Scented Sunday : Buona notte Milano, bonjour Paris, by Thomas de Monaco

While scrolling through a LinkedIn notification, we came across a post written by Thomas de Monaco, the eponymous founder of his fragrance brand. Barely recovered from the buzz of Paris Perfume Week, he wanted to share his impressions of a lively trade show—at times a bit cramped—full of both charm and flaws, yet endowed with perhaps its greatest quality: being unmistakably Parisian. Moved by the spontaneity of his text, we asked Thomas if we could publish it on our website, to which he immediately replied, “Sorry for the bad words!” We found them entirely fitting, on the contrary.

Our team. Three of us on a table not bigger than a DJ booth. Shoulder to shoulder, back to back, shouting into each other’s ears because the room will not allow anything quieter. By six in the evening our voices are already gone. A buyer from somewhere leans across the bottles. A content creator I have never met before smiles and waits her turn. A distributor I did not expect to see in Paris puts his card into my hand and says we should talk later, somewhere else, anywhere but here. Later. Always later. The word that holds a Paris Perfume Week together.

There is no break. None of us have one. We stand, we sweat, we laugh too loud because that is the only volume that carries. Someone brings water, someone forgets to drink it. A client from two years ago appears out of the crowd and hugs me before I even recognise him. Body to body. That is how this fair works, and it always worked like that, even when it was smaller, even when it was hidden behind its own walls.

The first two years it lived at the Bastille Design Center. Lower ceilings, fewer bottles, more corners, a place where you could step outside for a second and breathe. It was inner circle, almost protected, something growing quietly before it was ready to be seen. Now, third edition, Palais Brongniart. Stone, columns, the old stock exchange. One hundred and sixty brands. The room has tripled in temperature. Crowded, heated, noisy. Many people complained. I complained.

And I have never been happier at work.

The Carnival

Esxence in Milano. Karneval auf Steroiden. Ein Rummelplatz voller bunt und peinlich geschmückter Schiessbuden. Billige grosse Shows für kleine, teure Fläschchen. I will not translate that. The German carries the weight.

We had a small booth there last year, by invitation. At some point during those days, the three of us looked at each other and did not have to speak. Our eyes said it. No, not anymore, never again. It was not an argument. It was recognition. You know the feeling. The body registers the decision before the mind finds language for it, and then you carry it together.

What we saw was not noise. Milano is more controlled than that. What we saw was staging. Every booth produced, lit, decorated, arranged as if the perfume itself were a supporting act to the set around it. Bigger, brighter, each brand pushing further into space instead of pulling people closer. The room looked like a fair is supposed to look, and that was the problem. It had started to perform the idea of a perfume fair instead of being one.

This year the fair moved to June, and something essential broke. A fragrance fair without spring misses its own moment. Perfume belongs to that shift after winter, when skin wakes up and begins to react again, when people start asking themselves what they want to smell like. In June everything is already decided, the air is heavier, the rhythm slower, and you can still sell bottles, but that first impulse, that curiosity, is gone.

We will keep our hotel suite in Milano, next door to the fair. We will work with our partners, we will do what needs to be done. But there is a difference between being present and being aligned.

The Room

Paris does the opposite. It removes the distance. There is no construction to hide behind, no atmosphere thick enough to carry you. You stand there with what you have made, and that is enough or it is nothing.

Not everyone likes that kind of proximity. I watched a buyer come down from a polished presentation upstairs, step into the crowd below, look around at the density, the movement, the heat, and conclude that this could not be niche anymore. He said it as if he had identified a flaw.

What he saw as chaos was concentration. Brands showing pieces that exist only there, only for those days, only for those people. No buffer, no filter, no protection. The reaction is immediate, and so is the judgement. That kind of exposure leaves no room for illusion, and maybe that is exactly what makes it uncomfortable. True niche.

We have trained ourselves to read certain signals as quality. Space, silence, decoration, distance. When those signals disappear, when everything becomes physical and direct, it is quickly interpreted as something less refined. But refinement does not always live in quiet rooms. We are a quiet house, but our whisper holds only because of the noise around it, because contrast sharpens perception, and in that density a softer voice does not disappear, it draws you closer.

Culture Counts

The difference is not only the fair, it is what surrounds it, what holds it, what continues once you step outside and realise nothing actually stopped. You leave the Palais and within seconds you are somewhere else, but still inside the same conversation. A small table, a coffee that goes cold because nobody is paying attention to it, a perfumer you saw hours before now speaking slower, more precise, without the pressure of the crowd, and suddenly the scent you tried earlier makes more sense because it is no longer competing with fifty others in the same breath.

You walk through the streets and the whole thing stretches. It does not close, it expands. Someone disappears into a side street, someone else pulls you into a place you did not plan to go, and the day rearranges itself without asking. That is where things start to connect, not in front of a stand, but between places, between moments. Perfume behaves the same way. It does not stay where you spray it. It moves, it lingers, it attaches itself to people, to rooms, to fragments of time, and then it reappears somewhere else when you least expect it.

In a city like Paris, this movement feels natural. In the heart of cities, not on commercial grounds where business is organised, executed, and closed, but inside places where things begin before the fair and continue long after it is gone, where perfume moves through the streets like an idea, carried from one encounter to the next.

Where We Go

And somewhere in that movement, between one meeting and the next, between noise and silence, between the room and the street, you start to understand why certain places matter more than others, not because they are louder or bigger or better organised, but because they allow things to happen that you cannot schedule. Ideas travel like scent, quietly, without announcement, turning corners, slipping through doors, finding their way into conversations that were never planned, and once you step into that, you stop trying to control it and begin to follow it.

So we move. Not away from one place and towards another in a strategic sense, but following that current wherever it feels alive. San Francisco in June, Firenze in September, Cannes in October, each with its own rhythm, its own way of bringing people together, and then back again, because some places you do not visit once, you return to them to see what changed, and what did not.

And Paris stays in that loop, not as a stop, but as something you carry with you even when you leave, because the conversations do not end at the door, they stay somewhere in the back of your head, ready to pick up again the next time you are there, or somewhere completely different, and if there is a direction in all of this, then it is simple – we move towards the places where this still feels like joy.

Mes baguettes, mes fromages, mes vins, mes amies, mon Paris. À bientôt.

Wishing you all a lovely scented Sunday,

Thomas

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