ALIA RAZA + USAGE MAGAZINE interview
JEAN-MARIE BINET photography

Please note that each image is credited with reference codes,

listed at the end of this editorial.

Régime des Fleurs, the New York-based fragrance brand founded by Alia Raza, launches its first men’s fragrance, Rock River Melody. Resulting of a collaboration that grew out of a longtime friendship with Christopher Niquet, Rock River Melody is more than a fragrance. Raising the question of gender norms, it explore today’s relationship to masculinity in a rich, complex and unmistakably composition that challenges established norms.

For this occasion, Usage Magazine asked Alia Raza to interview Christopher Niquet about their collaboration. Between personal memories, experiments and intuition, Rock River Melody is the synthesis of a friendship, but also of a certain vision of perfumery, that has made of Régime des Fleurs one of the most visionary brands of our time.

AR   Are there specific ingredients or notes that communicate different things for you?
CN   As you know, the names of ingredients and identifying of notes is not my forté. To this day when talking about our project I still need cheat sheets. I was surprised that some of the notes I like were things like vanilla or cinnamon, or even musk. I have sensory markers, linked to moments in my life, and they kind of collide. For Rock River Melody, it was all tied up to my horse riding days as a teenager — or more so the fantasy in my mind of what it was. Manure, forests, flashing lights. They are ideas linked to smell, but you did the detective work to attach a scent to each memory. 

AR   And what about Rock River Melody himself? 
CN   Everything about this perfume is very personal. The name comes from a pony I was riding as a teen, a grey Connemara. A wonderful horse. All my fantasies about these years are tied around this horse. He was fearless and great looking.

AR   You created a campaign for Rock River Melody which will live on Régime’s site and social media. What can you tell us about it? 
CN   It was important for me to try and express what the fragrance meant through visuals. In a previous life I’ve worked on perfume campaigns for big brands and was always shocked about all the money and time spent, all the talents involved, for images that looked very generic. For Rock River Melody I knew I wanted Matthew Jamal to be the face of it. I did his portrait for a project I developed with my friend Michael Avedon called 65CPW on Instagram, and I loved his energy. He is a young composer and musician studying at Julliard in New York. I also knew I did not want just a modely portrait, so I enlisted my friend, the photographer Daniel King, for the visuals. The brief was the same as what we had shared with the perfumers, and I did not inundate him with references. There were colors I wanted him to focus on, a certain light, but then it was open for him to experiment. I believe this is how you get the best results. When you don’t create too tight a brief for the talents so they can find their image in it more easily. Daniel did a great book a few years ago about Ukranian teenagers, and I wanted him to be using a similar process, more documentary than fashion. They shot and filmed for a day in an abandoned house in Rockaway, no hair or makeup or styling. Just the talent and a photographer, which seems to my knowledge to always be what works best. 

AR   Are natural ingredients important to you? I think there’s something nice about knowing there are essences of living things in the bottle, but as you know we are certainly not an all natural brand. That said, we did end up using a great percentage of natural oils like artemisia and patchouli in this fragrance. 
CN   I wouldn’t say natural ingredients are important to me, or at least this wasn’t part of my process, to push for them. I wanted something that was odd, and for this mixing naturals and molecules seemed to be the way forward. This fragrance is about my teenage memories, and if some ingredients like grass, mud, horse smell, and leather can be reproduced with natural ingredients, then lights, speed and sound needed something more odd and unnatural to come to life. I also learned through this process of creating scents that what’s important is the end formula, and whether it works or doesn’t. 

AR   Here’s something everyone gets asked when talking about scent. What childhood memories do you have of fragrance? When were you first conscious of it? 
CN   Growing up in Paris in the 1980’s you can only imagine the smell that I was surrounded by. It was the days of Opium, Poison, Trésor. These were the smells in the streets, in restaurants, stores, so I couldn’t ignore them. But my mother and her friends had a snobbism about designer fragrances. They all wore Guerlain. My mother, Shalimar, and her friend Margaret, L’heure Bleue. So these scents are what I associate with a good perfume. Anything else was considered cheap. As I entered my teenage years and began the quest for my scent, I created other memories. 

AR   It is inspiring. On a daily basis I think about your button down shirt made of shahtoosh. As the kids say, “goals.” What would you say is the relationship between clothing and fragrance?
CN   When it comes to fashion and smell I think there used to be a relationship, but maybe because brands had more of an identity. Jil Sander, Yohji Yamamoto, and these strong people in fashion had a very specific clientele, and they were associated with the perfumes they wore. I think this doesn’t exist anymore.

AR   You’ve worked for something like two years on this project and there have been so many steps, from just meeting and talking to testing a hundred trials on your skin to developing imagery and shooting photos for each fragrance. What has been the biggest challenge?
CN   I don’t believe anything was a challenge; maybe the hardest part was creating stories for each scent. To compartmentalize these scent stories. But once that was done I felt everything was just adding another layer to the narrative. From defining the stories to illustrating it in mood boards, then isolating notes for each scent, refining the proposals from the noses, working on the bottle and packaging, to putting a team together for the visuals. Every step was getting us a little bit closer to the full story.

AR   I’m excited to finally share the work with the world and can’t wait to see what people think. Because we didn’t make perfumes to appeal to an audience, we made things that were personal to you, and that’s what I like to do with Régime. It’s really nice that with perfume I feel allowed to be more experimental and avant-garde than in other fields but can still make a decent living. Which gives me an idea for our last question. I was an artist and filmmaker before I started making perfume, so I automatically connect fragrance with visual things. If the scent of Rock River Melody was a short video or film, tell us what we would see.
CN   I thought about this, and it would most likely give you a headache. It would be like MTV Cribs at the horse farm meets Wong Kar-Wai, projected over a strobe light. That was one of my realizations while working on the perfume and communicating visual references. Movie making really hasn’t caught up with the pace of social media. Everything just feels so slow. And to me Rock River Melody is about speed. 

AR   Yes exactly. For me it really smells like a flash of light, and then it becomes something else as it wears. Something comforting.
CN   Yes, to me when I smell it, it’s like I have been hit in the head. Like when you are a kid and you fall down and things feel empty. But after that comes this comforting green, earthy smell. I have worn it after the shower, before bed, and it never disappoints; each time I have weird dreams that I can’t remember anything about, besides their oddness. And there are always moments where I wake up and smell the perfume on my skin and think, “This is good.”

Fragrance

[FR01] RÉGIME DES FLEURS Eau de Parfum “Rock River Melody”, 75ml 225$ • [NOTES] Green Sap, Galbanum, Hedera Ivy, Bergamot, Narcissus, Rose, Patchouli, Cedar, Sandalwood, Amber, Musk.

Régime des Fleurs, the New York-based fragrance brand founded by Alia Raza, launches its first men’s fragrance, Rock River Melody. Resulting of a collaboration that grew out of a longtime friendship with Christopher Niquet, Rock River Melody is more than a fragrance. Raising the question of gender norms, it explore today’s relationship to masculinity in a rich, complex and unmistakably composition that challenges established norms.

For this occasion, Usage Magazine asked Alia Raza to interview Christopher Niquet about their collaboration. Between personal memories, experiments and intuition, Rock River Melody is the synthesis of a friendship, but also of a certain vision of perfumery, that has made of Régime des Fleurs one of the most visionary brands of our time.

AR   You were an early champion of Régime des Fleurs, which is how we got to know each other. I remember my first day at Bergdorf Goodman you showed up in the morning and bought a perfume. You wrote that great article about the brand, and you were posting photos of the perfumes in your home. You don’t do that a lot. What was it about Régime you felt a connection to?
CN   Well first thing first, I heard of Régime des Fleurs from Rachel Chandler, whom we know is always aware of the good stuff. Right off the bat, before I even smelled the perfumes I was really intrigued by the aesthetics you had developed. I am not as much of a fragrance fanatic as you are, but I have always been looking for MY scent and when I discovered Régime I thought, here is something different and more layered and specific than anything that was on the market. It was like a reinvention of what perfumers were a couple centuries ago. That got me.

AR   I haven’t asked many people to create a perfume with me. I have to really admire something in them and be curious about what they’ll come up with. When I did it with Chloë Sevigny she said yes because she really had been searching for a new perfume and couldn’t find one she loved. Why did you say yes?
CN   It all started with your proposition to create a scent for me. Not a commercial endeavor at first. You generously proposed to walk me thought the creation of a scent. This was such an exciting process, from visualizing what it was, creating a story, talking about perfumes I have loved and worn. By the time the perfume got created and I got to wear it I was getting so many compliments, and so were you, that when you proposed to commercialize that scent, I was all for it. So I would say it was the total trust in your vision as well as the invitation. 

AR   We are here to talk about Rock River Melody, your first perfume. What was the most interesting or surprising thing you learned while creating it? 
CN   Everything was surprising. I have worked behind the scenes on lots of different projects, whether it be art, fashion, books or movies, but I never had a go at anything perfume-related. I had to really think about what I cared about in a perfume and how to communicate different feelings with scents. 

AR   In your teen years what perfumes did you wear? 
CN   My horse riding friend’s dad wore Obsession, so I would wear it when I had sleepovers. It became the first perfume I loved for myself. I recently bought a bottle and they changed the formula so much I was shocked. Or my palette got more subtle. Then I started a L’Artisan Parfumeur phase right in parallel with Annick Goutal. I can’t remember what I wore from them. Then Serge Lutens happened. That was game changing, and it still to this day is my standard. His was the only shop with Didier Ludot in the jardins du Palais Royal, and it was such an experience to go to the store and smell all these early fragrances. We are talking mid to late 1990’s. I wore Féminité du Bois and Fumerie Turque, amongst others. 

AR   I remember my first time going to Didier Ludot as a teen and I was in heaven, trying on a Chanel suit. Serge Lutens is of course one of my heroes. His Tubéreuse Criminelle is astonishing. You’ve worn several fragrances throughout your adult life, but none of them have specifically been “for men.” Why was it interesting to create Rock River Melody as a fragrance for men? 
CN   Coming of age with the visuals of CK One was probably different than the generation before. The same smell could be for men and women. I think men’s fragrances smell cheap; they also always use some old macho clichés to advertise them. So during my twenties I never felt compelled to smell or look like the product promoted that was going to make you this macho thing. I have worn Gucci Rush, Féminité du Bois, Aromatics Elixir — all smells made for women. I also realized that it was a given that a woman was going to wear a men’s fragrance but not the other way around. I thought it could be interesting to think of a men’s fragrance that could be worn by women. Not a unisex smell but something altogether more subtle. It’s probably more a woman’s perfume that men can wear.

AR   In a way you are saying to men they can expand their tastes. When we first met, something like seven years ago, you had a more fanciful style, there were prints and colors, dandy-like. These days you are more classic, clean, preppy. You’re always very intentional and very smart about it, which has always moved me. Have your tastes in perfumes changed since then as well? 
CN   I don’t believe my tastes in smell have changed, or my taste in fashion either. I believe that with fashion you have to look in the mirror every five years and do a check. Two years ago I thought, do I want to be the forty year old in a silk shirt? And the answer was no. I had also become very tired with fashion brands around ten years ago, so this is when I started making all these dandy outfits. Everything was hand made; shoes, shirts, suits, sweaters, jewelry, sunglasses. It was fun while it lasted. At one point I realized there was nothing left that I wanted to experiment with. I had gone to the bottom of this funny moment and just wanted to wear ‘nothing’ types of clothing. It so happened that I was working with Brooks Brothers at the time and saw an opportunity. I was now going to wear the most boring, generic, off the rack clothing AND for dirt cheap with my corporate discount. I still throw in some The Row, Charvet, Hermès or Loro Piana, but I do love the anonymity of it.

AR   I said to you once that I get confused now because you look like all the boys I went to high school with! 
CN   I like the idea of not sticking out. Though I put way more thought into it than the boys from your high school ever did!

AR   It is inspiring. On a daily basis I think about your button down shirt made of shahtoosh. As the kids say, “goals.” What would you say is the relationship between clothing and fragrance?
CN   When it comes to fashion and smell I think there used to be a relationship, but maybe because brands had more of an identity. Jil Sander, Yohji Yamamoto, and these strong people in fashion had a very specific clientele, and they were associated with the perfumes they wore. I think this doesn’t exist anymore.

AR   You’ve worked for something like two years on this project and there have been so many steps, from just meeting and talking to testing a hundred trials on your skin to developing imagery and shooting photos for each fragrance. What has been the biggest challenge?
CN   I don’t believe anything was a challenge; maybe the hardest part was creating stories for each scent. To compartmentalize these scent stories. But once that was done I felt everything was just adding another layer to the narrative. From defining the stories to illustrating it in mood boards, then isolating notes for each scent, refining the proposals from the noses, working on the bottle and packaging, to putting a team together for the visuals. Every step was getting us a little bit closer to the full story.

AR   I’m excited to finally share the work with the world and can’t wait to see what people think. Because we didn’t make perfumes to appeal to an audience, we made things that were personal to you, and that’s what I like to do with Régime. It’s really nice that with perfume I feel allowed to be more experimental and avant-garde than in other fields but can still make a decent living. Which gives me an idea for our last question. I was an artist and filmmaker before I started making perfume, so I automatically connect fragrance with visual things. If the scent of Rock River Melody was a short video or film, tell us what we would see.
CN   I thought about this, and it would most likely give you a headache. It would be like MTV Cribs at the horse farm meets Wong Kar-Wai, projected over a strobe light. That was one of my realizations while working on the perfume and communicating visual references. Movie making really hasn’t caught up with the pace of social media. Everything just feels so slow. And to me Rock River Melody is about speed. 

AR   Yes exactly. For me it really smells like a flash of light, and then it becomes something else as it wears. Something comforting.
CN   Yes, to me when I smell it, it’s like I have been hit in the head. Like when you are a kid and you fall down and things feel empty. But after that comes this comforting green, earthy smell. I have worn it after the shower, before bed, and it never disappoints; each time I have weird dreams that I can’t remember anything about, besides their oddness. And there are always moments where I wake up and smell the perfume on my skin and think, “This is good.”