Do you think that the dream-like aesthetic is on trend at the moment?

Well, I guess Blade Runner has just come out. That’s got a dream/memory aspect to it. There’s a certain melancholia that comes with that dream quality. It’s really part of that language and vocabulary that people have out there. Just like there’ll be comedy aspects, there’s a certain emotion that comes with that sense of nostalgic dream in the sense of ambiguity that you get out of those story lines. It opens a lot of questions and makes your mind expand.

And that goes back to the vital aspect of memory.

Yeah. Very much with Map of the Heart, it was really based around the thread of ‘what it is to live’ and what the story of memory is. It makes you feel more human and more alive, to remember. With a lot of the scents that’s what we’re experiencing.

The Clear Heart is very youthful – an exuberance filled with salts and the smell of oceans and grasses. It really had that youthful experience of running down sand dunes. The Red Heart is more ripe, fertile and quite sexual, and the Black Heart was about having ‘to experience life you have to come so close to the edge of death to get that rush out of it again’. Gold Heart was much more a restorative peace, which came out of mythology and the abundance within the lands. The Pink Heart came out with another feeling of life, which was based more around a hallucinogenic. It was much more this experience of an opiated state that you could really go into; an outer-body experience. But, there’s more to it than that. Within the pink story one of the threads we pursued was the smell of plastic toys. It was quite a bizarre thing but it was based on the smell of blowing up a beach ball. As much as you would think that’s probably a repulsive smell, it kind of works in a sense of memory and escapism.

Similarly with Purple Heart, which was around the idea of valor, it came from the dirt of the lands and this feeling of something out of the earths, something heroic rises and a more floral scent rises over the dirty tones. It was almost built backwards. Usually you would start with something bright and it settles to something deep, this went the other way round so it was quite interesting. Even within that, the act of valor was really interesting too; based on the smell of ink. Smelling an ink well.

‘What is it around what is it to live? What is it that is the expression of it?’ – that’s the great thing with these collaborations and with the noses that we work with, they are all storytellers.

And since you’re getting lots of different people involved, they would all have different perceptions of things.

Yeah. Most of the fragrance work has been with Jacques Huclier, who’s one of the noses. Originally when we first started we sent out a visual brief, similar to a film brief, and seven or eight fragrances came back from Givaudan. We then picked three lines to explore from. All of the fragrances were from different people but the three that we chose were Jacques, strangely enough. So, he became our partner within it and we’ve recently collaborated with a junior perfumer at Givaudan to develop the pink. We also have another collaborator, Giovanna, our fragrance developer. She previously worked at YSL in developing fragrances so she is a huge asset to us.

Are you planning on doing other hearts?

There’s been a lot of intrigue around that. The bottle itself is something that has that sense of ‘ugly beauty’ and I think that’s what we always wanted. Something poetic. People either love it or hate it. As far as what else to develop from here we’ve been talking about a different millilitre sizes, but we’re still trying to explore those ideas. It’s not necessarily like a fragrance brand that goes into candles. Map of the Heart is much more an experiential brand, so it’s a different story all together. Where it goes next may be very different. The magazine is a big part of the development though.

Do you see the communication through the magazine expanding?

Yeah. And that’s key to it. The fragrance is kind of ‘exit through the gift store’ as far as the magazine’s concerned. But it gives us a reason to produce it and inevitably it is trying to find that attraction through creatives. People are interested because it’s so ambiguous, so you can bring in photographers, writers and artists, so many different virtues of media because they all have a different sense and experiential relationship with fragrance. Which is again harking back to starting in film.

Do you think your vision has changed over the years?

You’re always trying to reinvent your vision. You have these moments of reinvention and that’s the interesting thing, you’re always trying to look at what the streets are doing, what societies doing, what fashion’s doing. You’ve got to be always moving forward.