we/d: Yerevan as an Olfactory Documentary, a City Preserved Through Scent

There are cities that, once translated into the language of perfumery, seem almost destined to become collections of recognisable symbols. Paris receives roses, powder and classical elegance; the Mediterranean is rendered through citrus, salt and sunlight; Armenia often appears through apricot, pomegranate, mountains, woods and resins.

These codes are understandable, and often beautiful. But there is another way to speak about a place: not by trying to summarise it, but by remembering what would normally remain outside the postcard.

This is precisely where we/d, the project of perfumer Victoria Shaipova, begins. Its first drop is dedicated to Yerevan, where Shaipova lived for approximately a year and a half before returning to Moscow. The collection is built around personal experiences of the Armenian capital rather than a conventional representation of it.

The brand’s very name offers one of the keys to understanding the project. we/d refers to the English verb “weld” - to join through fusion. The metaphor is particularly fitting when applied to scent. A smell can bind a place to a moment, a person to a particular temperature of air, a room to a specific period of life. It can create an invisible seam between the present and something we believed had already disappeared.

And perhaps that is the most useful way to approach this first collection.

we/d does not exactly present four perfumes “about Armenia.” It presents four fragments of a memory of Yerevan.

It could be described as olfactory documentary / urban memory: a form of olfactory documentation in which attention shifts from fantasy to experience, from symbol to detail, and from the idealised representation of a city to what genuinely remains after living there.

Memory never preserves a city in its entirety. We do not retain its buildings, streets, people, temperatures, sounds and smells with equal clarity. Time performs its own editing.

A window remains. A texture. A particularly cold wall. Dust on a pair of shoes. A fruit bought at a market. Someone else’s laundry moving above the street. A conversation after dinner. The specific smell of an interior we may have entered only once.

A city survives within us through a collection of apparently minor details.

That is what makes the first we/d drop compelling. Yerevan is not presented through monuments or through a solemn narrative of history. It appears as a city that is lived in.

Its four compositions - 700/kg, Aftertaste, so washed and Reliquid - originate respectively from an Armenian market, the experience of a traditional table accompanied by coffee and cognac, laundry drying in the streets of Yerevan, and the cold walls of an old Armenian church.

Four radically different scenes which, taken together, construct something far more complex than a promotional image of the city.

In 700/kg, one of Armenia’s most immediately recognisable symbols - the apricot - is stripped of its symbolic role.

The starting point is an Armenian market: fruit beside spices, smells crossing over one another, products displayed side by side. The composition brings apricot together with leather, saffron and osmanthus.

The distinction may appear subtle, but conceptually it matters. The apricot is not placed on a pedestal to declare “Armenia.” It is positioned where it might actually be found: among stalls, boxes, spices, hands, leather and warm air.

It becomes less a cultural emblem than an everyday experience.

The bottle’s visual treatment strengthens this documentary quality. The fruit seems to occupy the glass itself while large, imperfect black handwriting crosses the surface. It does not resemble a conventional luxury perfume label. It feels closer to an altered photograph, a note written over a memory, or a page from a visual diary.

Aftertaste moves into an entirely different register.

Its point of departure is the Armenian table, where coffee and Ararat cognac appear and reappear around a gathering that seems capable of continuing long after dinner should have ended.

The name itself is particularly precise: aftertaste. It shifts attention away from the event and towards what remains after it.

A memory of a table is rarely only about food. What remains is the dark coffee in a small cup. The warmth of alcohol. The voice of someone seated opposite. A pause in conversation. A glass still left on the table. A stain. The sense that far more time has passed than expected.

The graphic language of the bottle seems to inhabit the same territory. Brown lines, stains and organic forms evoke spilled coffee, dried liquid or traces left behind on a surface.

Aftertaste does not need to illustrate a feast literally.

It appears to show its residue.

That gesture runs through much of we/d’s identity: rather than depicting a story, it preserves what the story leaves behind.

Perhaps the most radical example of this approach is so washed.

Its inspiration comes from an entirely ordinary Yerevan scene: laundry drying outdoors on lines stretched between buildings. The perfume places the familiar cleanliness of freshly washed fabric against the dust and industrial character of a large city.

Here, the notion of urban memory becomes particularly significant.

Because a real city is not remembered only through what we consider beautiful. It also survives through concrete, balconies, windows, cables, dry air, dust, damp fabric and metallic surfaces.

On the bottle itself appears the façade of a residential building and, in front of it, a small graphic sequence recalling clothes hung out to dry. It is the kind of scene one could easily overlook in everyday life.

That is precisely why it works.

This is Yerevan not as a destination, but as a place where someone lives.

There is something particularly contemporary in that decision. The perfume does not need to beautify every aspect of a city in order to express affection for it. It can accept contradiction, dust and imperfection.

Sometimes those imperfections are exactly what become the most persistent memories.

Reliquid, by contrast, turns towards a quieter Armenia. Its point of departure is the cold wall of an old Armenian church, an environment approached through austerity, stone and an almost spiritual sense of stillness.

Here another dimension of memory emerges: the memory of material.

We may remember a church visually — its architecture, height, proportions or the way light enters the space — but we also remember it physically. The temperature of stone. Dryness in the air. A trace of humidity. Silence. Dust. Shadow. The smell of an old wall.

Reliquid transforms architecture into sensory experience.

If 700/kg speaks of the market, Aftertaste of a gathering around a table and so washed of everyday urban life, Reliquid introduces the memory of something that seemed to exist long before our arrival: stone.

And so, without ever trying to define Yerevan, the four fragrances begin to construct a city.

It is difficult to separate the olfactory project from we/d’s visual identity.

All four perfumes share the same bottle architecture, yet each surface is treated radically differently: photographic imagery, handwriting, stains, drawings, apparently spontaneous marks and finishes that deliberately resist the polished perfection usually associated with luxury packaging.

In an industry where glass, typography and finish often aim to eliminate any trace of irregularity, we/d appears to move in the opposite direction.

Here, imperfection has a function.

A memory does not return to us in perfect resolution either. Some elements disappear. Others distort. And inexplicably, an insignificant detail can remain intact for decades.

The bottles seem to accept the same logic. Rather than acting simply as containers for a formula, they function almost as archival objects: altered photographs, annotated pages, fragments of something that already possesses a history.

The bottle does not merely contain a memory.

It begins to resemble memory itself.

Partial.

Irregular.

Sometimes damaged.

With some details fading and others, for reasons impossible to explain, remaining perfectly clear.

Perhaps this is why we/d’s visual language finds such a natural relationship with Yerevan: a city where volcanic stone, basalt, tuff, twentieth-century buildings, balconies, older walls and intense light coexist without any need to form a perfectly uniform surface.

In we/d, luxury does not seem to depend on perfection either.

It comes from something more difficult to achieve:

precision of observation.

Over the past several years, niche perfumery has spoken almost endlessly about storytelling. Every launch seems to require a story, a character, a journey, an emotion or an imaginary territory. Yet at times the narrative can feel like a layer added after the perfume itself.

Shaipova’s project becomes more interesting when considered in reverse.

First came the place.

Then the experience.

Then the memory.

And only after that, the perfume.

This is why olfactory documentary / urban memory feels like more than an attractive way of describing we/d. It can almost be understood as a possible genre within contemporary independent perfumery: using perfume not to invent a fantasy about a city, but to document how that city was actually experienced by one particular person.

Not searching for a universal Yerevan.

Preserving one’s own.

Because there is probably no single answer to the question of what a city smells like.

For one person, it may be a square or a garden. For another, the stairwell of an apartment building. For someone else, bread, petrol, a particular tree or the interior of a family home.

For we/d, that Yerevan appears somewhere between apricots and spices in a market, coffee and cognac after a long table, freshly washed fabric meeting urban dust, and the cold temperature of a stone wall.

Four small scenes against the scale of an entire city.

But that is how memory works.

It does not necessarily preserve what was most important.

It preserves whatever, for reasons of its own, managed to stay.

And somewhere between those fragments lies the meaning of the name we/d: that weld, that invisible seam through which scent can bind a moment to a place so firmly that, years later, encountering it again can make distance disappear.

It is not Yerevan turned into perfume.

It is something perhaps more intimate:

Yerevan turned into memory, and memory turned into scent.