Natural fragrance brand Abel has made a perfume with New York fashion label Tibi. The scent, simply called Tibi, costs €180 and is sold through abelfragrance.com, with a launch party planned at Tibi’s showroom in Paris.
The partnership began with a sceptic. Tibi creative director Amy Smilovic admits she once assumed that people who loved natural perfume were the sort who rubbed rocks on themselves, a remark that drew a joke about rock deodorant from Abel founder Frances Shoemack. Smilovic quickly and completely changed her mind once she started wearing Abel’s scents, which showed her that natural fragrance could be something entirely different from what she had pictured.
Abel works only with natural ingredients, and its method is unusual. A fermentation process turns plant sugars into scent molecules, which master perfumer Isaac Sinclair then builds into niche perfumes. The aim is to rival synthetic fragrances on complexity and on how long they last on the skin. For this project, Shoemack and Sinclair set out to reflect what Tibi calls creative pragmatism, the label’s term for clothes that combine everyday usefulness with a creative eye. The brief was to capture the pull between ease and invention, and between minimalism and a slight edge. That balance mirrors the way Smilovic approaches clothing, where practical pieces are given a less predictable twist.
Sinclair started with an accord of paper and vetiver. “The paper gives it a freshness and the vetiver a woodiness,” he said. Around that base he added yerba mate from South America for a soft, herbal note, timut pepper from Nepal for a sharp, almost spicy lift and grapefruit for extra freshness. The finished scent is bright and clean, like skin just out of the shower, with the woody vetiver sitting underneath.
The development was unhurried. Smilovic gave Shoemack a selection of perfumes she had worn over the years so the Abel team could understand her taste, and they then spent two years on the formula without working to a tight deadline. The result was designed to feel modern and easy to wear, in the same spirit as the clothes Smilovic designs for Tibi. For Abel, the launch adds a fashion name to a brand built on proving that natural perfume can hold its own against synthetic scents on complexity and longevity.
