ATELIER 1887 I moved through ateliers across Europe until the memories blurred into something softer than fact. High ceilings. Dress forms standing like quiet witnesses. The hush of serious work in near silence.
This memory belongs to so many places and cities. There were ateliers across Europe workrooms with high ceilings and dress forms standing in corners like quiet witnesses, bolts of fabric stacked against walls, the particular hush of a place where serious work was happening in near silence. I moved through enough of them that they have blurred together now into something that feels less like memory and more like a place I carry inside me.
It started long before that. My mother loved clothes and I grew up watching her, and then I sat down at her sewing machine, and then I couldn't stop. There is something about the making of a garment that gets into you. The patience of it. The way a piece of cloth becomes, through nothing but time and intention, something that will hold a person's shape.
I created emotions that could hang on a wooden hanger for thirty years. I moved from city to city, atelier to atelier, learning the particular scent of each one: warm fabric, thread, the faint sweetness of pressed seams, something floral and powdery that I could never quite locate. Jasmine perhaps. Lavender from a workroom in the south. The soft amber warmth of a room where beautiful things had been made for a very long time.
ATELIER 1887 opens with bergamot and lavender the clean, considered air of a workroom at the beginning of the day. Jasmine and lily move through the middle, soft and unhurried, the smell of fabric and flowers and quiet concentration. At the base, vanilla and musk and patchouli settle in like the end of a long fitting, warm and close, the scent of something finished.