Fashion & Shopping
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Editor’s Pick: Perfume Genius lights up the 9:30 Club

Holly B. Martin
Perfume Genius -- Photo: Camille Vivier
Perfume Genius — Photo: Camille Vivier

The New York Times once called Mike Hadreas, who goes by the performing moniker Perfume Genius, “the gay indie-rock equivalent of a swaggering Syvlester or Jobriath.”

In 2015, Metro Weekly asserted “he may be our most unapologetic, unabashedly gay artist ever.” At the time, Hadreas was delivering a take-charge message about being “weird,” about being the outcast, about being gay — even about his penchant for wearing lipstick and jungle red nail polish.

“I grew up my whole life thinking about my anxieties and my insecurities, thinking that the things that happened to me made me a wounded person,” Hadreas said in a cover interview shortly after releasing his third album Too Bright.

“[I learned] you can be a nervous, weird, tiny, feminine man and be a fuckin’ badass. It doesn’t need to be solved for you to be okay. I made a

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Fashion & Shopping
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Black in Fashion Council and IMG Launch Directory of Black Professionals, The Rise of Perfume Collaborations

Holly B. Martin

Plus, Giorgio Armani on his long career and legacy.

Designer Adreain Guillory of Ajovang at the Black In Fashion Council Discovery Showrooms at New York Fashion Week Spring 2022. <p>Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images</p>
Designer Adreain Guillory of Ajovang at the Black In Fashion Council Discovery Showrooms at New York Fashion Week Spring 2022.

Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images

These are the stories making headlines in fashion on Wednesday.

Black in Fashion Council and IMG launch directory of Black fashion professionals
Color of Change and IMG‘s #ChangeFashion, along with the Black in Fashion Council, have launched a directory aimed at solving fashion’s exclusivity problem with a road map and resources for racial equity. The first-of-its-kind guide contains profiles and resumes of more than 300 Black industry professionals — from photographers to makeup artists, set designers and more — worldwide. The directory is only available to companies that have signed on to the #ChangeFashion Roadmap. {WWD}

Perfume brands tap into the potential of collaborations
“As the perfume market grows and collaborations become de

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Fashion & Shopping
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Perfume Gets in the Collaboration Game

Holly B. Martin

When Palm Angels designer Francesco Ragazzi decided to launch a fragrance, he opted not to take a traditional route — forging a licensing deal with the likes of Coty or Inter Parfums or building out production in-house. Instead, Ragazzi tapped a familiar strategy: collaboration.

He contacted Swedish perfume brand 19-69, a brand that shared Palm Angels’ obsession with California counterculture as well as placement at retailers like Browns and Dover Street Market.

“He just cold-called me one day,” 19-69 founder Johan Bergelin said of his first contact with Ragazzi in December 2019. “Immediately we saw there was sort of a curiosity from a creative perspective from both parts.”

That call resulted in a trio of collaborative fragrances, released in August 2021.

With the Palm Angels team-up, 19-69 joined a growing group of perfume houses opening their doors to brands and celebrities looking to get into fragrance outside the licensing model.

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Fashion & Shopping
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Inside the High-End Perfume Boom

Holly B. Martin

At the Omani perfume house Amouage’s headquarters and factory in Muscat, chief executive Marco Parsiegla is sitting above 10,000 bottles worth of “Interlude 53,” an ultra-concentrated perfume extract which the brand ages for six months before selling it at $500 per 100-millilitre bottle.

It’s the fourth batch of Interlude 53 the brand has produced since launching its “Exceptional Extrait” range in 2020, which features signature fragrances aged for months and concentrated to levels of scent oil as high as 56 percent — several times higher than the amount of fragrance in a typical eau de parfum.

Parsiegla, a longtime executive in Proctor & Gamble’s fragrance licensing division who joined Amouage in 2019, wasn’t sure how clients would respond to the experiment, which resulted in perfumes that were 40 percent more expensive than the brand’s already steep prices. But he ended up with a sell-out on his hands.

“Right now there’s

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