Hermès Was In the Air at Last Night’s Fragrance Launch Party

As the supermoon eclipse began to emerge over New York’s skyline last night, the city’s most beloved party people began to make their way to the rooftop of Hermès’s Gansevoort Street store. While trays of chef Sophia Roe’s delicate hors d'oeuvres like English pea tarts, caviar edible spoons and elderflower pate de fruits passed through the crowd, perfumer Christine Nagel toasted the house’s newest fragrance, Barénia. “Sometimes when you work on a perfume, it really takes a lot of time, 10 years go by, and you get tired of working on it,” Nagel told the crowd in a heartfelt speech. “But I never tired of it.”

Nagel spent a decade trusting her own vision of creating the first chypre scent for the house, named after its signature heritage leather, which she worked on in secret for years to capture fairytale-sounding notes of butterfly lily, oakwood, miracle berry, and “a sugary element” that floats in the air. The concept of “Hermès women” who “really rely on their instinct” inspired her. “Explorers, the discoverers” and the “women radically dependent on their instinct in order to discover the world” like writer and activist Nancy Cunard and bohemian socialite Peggy Guggenheim were on her mind as she created the chypre, a “timeless” and “very structural, elegant element of fragrance.” As American contemporary poet, writer, lyricist Aja Monet took the stage to open with a piece called “Love Supreme,” she dedicated her performance and set “to the legacy of the many poets, artists, musicians who have come before us and knew that art was not just aesthetic, but it was necessary for the world we want to see.”

Soon, friends of the house were strolling next door to Pastis, the restaurant that arrived in the Meatpacking District at the height of Y2K’s nightlife scene. Actor Natasha Lyonne, Olympian Aly Raisman, writer Sloane Crosley, and designer Athena Calderone were among the guests sitting at tables adorned by slim arrangements of ivory calla lilies and family-style French fries. “I’m always up for an Hermès moment,” Mickey Boardman, nightlife whisperer and director of special projects for Paper Magazine told me once courses like leeks vinaigrette, celery root au poivre, and French choux profiteroles were served. “Everything they create is immaculate, from the packaging on their new perfume to the chocolate sauce on the profiteroles. You know every aspect of the evening will be beautifully done.”

When I sidled up to a long booth where Leigh Lezark, Dylan Penn, and Indre Rockefeller are fully alive in conversation, Lezark slid over to make room for one more (honorable after a NYFW spent squeezed into little spaces!). I wanted her perspective on the night as the beacon of any really great party after years DJ-ing and attending the best. Fragrance is known to stir memories and help form new ones, after all, and Nagel’s words weren’t lost on Lezark. “Her speech was really indicative of her love of her own nostalgia, and then when we came over to Pastis, we kind of revisited our own kind of nostalgia,” she said of being able to connect in a way that mirrored that spirit, coming from “a very personal place, and this is a quintessential New York personal place to be.” Rockefeller agreed. “It maintains that sense of intimacy, like you’re having dinner and meaningful conversations with old friends.”

“Well this is Pastis!” Lezark enthused. “We are old friends here.” It isn’t the first time they've found themselves sitting in an iconic Manhattan restaurant having some laughs. “If you’re a New Yorker, you know each other.”