SOUS LE MANTEAU
Under her beautifully conceived artistic platform, Iconofly, Olivia Bransbourg’s Sous Le Manteau perfumes, made in collaboration with master perfumer Nathalie Feisthauer, are perfumed voodoo inspired by an anthology of love philtres found in a French flea market.
Nathalie is one of the most fascinating and sensual perfumers in the scented sphere. Entranced by the original Opium by Yves Saint Laurent she set out on the road to being a trained perfumer, studying at Roure (now Givaudan) and being mentored by Jean Guichard and Edouard Fléchier. With Olivia she has created a collection of unique perfumes that combine power, historical eroticism and contemporary idiosyncrasies.
There is a lot of olfactive chatter about Iconofly, the multi-discipline artistic space and cultural platform Olivia founded in 2009. It feels very different from other such endeavours using a laboratory approach to creation utilising musicians, writers, photographers, perfumers, designers and artists. She has perfect perfumed form, commissioning Attache-Moi from Christine Nagel and Benoist Lapouza, winning accolades from the perfume industry working at Takasago, one of the global fragrance behemoth companies, so it’s fair to say Olivia is hardly a novice when it comes to creating perfumes. A new addition, the enigmatic and emotive composition called Personne, created by Alexandre Helwani, a dashing young perfumer, preoccupied with the musicality of natural materials.
Sous le Manteau (which translates approximately as under the counter, on the side, clandestine) is six sublime love potions, inspired by a collection of old apothecary writings discovered by Olivia Bransbourg in a Paris flea market. The recipes were bare bones in terms of perfumery but evocative and aromatic enough to fire her imagination and draw Nathalie to the flame. The sextet of Fontaine Royale, Cuir D’Orient, Essence Du Sérail, Vapeurs Diablotins, Poudre Impériale and Odisiaque play with the concept of seduction, using skin and self as a scented weapon, desirous of making someone fall in love with you. This allure has been a huge part of perfumery for millennia, but perhaps forgotten in the hunt for lucre and profit.
Seduction is the pervasive theme of Sous le Manteau, the perfumes like secret diary entries in the possession of a notorious libertine or a court beauty who makes spellbinding formulae for a very select circle of beautiful women. The original love philtre recipes are suggestive and sensual, providing deliciously intriguing inspiration. Perfumery, poisons and the eternal search for the transmutation of base materials into gold.
Nathalie Feisthauer and Olivia have fashioned the original love potion recipes into a collection of desirable and unique perfumes, focussed on the eternal themes of seduction and the multi-facetted stories of love, hunger and devotion. Every detail of Sous le Manteau has been beautifully considered. Made in France, the tactile bottles have a lovely peach skin finish and have been serigraphed and housed in boxes illustrated with an atlas and a caryatid, the draped female forms that adorn temples as pillars.
It is becoming increasingly rare to discover unique perfumes in the over-saturated and often quite repetitive market now, ironic really considering how many perfumes appear, week in week out. Sous Le Manteau is the sublime manifestation of desire in perfume form of dreams, skin and fantasy, essays in epicurean secrets.