Dressing The Air is the brainchild of the London-based artist Paul Schütze.

In a career spanning 30 years, Schütze has exhibited his photographic and installation works in galleries and museums around the world, released over thirty albums of original recordings, scored a number of films and performed numerous concerts. He has collaborated with artists such as James Turrell, Josiah McElheny and Isaac Julien and musicians as diverse as Bill Laswell, Raoul Björkenheim, Toshinori Kondo, Lol Coxhill and Jah Wobble.

Dressing The Air is a unique open resource that aims to enrich creative thinking by encouraging a multi-sensory approach. A constantly evolving archive and creative news feed, Dressing The Air monitors and reports on a diverse range of art-forms from cinema to sculpture, painting to furniture design, land-art to perfumery.

Cuir d'Ange - Jean-Claude Ellena - Hermés
Hermes

Cuir d'Ange - Jean-Claude Ellena - Hermés

In what will be one of his parting gestures as Jean-Claude Ellena passes the baton at Hermés to Christine Nagel, he makes certain his legacy is set in stone. Ellena is, despite his exclusive tenure in this conservative bastion of haute-luxe, an elegant radical. Perfumers have been riffing on the theme of leather for centuries. Indeed Grasse in the middle ages was a center for leather tanning. Clever attempts to disguise the material's natural odor (the perfumed gloves presented to Catherine De Medici) resulted in the variety of olfactory marriages between leather and aromatic oils which continue to this day. That Ellena has succeeded in entirely transcending all known renderings of the smell of leather shouldn't surprise us. Having delivered a bouquet of alien flowers with Jour d'Hermés, a perfume of dazzling ingenuity, he now presents us with the virginal, androgynous skin of an impossible creature to wear as our own. Like most of his work Cuir d'Ange is luminous, spacial, audaciously clever and exquisitely beautiful, blooming on warm skin like remembered sunlight.  It will doubtless be much imitated and should become a turning point in the olfactory depiction of the sublime surface. A surface so beguiling that one forgets to enquire beneath it.