Issey Miyake’s Return To Big Fragrance
For men who came of age in the mid-Noughties, Issey Miyake’s L'Eau D'Issey will likely have been an olfactory rite of passage. Elegant and understated, this classic cologne arrived once you’d made it through the clouds of Lynx Africa that stifled the school corridors, and survived the heady blend of Egoiste and Le Male that perfumed sticky-floored nightclubs. While most blockbuster fashion houses were creating big fragrances with gigantic marketing campaigns to dominate the male market, Issey Miyake’s quiet cologne offered a sophisticated alternative that whispered, rather than shouted – yet made its point just as well.
Now, 30 years on from L’Eau D’Issey Pour Homme, the fashion house has revealed its follow-up. Taking on another earthly element, L’Sel D’Issey is an olfactory imagining of salt, blending nose-twitching salinity with the kind of lucid aquatics that made its predecessor such a cult hit.
Unlike most of this year’s big fragrance launches, L’Sel D’Issey isn’t a shouty powerhouse scent, but one that wears close to the skin in a way that feels refined and minimalist. It’s not a subtle, flimsy fragrance though: the sillage and longevity are impressive, with aquatic and citrussy notes that linger as long as you want them to.
For the perfumer Quentin Bisch, creating a scent to bring Miyake back to the forefront of the fragrance conversation was no small undertaking. Whereas many big fashion houses wil contort and compromise their identity in order to comply with the whims of the zeitgeist, Miyake has always remained stubbornly true to the late founder’s singular vision.
“Miyake is one of the strongest brands with the most defined expression: it has a very specific identity,” says Bisch. “The brand’s fragrances always have a certain fluidity to them – a kind of transparency. They’re minimalistic, understandable, but somehow also very powerful.”
While many perfumers creating for established houses are required to follow a forensically defined brief, with the brand working backwards to create something they can see a market for, the only guidance Bisch received for L’Sel D’Issey was to, well, make it smell like salt. But of course, salt doesn’t actually have a smell, so an abstract interpretation – surely the dream gig for a perfumer (“it’s super exciting, starting from a completely blank page” confirms Bisch) – was on the cards.
“The scent of salt is subjective, a matter of interpretation. I could have invented anything,” says Bisch. But, instead of taking his creative license to partnership-challenging heights, he began by looking to the ocean. “The salt is the only thing that remains on the sand when the ocean recedes, or when it dries on the skin,” he says. “Thinking about this, I looked for ingredients that represent the transition between water and earth.” Bosch came first to algae and to moss: and while the poetry of the two together – one representing the water, and the other the sand – may be marketing catnip, they don’t quite sound like an olfactory slam-dunk. But actually, seaweed and moss combine to create the base for a fragrance that, in Bisch’s words, vibrates between a “moody, earthy accord and a watery, fresh accord.”
With a flash of light from a top note of ginger (uniquely extracted from the fresh root to keep it sparkling and ephemeral) added for that initial spark, and woods for a lingering trail, it’s a scent that hyper-realistic: a breath of fresh, salty sea air without the cloying synthetic notes.
While L’Sel undoubtedly makes its presence known (the staying power is extraordinary) it won’t divide opinion in the office, or start to sour on you after a long day – a quality that made L’Eau such a success three decades before. When it launched in 1992, Miyake’s first hit chimed with the scent predilections of the time: where the 1980s were all about obnoxious, dinner-souring scents, the Nineties ushered in the rise of modest minimalism. And while Calvin Klein may have bagged the heavyweight title, Miyake offered up a quiet counterpart for those who didn’t want to smell quite like everyone else: the sharper-dressed, well-mannered little brother to Klein’s underwear poser.
Today, with quiet luxury and considered craftsmanship maintaining hold in the men’s style arena, there’s a demand for similar serenity in the fragrance realm – and, with its fresh-air blend of salty salinity and aquatic freshness, L’Sel D'Issey is ready to (politely) clean up.
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