Empire T

Night-time Moscow, a black and white city not built to human scale.

A terrace on one of the Seven Sisters in the 1980s: furs, a cigarette, a glitzy party going on indoors under the stucco ceilings, and outside nothing but the night and the hiss of champagne in a glass. That hiss is icy and sparkling and fruity. It is where the ashy, smoky tuberose starts, on an ambrette seed extract that is bright yet earthy, spicy yet musky. Karl Blossfeldt magnified the patterns of the natural world up to thirty times until they looked like ironwork, and the tuberose gets the same treatment. A stalk of marble-white flowers that at fifty times its size reads as a tower with a terraced crown.

Nos Republic grew out of an eponymous blog, Ksenia Golovanova's first Telegram channel on the subject. The name comes from res publica, a public affair, and rests on the idea that smell is the rawest and least filtered sensation available, and therefore the one that levels people from very different countries and cultures.

The stories start in Golovanova's own culture and are built to carry past it: the longing for space, or a city seen at night from the top of a tall building. Seven releases now, each credited on its own page to the person who made it, Stéphanie Bakouche on four of them and Cristiano Canali, Valery Mikhalitsyn and Maria Golovina on one each. On several products Golovanova signs a material story herself and leaves the rest to the maker.