Hermès’s in-house perfumer, Christine Nagel, remembers visiting her grandmother, a trouser tailor, at her workshop as a child. “It was on the top floor of a very dark building in Geneva. I would watch her take her red-hot iron and place it on a damp cloth over trousers to iron them. That smell of dampness – the hot metal and wool – is absolutely unique,” she says. Today, that singular scent is still very present for Nagel. She, too, works in a top-floor studio, but this one is at Les Ateliers d’Hermès, a vast grey-green glass building in Pantin, a suburb outside northeast Paris. Nagel’s office has a tree-lined terrace and was once occupied by Jean-Louis Dumas, the father of the current artistic director of Hermès, Pierre-Alexis. It has a panoramic view of the workshop complex. One floor below is the menswear studio, presided over by Véronique Nichanian, artistic director of the Hermès ‘men’s universe’. A familiar smell of hot metal on damp wool fills this domain.
That persistent, electric tang bolsters Nagel’s new fragrance, H24 – the name references Hermès’s historic flagship at 24, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, opened in 1880 and still its, human and hour – like the 24 in the day. Put together, H24 sounds cold: technical, chemical and lucid. But the perfume is anything but.
