Perfumer Christine Nagel has been working in-house at Hermès for ten years now. However, her appointment at the storied luxury maison with deeply equestrian roots (Hermès was founded as a harness workshop, and then a saddlery, in Paris in the 1800s) had an ironic twist: Nagel was afraid of horses.
‘When you are a child, you try different activities... dance, or piano, or tennis, or horse-riding,’ she tells me in French, via an interpreter, at the Hermès HQ in London. ‘In my family, it was ballet and piano. So, I didn’t grow up with horses. And I was, in fact, rather frightened them. I thought they had very big teeth. But, of course, the horse was the first Hermès customer,’ she says, flashing her silk and cashmere Carré 100 Rocabar de Rire scarf, playfully printed with an illustration of a horse sticking its tongue out.
