FASHION Magazine

High notes

Whether it’s harvesting millions of blossoms to fulfill a single scent or using gadgets worthy of a Bond film to distill the aroma of a bloom, fragrance additives have a long and storied existence. This season’s perfumers reveal the yarns behind the notes and more.

Tommy Hilfiger

What: Dreaming (from $56, at department stores), with key notes of peaches and tuberose. Background Notes: For his latest fragrance, the New York–based designer moved his photo shoot to the bedroom. Dreaming lingers like memories of an erotic foreign flick. (Tommy Girl—Hilfiger’s energetic daytime floral, launched over a decade ago—is such a chaste roll in the clover by comparison.) Our femme fatale, a happily spent Mona Johannesson, floats through the story wrapped in nothing but a bedsheet and an intoxicating cloud of peaches and tuberose.

Industry insiders say Hilfiger’s European business has been outpacing growth in the U.S., which may explain the brand’s sexual awakening. But Trudi Loren, vice-president of corporate fragrance development worldwide for Aramis and Designer Fragrances, says the “voila moment” for the scent came during a summer stroll in the Italianate gardens of the Parrish Art Museum in the Hamptons.

“We wanted to do something more timeless and emotionally driven,” says Loren. “The peach symbolized what we wanted to convey. There is a texture to peach skin, and that sensuality and organic roundness and feel of the peach. We used a natural peach juice flavour and balanced it with a background note of tuberose, which creates a fluttering sense of movement, like the feeling you get when you’re in love.”

Shown: Tommy Hilfiger Dreaming, $56. Visit department stores.

By Alison Garwood-Jones

Photography by Tracy Shumate