Hermès Was In the Air at the Fragrance Launch Party Last Night

The most beloved partygoers in New York started heading to Hermès’ Gansevoort Street store as the supermoon eclipse began to show over the city skyline last night. As trays of English pea tarts, caviar edible spoons, and elderflower pate de fruits passed through the crowd, perfumer Christine Nagel toasted the house’s newest scent, Barénia. “Sometimes when you work on a perfume, it really takes a lot of time. Ten years go by, and you get tired of working on it,” Nagel said sincerely to the audience. But I never tired of it.

Spending years in secret to capture fairytale-sounding notes of butterfly lily, oakwood, miracle berry, and “a sugary element,” Nagel spent a decade trusting her vision of creating the first chypre scent for the house, named after its signature heritage leather. Her inspiration came from the idea of “Hermès women,” who “really rely on their instinct.” She created the chypre, a “timeless, very structural, elegant element of fragrance,” “Explorers, the discoverers,” and “women radically dependent on their instincts in order to discover the world,” like writer and activist Nancy Cunard and bohemian socialite Peggy Guggenheim were on mind. Dedicating her performance and setting “to the legacy of the many poets, artists, and musicians who had come before us and knew that art was not just aesthetic, but it was necessary for the world we want to see,” American contemporary poet, writer, and lyricist Aja Monet took the stage opening with a piece called “Love Supreme.”

Soon, friends of the house were walking next door to Pastis, the restaurant that opened in the Meatpacking District at the height of Y2K’s party scene. Among the guests seated at tables decorated with slim arrangements of ivory calla lilies and family-style French fries were actress Natasha Lyonne, Olympian Aly Raisman, writer Sloane Crosley, and designer Athena Calderone. “I’m always up for a Hermès moment,” Mickey Boardman, nightlife whisperer and head of special projects for Paper Magazine, told me once meals like leeks vinaigrette, celery root au poivre, and French choux profiteroles were served. From the packaging on their new scent to the chocolate sauce on the profiteroles, every item they produce is flawless. You know every element of the evening will be masterfully done.

Lezark shifted over to make way for one more (honorous after an NYFW spent packed into tight places!). Leigh Lezark, Dylan Penn, and Indre Rockefeller were fully alive in conversation when I sidled up to a long booth. After years of DJing and attending the best, I wanted her view of the evening as the lighthouse of any truly outstanding party. After all, fragrance is known to evoke memories and assist in their formation. Nagel’s words were not lost on Lezark. “Her speech was really indicative of her love of her own nostalgia, and then when we came over to Pastis, we kind of revisited our own kind of nostalgia, and this is a quintessential New York personal place to be. This is a very personal place to be,” she said. Rockefeller concurs. “It keeps that intimacy, like you’re having dinner and deep talks with old friends.”
Well, this is Pastis! Lezark excitedly said. Here among us are old pals. They had not been sitting in a famous Manhattan restaurant having some laughs anywhere else. “You know each other if you live New York.”