This fragrance was created with our home as a base, our lives, our travels, all the smells and scents we’ve sort of collected along the way…we always wanted our house to be some sort of warm wooden place where you can’t really tell if we started living there in the seventies or now.¹ — Inez & Vinoodh

Byredo’s 2013 fragrance launch 1996 Inez & Vinoodh came, like many recent niche scents, rather weighted with backstory. It was inspired by the disquieting photograph shown on the outer packaging, titled ‘Kirsten, 1996’ and taken by Dutch fashion photographers Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, but inspired also by their lives and the notes they liked — it was originally intended as a holiday gift for their friends and came in a wooden box with the photograph under the lid.² The fragrance itself is a warm woody oriental that’s a must-try for iris fans — I would have included it in my Best of 2013 if I’d managed to smell it in time…

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