So… you want to smell like a liminal space?
Charles Vickery’s fragrance house 12_things rejects aspirational perfumery in favour of scents rooted in urban decay, infrastructure, and mortality. The brand’s olfactory philosophy—expressed through fragrances like Void, Condensation, Infrastructure, and Cold Storage—deliberately corrupts familiar scent profiles by introducing notes of rain-soaked tarmac, moss, morgue metals, plastic, and human residue. Vickery frames perfume as a medium for confronting everyday brutality rather than escaping it, celebrating the grey concrete and industrial materiality of contemporary cities. The brand’s retail environment itself is designed as a liminal space that resists commercial polish. This approach constitutes a sustained critique of mainstream fragrance’s consumerist escapism, positioning scent design as a vehicle for dark realism and philosophical inquiry into beauty within detritus and abandonment.
Original article published on Dazed — AI-generated summary. Visit the website to read the full article at the source. Image via Dazed.
