French perfumer Barnabé Fillion talks about how his travels, synesthesia and love for nature are behind his most iconic creations for Aesop
Barnabé Fillion is a synesthete, which means he experiences the world with all his senses. It is the secret to the photographer's successful venture into the world of perfumery and becoming a longtime partner of Aesop. The perfumer is behind Aesop's Hwyl and Rozu, both an olfactory memory of his travels to Japan, from the silent reverie of the Shinto shrine deep within the forests of Isé to the musk of a thousand-year-old virgin forest in the island of Yakushima.
"I would say that perfumery is still very visual for me. When I smell something, I see colours and textures," he says of this transition into this industry more than a decade ago.
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A passionate student of botany and phytology, nature has always been a source of creativity for Fillion. "One of my most vivid fragrance memories was on a beach in Yakushima, where I found a big piece of driftwood that washed up on the shore. I scratched it with my fingers and I could smell that it was hinoki cypress, which was not from the island itself but travelled through the ocean to reach me," he says, recalling the inspiration behind Hwyl. "I don't normally believe in signs but it was a beautiful moment that made me feel like I was on the right path."
In his latest collaboration with Aesop, the master perfumer revisits nature and explores its relationship with mankind with six new fragrances.
The Othertopias collection has been four years in the making and explores liminal spaces that invite reverie and reflection about the self and stimulate an olfactory journey into the natural world. "It's interesting that this idea, which came from a conversation with a friend of mine years ago, has become so relevant to the state of the world," he comments, referring to the pandemic and the introspection and imagination it has inspired in the last year and a half of social isolation.
On July 5, Aesop released the first three unisex fragrances from this collection—dedicated to the boat, the shore and the wasteland.
In this exclusive interview with Tatler, he shares the inspiration and thought process behind these new boundary-pushing and stimulating compositions.
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