All through childhood, oranges awaited us at the bottom of our Christmas stockings. Every year, a ripe orange, its bittersweet smell emanating from the red felt fabric. No Christmas was complete without the smell of a fresh orange.
For more than a quarter of a century, Christophe Jouany has been celebrated as a fashion photographer – but it was a decade ago that Jouany began wearing a fragrance of his own making, one that evoked his home in the Caribbean.
© Jouany
In creating his own fragrance line, Jouany sought to evoke an olfactory odyssey with fragrances that are redolent of favored locales.
A bitter orange bursts forth from Jouany Marrakech – as if you’ve arrived at the end of a journey across a desert to find that an oasis has materialized. A grove of orange trees beckons and you are immersed in an intoxicating cloud of citrus. Orange blossoms fall across your table as you sip from a glass of freshly squeezed juice. The scent of grapefruit mingles with orange. You could linger here all afternoon, in this citrus sanctuary.
© Jouany
Later, in the gloaming, there’s a whiff of jasmine mixed with neroli. Nightfall has cooled the air – and as you stretch across your bedding, Herodotus at your side, the scent of patchouli hangs about your pillow. It’s fitting that Herodotus has written of the ritual use of cannibis by the Scythians.
With all the complexity of a bittersweet orange in a land of arid beauty, Jouany Marrakech is an ode to Paul and Jane Bowles and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient – and to a city that inspires with the mere mention of its name.
