The Best New Perfume Of The Year Is Proenza Schouler's Arizona
How do you capture the scent of a scent-less flower? This isn't a philosophical question, but rather a technical one that designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, of Proenza Schouler, set out to solve for their very first fragrance.
After inking a deal with L'Oréal back in 2015, the designers took a road trip/vacation out west following a show. There they stumbled across vast desert landscapes, colourful sand and sunsets, and areas of spotty-to-no Wifi. It was in that disconnection that inspiration struck, followed by two years of tinkering in a perfume lab.
'We wanted to make it quite feminine, since we are a feminine brand. When you think of perfume, you think of flowers,' says McCollough. 'Then you see these pictures-we saw some actually-of these beautiful, big white blossoms on these dry cactuses. It was so beautiful. It's such a disconnection-this dry, spiky, hard thing and this beautiful white, feminine flower. That contrast was very interesting to us. They don't actually smell like anything, those flowers. At least, it's not an intense smell. So we thought, what would that flower smell like in an ideal world? It would be dry, not very fruity, very solar, minerally. We started inventing and designing what that would smell like.'
The result is Arizona, a perfume that is poised to be the best new scent of the year. Wholly original and wildly unexpected, the scent has notes of orris, cactus blossom, jasmine, orange blossom, solar accord, musk, and cashmeran.
The designers worked hard to make sure you could smell the sun in each mist; it's the bottled essence of daytime in the desert. On your skin, it feels both warm and breezy, a feminine scent without any sugary, fruity, or tropical implications. 'Arizona is not a state-it's a state of mind,' says Hernandez. 'When you close your eyes and you think of Arizona, you can conjure up what that is. It's a feeling, it's vast landscape, it's a Georgia O'Keefe world.'
The bottle is not millennial pink. Well, at least not on purpose. 'We stopped at all these crystal shops on the road trip, collecting geodes and crystals. It was so fun. We've always collected those kinds of things. We brought that into the first meeting with L'Oréal and we said, "How do we turn this into a bottle?" Or the spirit of it at least,' says Hernandez.
'That was one of the starting points in terms of the bottle and the vibe of that.' At one point in the process, ten different bottle designs were being considered-some more crystal-y than others (this was years before Kim Kardashian dropped her Crystal Gardenia fragrance). 'We started honing in-we wanted something that spoke to a timeless perfume bottle silhouette but also bringing in that crystal energy into the mix. Something that felt a little Earthier and organic,' Hernandez added.
The designers and their fragrance team sniffed every perfume in Sephora, plus nearly 1,000 different tweaks and iterations of their own scent, before landing on the final version of Arizona. For the self-proclaimed 'restless creative weirdos,' the process was one of their most exciting challenges yet.
'It's always been our dream to have a fragrance-it's most designers dream to have a fragrance. What we do currently speaks to, especially up until this PSWL thing came out, it speaks to a narrower group of people,' says Hernandez. 'It's niche and not accessible to everybody, so it's nice to be able to speak to a broader demographic. through fragrance. And speak to different kinds of women all around the world and to come up with a concept that feels more universal. Something everyone can connect with. This idea of escape, freedom, and going back to this core elements that are the foundation of who we are.'
Proenza Schouler Arizona, available for pre-order at ProenzaSchouler.com.
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