RUNDHOLZ PARFUMS: A CALENDAR OF SCENT, MEMORY AND IMAGINED TIME

Some fashion houses launch perfume because fragrance is expected to complete the universe of a brand. A bottle arrives after the clothes, shoes and accessories as another extension of lifestyle.

RUNDHOLZ feels fundamentally different.

Its perfumes do not behave like accessories to fashion. They feel like another medium through which the same artistic language can speak.

What fabric, proportion and silhouette do visually, fragrance does here through atmosphere, texture and memory.

That distinction matters.

Because RUNDHOLZ Parfums does not begin with perfume.

It begins with a world.

FROM CLOTHING TO OLFACTORY FORM

Founded in Germany by Lenka and Carsten Rundholz, RUNDHOLZ has built its identity around a very particular relationship with form.

The house is often described as avant-garde, but the term alone is insufficient. Its clothing works with asymmetry, volume, layering, distortion, surface, rawness and proportion in ways that continuously question how a garment is expected to sit on the body.

There is experimentation, but rarely experimentation for spectacle alone.

RUNDHOLZ can be austere, architectural, theatrical, almost monastic or deliberately imperfect. Yet even at its most radical, there remains a remarkable sensitivity to material.

The garment is not simply designed.

It is treated as an object with presence.

That same instinct eventually found another material to work with:

smell.

If RUNDHOLZ clothing could alter the way the body is perceived, perfume offered an opportunity to interfere with something even less stable.

Time.

SCENTS AND MEMORIES

At the center of RUNDHOLZ Parfums lies a simple but exceptionally effective concept:

Scents and Memories.

The fragrances are not given conventional names.

There is no Noir, Bois, Absolu, Oud or Rose.

Instead, there are dates.

03.Apr.1968

SEPT.21.1966

FEB.14,1912

20MARS2022

12th of Oct. 1492

AUGUST/7th/2088

2024-june-2nd

At first, this may appear to be a graphic device.

It is much more than that.

A date immediately establishes a relationship with time, yet refuses to explain what that relationship should be.

Some dates appear personal.

Some historical.

Some belong to the present.

Others point towards a future that has not yet happened.

And some remain deliberately unresolved.

That ambiguity is one of the collection’s greatest strengths.

RUNDHOLZ does not always tell us what happened on a particular day.

Instead, the date operates almost as a coordinate.

A door.

A fragment of an archive whose meaning has partly disappeared.

The wearer is invited to fill the absence.

Whose memory is this?

What happened there?

Did the moment really exist?

Does it matter?

Through this mechanism, RUNDHOLZ transforms the perfume collection into something resembling a non-linear calendar of human perception.

Because scent itself has never respected chronology.

A smell can collapse decades instantly.

It can return us to a place before we have consciously recognised it.

It can even create the uncanny sensation of remembering something that never happened.

RUNDHOLZ understands this beautifully.

ARTURETTO LANDI: THE PERFUMER INSIDE THE RUNDHOLZ WORLD

A concept of this kind required the right perfumer.

RUNDHOLZ found him in Arturetto Landi.

An Italian master perfumer with a career extending across several of the world’s major fragrance cultures, Landi brings together technical precision and an unusually broad olfactory vocabulary.

His professional path has taken him through Europe, the United States, Japan and the Middle East, and that geographical breadth can be sensed in his work.

There is classical structure in his compositions, but rarely restraint for restraint’s sake.

Landi is comfortable with density.

With smoke.

With leather.

With woods and incense.

With powder, spice, musk, animalic shadows and voluptuous materials that carry weight.

This makes him an especially persuasive interpreter of the RUNDHOLZ universe.

The collaboration does not feel like a fashion house commissioning fragrances from a perfumer.

It feels closer to a translation between artistic disciplines.

RUNDHOLZ supplies the visual philosophy.

Landi gives it an olfactory body.

And crucially, neither voice disappears inside the other.

TRANSLATING RUNDHOLZ WITHOUT BECOMING LITERAL

The most successful aspect of the collaboration is its refusal of obviousness.

RUNDHOLZ does not simply produce black clothes and therefore demand a “dark” fragrance.

A leather garment does not automatically become a leather perfume.

The connection is more structural.

Landi translates the principles of RUNDHOLZ rather than its objects.

Contrast.

Layering.

Distortion.

Unexpected proportion.

The collision between roughness and refinement.

The tension between familiarity and discomfort.

Materials that seem unfinished, only to reveal extraordinary complexity.

Those ideas appear repeatedly in the fragrances.

Something powdery becomes smoky.

Something green becomes warm.

Something creamy turns dry.

A composition that initially appears beautiful in a conventional sense suddenly shifts into stranger territory.

Many RUNDHOLZ perfumes behave almost like garments changing architecture once they are worn.

They refuse to remain static.

FIRST, THE IMAGE. THEN, THE FORMULA.

RUNDHOLZ also understands something that many perfume brands forget:

a fragrance story does not have to begin with ingredients.

The house often introduces its perfumes through a date followed by a small cluster of sensory phrases.

For example:

heavy narcotic quality — charred ode to incense — sweet vanilla

or:

vibrant velvety — sun-warmed hay — freshly cut grass

or:

crispy floral — wet petrichor — lime

Before the technical architecture appears, there is already a scene.

Grass.

Smoke.

Rain.

Skin.

Milk.

Leather.

Light.

A house above the sea.

Warm hay.

Burnt incense.

Only afterwards does the note structure become important.

This reversal is significant.

RUNDHOLZ asks the wearer to imagine first and analyse later.

That is, arguably, much closer to the way perfume actually works.

We rarely remember formulas.

We remember states.

03.Apr.1968

The first RUNDHOLZ perfume arrived in 2012, and there was nothing tentative about the debut.

03.Apr.1968 immediately established the vocabulary of the line.

heavy narcotic quality — charred ode to incense — sweet vanilla

The central impression is incense pushed towards something almost burnt.

Dense.

Resinous.

Sacred, but not serene.

There is weight to it.

Then heliotrope introduces a soft, powdery, almost vanilla-like texture, while lychee brings a ripe sweetness that makes the composition stranger rather than easier.

The result exists somewhere between ritual and decadence.

Incense usually creates distance.

Here it becomes almost physical.

The official structure is remarkably concise:

lychee — heliotrope — frankincense.

Only three principal coordinates.

Yet between them, Landi creates an enormous amount of space.

It was a striking first statement.

And perhaps an important warning:

RUNDHOLZ Parfums was never going to behave like conventional fashion fragrance.

SEPT.21.1966

If 03.Apr.1968 feels like a dark interior filled with smoke, SEPT.21.1966 opens the landscape.

vibrant velvety — sun-warmed hay — freshly cut grass

The immediate image is almost physical: lying in grass with closed eyes, surrounded by the smell of vegetation warmed by the sun.

But this is not pastoral prettiness.

Rhubarb, mate and pink pepper create a tart, almost abrasive green opening.

Hay gives dryness.

Heliotrope and magnolia soften the center.

Then woods, agarwood and incense begin to darken the horizon.

Nature in RUNDHOLZ is rarely decorative.

It feels enlarged.

One blade of grass becomes an entire landscape.

A simple vegetal impression becomes something almost prehistoric.

The perfume does not describe nature from a distance.

It places the body inside it.

FEB.14,1912

cool liquorice — prominent iris — creamy musk

Perhaps one of the strangest perfumes in the collection, and one of its most elegant.

RUNDHOLZ describes FEB.14,1912 as a lucid chameleon.

That is exactly what it is.

There is a strange sensation of cool milk, liquorice, fennel and anise.

Above it sits iris, shifting between dryness, earthiness, powder and velvet.

Leather, cedar and musk gradually give the composition a firmer body.

Its beauty comes from contradiction.

Cold and warm.

Creamy and dry.

Comforting and unsettling.

Familiar and alien.

On paper, the elements sound almost incompatible.

On skin, the incompatibility becomes the point.

FEB.14,1912 demonstrates one of the house’s strongest qualities:

RUNDHOLZ knows how to make strangeness elegant.

20MARS2022

dark — spicy — woody

This is perhaps where the philosophy of time becomes most explicit.

20MARS2022 was released before the date in its name had actually arrived.

When the perfume first appeared, 20 March 2022 still belonged to the future.

That one decision says almost everything about the RUNDHOLZ concept.

The fragrance itself is presented as a black enigma.

Pepper, cinnamon and saffron flash through the opening like sparks inside darkness.

Woods and smoke follow.

Floral notes - jasmine, rose, lily of the valley - appear more like apparitions than a conventional bouquet.

Then the smoke slowly changes character.

It becomes lighter.

More transparent.

Almost sacred.

Hay, vanilla and tonka soften the darker structure.

The perfume moves from shadow towards illumination.

The conceptual achievement is quietly brilliant.

RUNDHOLZ created a memory attached to a date that had not yet happened.

Here, memory no longer points only backwards.

One can apparently long for the future too.

12th of Oct. 1492

Then the calendar moves in the opposite direction.

Far backwards.

12 October 1492.

The historical weight of the date is impossible to ignore.

Yet RUNDHOLZ wisely avoids reducing the perfume to literal historical theatre.

Instead, it becomes an olfactory journey.

Rhubarb, ginger, cinnamon, blackcurrant and bergamot form a rich opening of fruit and warm spice.

Iris, jasmine and lily of the valley appear in the heart.

Then comes one of the perfume’s strongest contrasts:

vanilla against smoky leather.

Frankincense, cypriol and sandalwood deepen the structure further.

RUNDHOLZ describes the effect through two words that could almost serve as a motto for the entire collection:

decadent and sacred.

That tension is fundamental to the house.

Pleasure beside austerity.

Beauty beside unease.

Luxury beside something almost ritualistic.

AUGUST/7th/2088

Then comes the most radical temporal leap of all.

7 August 2088.

A perfume named after a date many decades into the future might easily fall into predictable futurism.

Metal.

Ozone.

Sterility.

Technology.

Artificial light.

RUNDHOLZ does the opposite.

Its future smells alive.

Grapefruit.

Cactus.

Rhubarb.

Sea water.

Orchid.

Jasmine.

Iris.

Pampas grass.

Later, darker and warmer materials emerge: chocolate, moss, woods, hay and amber.

The conceptual reversal is beautiful.

Perhaps the future will not smell technological at all.

Perhaps nature itself will become the ultimate luxury.

In that sense, AUGUST/7th/2088 may be one of the most unexpectedly human fragrances in the collection.

It imagines the future not as machinery, but as intensified nature.

2024-june-2nd

With 2024-june-2nd, RUNDHOLZ returns almost to the present.

crispy floral — wet petrichor — lime

The central image is rain.

More precisely, the smell of earth after rain.

Petrichor becomes the atmospheric core, but Landi refuses to leave it simply wet or mineral.

Grapefruit, lime, bergamot and mint bring brightness and almost electric clarity.

Thyme introduces a green edge.

Rose meets cardamom, nutmeg and black pepper.

Then the composition gradually warms through sandalwood, amber, musk and vanilla.

Once again, the perfume is structured as movement:

wet earth → air → light → skin.

It begins almost like weather.

It ends like memory.

SEVEN PERFUMES, ONE LANGUAGE

Look at the collection as a whole and recurring materials quickly become visible.

Incense.

Heliotrope.

Iris.

Leather.

Woods.

Hay.

Musk.

Vanilla.

Earth.

Smoke.

But RUNDHOLZ does not simply repeat a successful commercial DNA.

The repetition is linguistic, not formulaic.

These materials behave almost like words inside a vocabulary.

Incense may become burnt, sacred, animalic or transparent.

Vanilla may feel creamy, smoky, powdery or simply warm.

Iris may be cool, cosmetic, earthy or tactile.

The same raw material can serve a completely different emotional function from one fragrance to another.

This is what gives the collection cohesion without making it repetitive.

Seven different perfumes.

One recognizable world.

The visual presentation follows the same philosophy.

The bottles are restrained.

Typography takes precedence over ornament.

The date itself becomes the primary identity.

There is something archival about the result.

The perfume almost resembles a catalogued object rather than a conventional luxury product.

A date.

A code.

A piece of evidence.

An object retrieved from some invisible collection of memories.

That restraint is especially effective because the fragrances themselves are rarely restrained.

The bottle remains quiet.

The perfume does the speaking.

Perhaps the most admirable aspect of RUNDHOLZ Parfums is the way it approaches memory without becoming sentimental.

Perfumery loves nostalgia.

Childhood.

A grandmother’s house.

A first love.

An old wardrobe.

A holiday.

A particular summer.

Often these stories are explained to the wearer before the fragrance even has a chance to speak.

RUNDHOLZ is subtler.

It gives us a date.

Sometimes a few images.

Sometimes a mood.

And often very little explanation.

The rest belongs to us.

That changes the relationship between perfume and memory.

The fragrance is no longer merely illustrating somebody else’s recollection.

It becomes a mechanism through which the wearer can construct one.

That is considerably more interesting.

The most accurate way to understand RUNDHOLZ Parfums may be as an olfactory archive.

An archive in which 1492, 1912, 1966, 1968, 2022, 2024 and 2088 can exist side by side.

There is no correct chronology.

Human memory does not have one either.

A rainy afternoon can suddenly open a door to childhood.

Leather can become a person.

Incense can become architecture.

Grass can become summer.

And a smell encountered for the first time can somehow produce the unmistakable sensation of recognition.

That is where RUNDHOLZ Parfums becomes much more than an attractive exercise in concept.

Its philosophy genuinely exists inside the fragrances.

Arturetto Landi has managed to preserve the tension, materiality, darkness, wit and transformation that define RUNDHOLZ visually and translate them into scent without making the process literal.

RUNDHOLZ, in turn, appears to have offered him something increasingly rare:

enough creative space to remain a perfumer rather than merely an executor.

The result is a collection with unmistakable authorship.

It does not need to please everyone.

Perhaps it should not.

A genuinely individual artistic statement rarely does.

But it should be difficult to mistake for anything else.

And RUNDHOLZ Parfums certainly is.

Seven dates. Seven fragrances. Seven fragments of time.

A past we may remember.

A present we can smell.

And a future we can somehow begin to miss before it has even arrived.

WOWONELOVE