‘Imagine an elegant woman wearing furs and smoking a cigarette on a terrace of one of the Seven Sisters, Moscow’s iconic skyscrapers, in the 1980s. There’s a glitzy private party going on behind her back, under the stucco ceilings, but she’s on her own, listening in to the night and the quiet hissing of champagne in her glass; this latter note, icy and sparkling and fruity, is what the ashy, smoky tuberose of Empire T starts with. Working with Nose Republic means being able to use the finest ingredients, so let me tell you one secret of this champagne accord: it opens on a bright yet earthy, spicy yet musky ambrette seed extract.‘ — Stéphanie Bakouche

‘The first time I saw a tuberose in bloom, I thought: “Its beauty is monumental.” A tall stalk bearing marble-white flowers at the top, if magnified 50 times its size, would resemble a tower with a terraced crown — a structure not unlike the Chrysler Building in Manhattan or one of Moscow’s skyscrapers from the 1950s. “The plant must be valued as an architectural structure”, asserted Karl Blossfeldt, the famous avant-garde photographer. He did, in fact, magnify the patterns of the natural world up to 30 times their size in his photos, making them look like striking “ironwork”. In Empire T, we did the same with tuberose — turning it into a print of Moscow skyline,’— Ksenia Golovanova