Letter from Isabel: Cuir de Connolly
We have been working with perfumer Lyn Harris, since we reopened Connolly and she helped us create our Connolly Candle which has become a signature of the Connolly shop. As you walk in there is a certain smell of leather; atmospheric, intangible, slightly smoky and full of atmosphere. During the candle fragrance process Lyn rang one day to say she had dropped the fragrance in alcohol and the scent was incredible ... and if we were ever to do a fragrance we already had it. ...Seven years later we asked Lyn to finally create ‘Cuir de Connolly’ from this fragrance we had just enough to produce a limited edition of 200 bottles and some smaller travel sprays that fit in your pocket.
We worked with our leather workshops to hand-stitch the Connolly leather wrapped top and the pouch for the pocket size everything created and designed in house. Then we asked photographer William Waterworth to photograph dancer and contemporary dance choreographer, Connor Scott interpreting the sense of wearing this fragrance: its depth, its layers unfolding and its swirling headiness and the gestures of applying the scent to your body. At the same time we made a film with videographer Joel Kerr and commissioned music by Hugo Hamlet who not only composed the piece but plays it too.
The results are very personal, beautiful and sensual playing on the theme of where your pulse points like the neck, the wrists and everywhere you want to be embraced! Named after the word for leather in French...it smells like memories of Paris, of those fragrances that stylish men wore in the seventies, grown up, dandy, masculine with an underlying burst of vetiver mixed with leather. Its full on, it isn’t subtle, its heady, sexy and rich. You could say its full throttle, and then just fades to a soft purr. Like Connolly leather it is un- mistakable and for me personally evokes memories of a life that I remember... walking into certain menswear shops in Paris that no longer exist, night clubs, elegant restaurants ...the back seat of a car. It’s a memory of a style and way of living that I wanted to recapture and like all the best sensory experiences it takes you into another realm.
- Isabel
