From the ground up
(The New York Times)
Updated: 2010-10-17 12:31
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Fruits, flowers and animal prints burst onto the runway at the spring collections in Paris and Milan recently. Monkeys scrambled up the sides of a Prada blouse and wild orchids saturated dresses by Akris. In New York, the designers at Rodarte were inspired by the nature and redwoods of California. If fashion imitates life which imitates fashion, then now seems the time to have a big garden party.
Despite ash clouds, earthquakes and floods, nature is there to, well, nurture. And when feeling overly wired, a bit of the organic and primordial may be the perfect antidote.
"People are so often in front of their computer screens and detached from the sensual world," Mandy Aftel, a natural perfumer who wrote "Essence and Alchemy", told The Times. The home garden has become the home lab for harvesting a fragrance, and Ms. Aftel said she has ��observed an absolute explosion of interest.�� This community of natural perfumers explores the craft of making scents without the synthetic and heavy aromas in commercial perfumery.
Andrine Olson, who lives in Washington, steeps plants in 190-proof alcohol and presses flowers into fats like palm oil shortening to create perfumes, soaps and deodorants. Anya McCoy makes scents from the leaves and fruit of a Kaffir lime tree, jasmines and plumerias from her garden and sells them online for $60 to $125. ��Since 2007, I��d say my sales have increased 25 percent every year,�� she told The Times.
Some think a nice smell can be therapeutic. For a public art project in Brooklyn, Anne McClain installed a ��perfume fountain�� that emits fragrance from a heartshaped glass vessel.
Based on the Mexican drink horchata,the scent has milky notes and a touch of cinnamon. ��The idea was to create a perfume that was inspired by, and could evoke, a sense of compassion,�� she told The Times. Ms. McClain and other natural scent makers offer classes on tincturing, distillation and perfuming, where participants create takehome scents.
In bars, mixologists are doing their own distilling and infusing with fresh herbs to create liquors like tarragon-infused vodkas and creating fruit mixers from scratch, often using local ingredients.
In a beer-loving city like Copenhagen, an influx of foreign bartenders, mainly from Britain, are bringing back the shaker to concoct more sophisticated cocktails, wrote The Times. Umami, a restaurant that added a cocktail bar last year, infuses its drinks with Far Eastern flavors like green tea, cherry blossom liqueur and shiso leaves.
Maybe a bit of nature in a highball glass does the trick. For others, well-being comes in another vessel.
Perhaps a sense of control and calm can be had when a little bit of nature is encased in terrariums, which have begun gaining favor with creative types, The Times reported.
These miniature gardens combine the interest in handmade crafts with the do-ityourself and locavore movements. They have been best-selling items in garden stores and on Web sites, The Times reported. YouTube videos demonstrating how to make terrariums garner tens of thousands of views.
Paula Hayes, who has elevated terrariums to art, told The Times that they appeal to the human desire to nurture living things. ��It��s this beautiful little world you can care for,��she said. It��s comfort, safety and beauty in a bottle that has attained a state of equilibrium, an escape from everything else in reality that hasn��t. ANITA PATIL
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