Serviette Fragrances11 Images
Trey Taylor is obsessed with good taste. With how it’s formed, how it reflects who you are, and how taste – and what Pierre Bourdieu calls “cultural capital” – can help you move through society. It’s something that he’s explored throughout his career as a journalist, pop culture curator and Dazed’s former film editor, and now it’s the concept at the heart of his new venture: a fragrance brand called Serviette.
Launched last month, Serviette comprises four fragrances that bring together Taylor’s specialty of mixing of high and low culture. Byronic Hero is a rosy oud with a note of diesel exhaust, while Frisson d’Hiver captures the smell of the cold and snow of the Rocky Mountains where he grew up in Canada. Roche Parfum is a musky raspberry scent and Sour Diesel, named for the famous strain of weed, features notes of Egyptian geranium, rhubarb and marijuana. It’s all about the familiarity of tradition combined with something more unexpected, Taylor says.
“I wanted to explore class dynamics, taste, and societal markers of tradition through the brand. I want people to question the authenticity of these things, heritage brands, the ways we are marketed to, and how our taste is formed,” he tells Dazed. This mission extends to the name, Serviette, which stems from Nancy Mitford’s satirical essay on upper-class idioms and how social background dictates who says ‘napkin’ versus ‘serviette’, as well as to the brand’s storytelling – Frisson d’Hiver is named for an Alfred de Musset poem that Taylor’s loves, for example – and newsletter which will delve into topics that will spark the readers’ interest, like New York’s urban cowboys of Death Avenue.
“The brand is about proposing a return to ’good taste’. I put that in quotes because, really, who am I to dictate that? But the idea is to encourage people to be more culturally curious,” says Taylor. Dazed caught up with him to find out more about the new brand.
When did you have this idea to start a fragrance line?
Trey Taylor: I was laid off a few times in the media, as one happens to experience, so I thought, let me take this different route where I can still tell stories. I can build a brand. It won’t just be a perfume brand. I want to really go deep with it and inject cultural symbols and talk about class dynamics and power dynamics within fragrance. But the practical side of it was that I needed to learn how to make perfume first. So during the pandemic, that was sort of my thing. I spent a good three years learning and doing blind smell tests.
Then I contacted this independent perfumer in Brooklyn, Marissa Zappas, and basically begged her to teach me. I think she was a bit reluctant but I kind of wore her down because you can only get so far on your own. I was doing classes with her, just one-on-one for several months. I have other amazing friends too, who are independent perfumers. People like Maxwell Williams of UFO Parfums were super helpful, as well as Callum Rory Mitchell, who has this line called Pêdrisat. So I was slowly building up this community of people who could tell me what the hell I was doing.
When you were learning about perfumes, did you already have in your mind that you wanted to do this brand about good taste and cultural knowledge?
Trey Taylor: That came after. While living in London, especially as a Canadian originally, I met so many people with double-barrelled names who had all this rich history or cultural nuance that I found fascinating. Throughout my time there, I encountered all this cultural knowledge I did not have. I realised this was another way, financials aside, to move through society. I became kind of obsessed with taste. I started looking into Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital. I do think that is a bit of a dated theory in some ways, with kids on TikTok now forming their personal tastes and following micro-trends like strawberry girl summer or cottagecore.
For me, the catalyst to start this brand was the idea to encourage people to be more culturally curious. It is so easy to pop a search into AI, get an immediate answer spat back at you, and never look further. That is kind of a new epidemic of sorts, nobody wants to go deeper. I am providing, and this is pretentious, but deep levels of lore for my brand. If you want to spray the perfume and just smell amazing, go forth. But if you want to dive deeper, there are so many layers. I want to explore that through storytelling, and hopefully, it resonates with people who are trying to develop their own personal taste, figure out who to listen to, and create a kind of cult community of sorts.
What are some ways you’ve put that extra storytelling into the brand?
Trey Taylor: Every bottle will come with an embroidered serviette, which you can spray and wave around dramatically if you like. The idea behind it comes from the Victorian era, when foul odours were everywhere. People would use fabric scented with perfume to combat bad smells. It was also seen as a health precaution, breathing in foul air was considered bad for you.
The green colour I use is based on baize, the woven wool fabric used on gaming tables, which was also used between the servants’ quarters and the living areas in grand houses. It is a subtle nod to the class dynamics in the brand. Every touchpoint is infused with a deeper story, should you care to dig into it. It’s just a catalyst to be more curious about things.
Once you developed the concept for the brand, how did you translate that into scent and fragrance?
Trey Taylor: I don’t think the fragrances themselves were really conceptually born out of the story that I’m trying to tell. For me, it was mostly just scents that were personal to me, my takes on things that would be comforting to smell. I started experimenting, adding notes that maybe you would not expect in that kind of composition.
My fragrance Byronic Hero is a rosy oud, and I added this material that gives a note of diesel exhaust. So you’re smelling this nice rosy oud, this deep jammy rose, and then you get a whiff of a lorry that just drove by or something. In that sense, I’m trying to tweak tradition. I want to cosplay as a heritage brand, but I want to surprise you with something unexpected.
Was it a long process to perfect each fragrance?
Trey Taylor: Whenever I create a good formula, I have amnesia. I’m like, how did I do this?
Like when you write an article and then read it back.
Trey Taylor: Exactly. I found something I wrote back in 2016 about designer James Flemons. Remember him? I was like, this is kind of good. How did I do this? It’s the same thing with scent. How did I create such an amazing – in my opinion – fragrance? The process was just trial and error for a long time. You never really know when a fragrance is fully done. There are still changes I would like to make, but it’s like writing an article. You read it back and think, ‘I wish I chose this word,’ or ‘I wish I didn’t use that phrase.’
My process also involved market testing with my friends. I constantly sprayed them with new trials and asked, ‘what do you think?’ I made them rank all my scents. I did this for months, ranking them from best to worst to determine what would sell but also be palatable. The actual creation process was mostly me listening to Jonny Greenwood over and over again, compounding alone in my studio.
Are you thinking about what is next for the brand?
Trey Taylor: I really want to build a community. Like I said, I want people to feel like they are part of the brand. And by that, I do not mean just buying products or signing up for a newsletter. I want to put whatever profit I make, if I make any, because this has been extremely expensive, into creating culture or creating salons where we can smell things, a smell club. I want to create something that gives back and makes people feel empowered to learn.
To break out of the algorithm, which just feeds you the same interests over and over again.
Trey Taylor: Exactly. One of the most eye-opening things for me, and what made university completely worth it, was learning how to research properly. I remember going to the library one day, and they showed me how to use EBSCOhost to search for things in ways I had never considered. There are all these databases full of archives, New Yorker archives, WWD archives, just sitting there, free to access with a New York Public Library card. There is so much interesting stuff out there that people are not taking advantage of.
The way technology works now, we just keep being shown things we are already interested in. It stops you from falling down research rabbit holes and discovering new things.
Trey Taylor: Right. The days of going to a record store, thumbing through vinyl and stumbling across something unexpected are disappearing. We need to find ways to bring that kind of discovery back. Yesterday, I was lightly reading Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld, which is all about how algorithms dictate culture. He points out that nearly every digital space we engage with, TikTok, Instagram, Gmail, Spotify, YouTube, is governed by an algorithm designed to keep you hooked.
When it looked like TikTok might be shut down in the US, I saw people panicking, wondering how they would find new music. It is like we have forgotten how to discover things for ourselves.
Trey Taylor: Exactly. There needs to be more friction in discovery, some effort involved, because if everything is just handed to you, who are you really? That is a big cultural question.
