Queer de Russie

Green and gold sparks going up, like fireworks.

A tenth of this formula is ginger, taken as a CO2 extract rather than the more commonly available steam-distilled oil, so it smells like a root freshly harvested, in all its complexity. Everything else is built around it. The leather breaks with the cuir canon on purpose. The suede is made to read high-tech, as though grown in a lab on the top floor of a skyscraper, with an exciting touch of latex. The name is a word charged with as many meanings and emotions as there are shades of LGBTQ+ identity.

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.