Fields OF GOLD

A wild garden fragrance that glorifies dry grasses, pistachios and absolutely no flowers? Hermès perfumer, Christine Nagel, shares more on her latest astonishing scent.

- ALLI SIM

Integrity, as they say, is who you are when nobody’s watching. As someone who spent many years on the inside at Hermès, I’ve become somewhat of an intimate accomplice. Much like those ‘come as you are’ family dinners where you’ve nothing to prove to anyone, it is fair to say that Hermès—the house and its people—are exactly who they are on the inside as they project to the world: a collective of dreamers, poets and at the very core, craftsmen. Few embody this spirit more than celebrated Hermès perfumer, Christine Nagel.

Years ago, as we sat in a conference room of the Hermès Maison in Ginza, Tokyo, Nagel uttered a raison d’être that still liberates me today. “You have the right to make mistakes.” It was a decree that Hermès’s sixth-generation artistic director, Pierre- Alexis Dumas, made to her when she joined the house.

Armed with this carte blanche to create, Nagel has birthed 22 fragrances, including Un Jardin à Cythère, since becoming the house’s perfumer creator in 2014.

“I think it’s the most beautiful thing that anyone’s ever told me. You have to be bold. Without boldness, there’s no creation. You have to, you’re allowed to make mistakes,” she muses. “He said, ‘I prefer if you make mistakes while being bold than making mistakes when following others’.”