curated collections are highly educated museum and arts professionals — the same skills that are required to understand and “consume” a work of visual art are transferable to analyzing a perfume as a work of olfactory art. Recently, Stéle, a fragrance shop located a few blocks away from the new Dossier store, hosted an exhibit in partnership with the fragrance manufacturing company Givaudan , where visitors could smell and select raw materials used in perfumery alongside fragrances specifically created for the event composed with those materials, none of which were for sale. Jake, the co-founder of Stéle, noted that the people gathered together weren’t there to buy anything — he quickly added the caveat that of course he wants and needs people to buy fragrances from the store, but sales are not the primary motivator for Stéle’s events — they’re truly for supporting a community of people with a common interest in fragrance, who appreciate it as an art form. Although fragrance collecting is typically a hobby focused on consumption, it doesn’t have to be — having physical spaces to gather and smell things without the necessity of making a purchase is one of the ways this can be facilitated. Essentially, Stéle’s space operates as the locus of the fragrance community, which is composed not just of consumers but of perfumers, industry professionals, creators, and writers. As someone who lives and socializes in proximity to Perfume Alley, I tend to assume that, because the shops in this area serve as third spaces for me and people like me, we are the primary denizens of this place. The first time I walked by the Dossier store, I thought, “That’s for tourists.” Maybe Dossier will hold events and become part of the local fragrance community (I’m sure they’ll at least have some sort of influencer-focused “activation” when they finally open), and maybe they won’t. Maybe they will become a highlight of the grand tour of the perfume district — a must-stop location for tourists and locals alike. While Dossier’s move into Nolita may signal that the saturation and “fast fashion-ification” of the wider fragrance industry has hit the local market, the NYC community will continue to come together to champion fragrance as an art form. 🌀 Quinn MacRorie lives and works in New York City. She writes about olfactory aesthetics and culture on her Substack, SMELL WORLD .

TikTokification continues to stifle creativity and siphon the joy out of experiencing makeup.    You’re all clones. Before you get mad at me, I’ll go ahead and attribute the quote to a New York City-based content creator known as Sasha . In 2024, she took to TikTok to lament that the eponymous app has “ruined the vibe.” She denounced the slicked-back buns and sunglasses setting up camp in whatever restaurant TikTok told them was cool. I have noticed that modern beauty trends are following a similar, overtrodden path. Everyone has the same fluffy brows, lifted concealer, overlined lips, and ultradewy skin, all achieved through the same products and same placement on the face.  I would place the onus on the post-COVID rise of “Clean Girl” beauty, which has been written about ad nauseam. The rules are at once transparent and discreet. Never wear blue eyeshadow. If you must do a red lip, keep the rest of the face bare. Ditch the skinny jeans. Stick to neutral tones and textures. Don’t text back too quickly. Don’t be too much . Makeup has devolved from a form of art and self-expression into yet another performance in nonchalance. The subtext is obvious: be hot, but don’t give a shit. Its more ominous undertones carry whispers of wealth, status, and an obsession with the idealized female form — in other words, youth and Whiteness, or proximity to youth and Whiteness. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so long as the beholder idolizes Hailey Bieber and/or takes a keen but ambiguous interest in Japan.  Modern beauty trends feel uninspiring because people are uninspired. I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup until I was in high school. My everyday look consisted solely of a natural peach or ruddy brown lipstick pilfered from my mother’s vanity and smudged on under the fluorescent overhead lighting of my middle school lavatory. As a teenager, I studied my favorite films and rifled through magazines (yes, physical magazines) like Seventeen  and Teen Vogue  for ideas. I experimented with editorialized looks like “windswept cheeks” (which really just translated to clown blush in the unsure hands of my 15-year-old self) and embraced Cara Delevingne’s signature brows with gleeful enthusiasm. Some of my favorite finds I sourced simply through wandering the aisles at my local Ulta and Sephora.  L-R: Farrah Fawcett, Shelley Duvall, Bianca Jagger But it would appear that no one reads magazines anymore, or goes to the movies (and even if they did it would make no difference, since everyone on screen looks the same — ever heard of Instagram face ?), or even browses the inventory of their favorite beauty retailers. If you visit the Sephora website, you can select a “Help Me Choose” feature that stratifies your search by categories such as super-natural sculpting, clean makeup guide, and no-makeup makeup . TikTokification continues to stifle creativity and siphon the joy out of experiencing makeup.    When working optimally — that is, when the products work cohesively and in tandem with the skincare beneath — makeup produces characteristic visual effects like improved volume or definition in certain areas of the face by increasing the overall contrast in your complexion. Learning to work with your features, understanding what complements your skin tone, figuring out what colors or textures appeal to you most — these are skills that require curiosity, effort, and patience like any art or science. The best part of being an adult is that no one can tell you what to do. The worst part of being an adult is that no one can tell you what to do. I understand how experimenting can feel like a chore as we get older and busier. Autonomy is exhausting, which may explain why so many people have collectively outsourced the creative process and discovery to influencers who use thousands of dollars worth of professional lighting, film equipment, and filters only to churn out the same “snatched,” “glowy,” altogether slightly sweaty look.  If a black crop top and low-rise baggy jeans is the TikTok uniform, then this clean beauty, no-makeup makeup aesthetic is its corresponding ultra-normie face chart template. The last thing a makeup trend should be is forgettable. That an act as innately expressive as literally painting your face could mass produce such tepid results is an indication that something in the beauty world has gone terribly astray.  None of this is to suggest that trends are inherently bad or good; beauty trends have always been around. In the 1960s, we had cut creases and pastel shadows a la Twiggy and Sharon Tate. The ‘70s favored both a bronzey, goddess-of-the-earth look as well as rock-and-roll flair thanks to stars like Farrah Fawcett, Shelley Duvall, and Bianca Jagger. The ‘80s ushered in big brows, bigger hair, and bold colors on the eyes, cheeks, and lips, all of which the '90s pared down to a look that was decidedly powdered and plucked. Frosted shadows and lamentable concealer mouth reigned in the 2000s, followed closely by the ultraglam, heavily saturated “Instagram makeup” of the 2010s.  Each decade can be linked to a distinctive beauty aesthetic with its own specific color palettes, textures, and techniques. The makeup looks popularized in years past remain memorable because they were both visually interesting and culturally significant. My hope is for the arrival of a new vanguard in the cosmetic industry, one that encourages more joy and expression in its patrons. Can we just make makeup fun again? 🌀 Neha Ogale  is a doctoral student in clinical psychology, a relapsed coat hoarder, and an indie film lover based in New York City. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @urbangremlin .