Hermès Haiku: Iris Ukiyoé
You think you know it. Like a haiku you read in school, one as beautiful as it was clean and straightforward – and yet when you read it again, study it further, you realize the paradoxes imbedded within its 5-7-5 structure.
So it is with Hermès Iris Ukiyoé.
Not unlike Florence, where the iris line the banks of the Arno, and where you find yourself marveling anew at a town that has for so long smitten artists, romantics, and lovers – so, too, does Hermès Iris Ukiyoé reward those who are drawn back to its mesmeric beauty.
Hermès master perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena has long admired the haiku for its ability to convey the ephemeral and the eternal with restraint and clarity. Hermès Iris Ukiyoé, the ninth fragrance in the Hermessence collection, draws inspiration from the Japanese word ukiyoé, sometimes defined as “images of the floating world,” and which also refers to 19th-century Japanese woodblock prints.
The concept behind ukiyoé is the art of living for the moment in the enjoyment of sensory pleasures – while disengaging from that which is disheartening about life. In a word, ukiyoé is about joy.
As with the great Japanese ukiyoé master, Hiroshige, whose work Ellena greatly admires, Hermès Iris Ukiyoé reveals its hidden treasures upon closer scrutiny. Described as a “divertimento on the theme of iris,” the fragrance opens with a sharply-focused rose and orange blossom bouquet, a reflection of the many scents Ellena associates with the iris flower (rather than the ubiquitous rhizome), which Ellena cultivates in his garden.
Deepening into an aqueous muguet before shifting again into a vegetal crispness that one might associate with the cucumber in a Pimm’s Cup, Hermès Iris Ukiyoé possesses an almost-thespian quality of registering emotion with the tiniest shifting of expression and gesture.
Like a watercolor in the process of being painted, the color mutating as it meets the water and slides across the paper, like misty clouds across a storm-swept sky, like an Impressionist painting that reveals itself in distance, Hermès Iris Ukiyoé is an endlessly fascinating, shape-shifting illusion, moving from its cool, floral morning tones into the warmth of an afternoon with the hint of a storm on the horizon.
As with all objets Hermès, the presentation is as artful as the content. Both the stopper and the bottle are dressed in Hermès signature saddle-stitched leather, this time in violet iris Swift calfskin, with Hermès orange Mysore goatskin lining the interior of the case. The glass of the decanter-cut bottle is tinged with streaks of violet, evoking again the watery banks of the Arno with its profusion of heraldic iris in spring.
In short, Hermès Iris Ukiyoé is as hypnotizing as one of those mornings when the dew on petals seems as miraculous as life – and you remain transfixed, in awe of the evanescent.
