ANOMALIA PARIS IN CANNES: FIVE YEARS OF TFWA, FOUR YEARS OF BEING PERFECTLY WRONG
There are certain rituals one does not question. For ANOMALIA PARIS, September in Cannes has become one of them. This year marked our fifth TFWA, once again from our suite at the Hôtel Martinez, where perfume, conversation, business, friendship and the particular kind of elegant chaos that only Cannes can produce have become part of the brand’s own calendar.
Five TFWA editions may not sound like a lifetime, but in independent perfumery they contain an extraordinary amount of history. Markets change, tastes mutate, brands appear and disappear, retail becomes more complicated, and the industry develops a new obsession roughly every fifteen minutes. Through all of it, Cannes has remained one of the rare occasions when the people behind the emails, purchase orders, launches and distribution plans actually sit across from one another, smell something together and have a real conversation.
This year, we were especially happy to welcome the partners who have been part of the ANOMALIA story, as well as the new faces who came through the doors of our Martinez suite for the first time. Some arrived for meetings, some for perfume, some for curiosity, and, as usually happens in Cannes, the most interesting conversations did not always begin with an agenda.
At the centre of everything were our two new creations, Matcha Woodoo and Fallen Milk, two very different interpretations of matcha designed to be worn separately, layered together or understood as a small argument against the idea that a trend has to smell the way everyone expects it to smell.
Matcha Woodoo takes matcha away from the predictable café fantasy and into something darker, drier and more textural, with woods, sandalwood and the strange elegance of a green material stripped of sweetness. Fallen Milk moves in the opposite direction, softer and more tactile, with the creamy comfort of milk that looks innocent until it begins changing everything around it.
Together they became our Cannes ritual: one dark, one soft, neither particularly interested in behaving like the matcha perfumes the market has already decided it understands.
TFWA has always been a peculiar mixture of theatre and reality. The Croisette is immaculate, the hotels are full, the calendars are impossible, and everyone pretends not to be exhausted. Behind the polished surfaces, however, this is still an industry built on human instinct. People smell, react, argue, remember, compare and occasionally fall in love with something they had no intention of liking.
That is why showing a new perfume in person still matters. A fragrance can be photographed beautifully, described convincingly and marketed perfectly, but there is always one moment that cannot be manufactured: the second after someone sprays it on skin and their expression changes.
This Cannes also gave us another reason to celebrate. ANOMALIA PARIS turned four, and, by now, celebrating our birthday during TFWA has become almost as traditional as presenting the collection from the Martinez. Four years is still young enough to remain dangerous, but old enough to have accumulated a history, a network of partners across the world and a sufficiently clear point of view to know what we refuse to become.
We have never been particularly interested in creating perfumes by committee or following an aesthetic simply because the rest of the market has agreed that it is commercially convenient. ANOMALIA was built around the opposite instinct: take something familiar, disturb it slightly, and keep going until the mistake becomes the interesting part.
So our fifth TFWA was not simply another trade fair. It was a few intense days of seeing old friends, meeting new ones, introducing Matcha Woodoo and Fallen Milk to the world beyond our own studio, celebrating four years of ANOMALIA and remembering why, despite everything that can make this industry maddening, perfume remains one of the most extraordinary businesses imaginable.
To everyone who came to see us at the Martinez, smelled with us, argued with us, laughed with us, discovered the new perfumes or has simply been part of ANOMALIA somewhere along the way, thank you.
Five TFWA editions later, Cannes still feels less like a trade show and more like one of our slightly unreasonable family traditions.
And we intend to keep it that way.
