Monocle: the scent of news

Launched in 2007, Monocle is an exclusive English magazine that covers topics ranging from international business and economics to culture and design. Monocle online has in short time become a valuable source of news and updates for the global market. What’s more, in order to guide it’s reader’s tastes and keep “an eye and an ear on the world”, Monocle has also opened a radio station and a store, with a selection of truly unique products.

Products such as the line of perfumes Scents 1, 2 and 3, produced exclusively by the perfume maker of Commes des Garçons, Antoine Maisondieu. The fragrances are inspired by unique and special atmospheres.
Scent number 1, for example, called Hinoki, recalls a still spring morning spent soaking in the baths of Kyoto’s famous Tawaraya Ryokan; the second, Laurel, on the other hand, is meant to capture memories of a sojourn in the ancient city of Batroun in Lebanon, the aroma of an ancient Mediterranean garden punctuated by the warm and strong essence of the laurel leaf.
Sugi (Japanese cedar) is the third fragrance, with a delicate, clean and energizing aroma, a blended scent that combines ingredients like the Mediterranean cypress, the pepper tree of Madagascar, the Florentine iris, the Virginia cedar and the vetiver of Haiti.
The packaging recalls the magazine’s elegant style, retro and contemporary at the same time. A few typographic marks, minimalist etchings on white, black or cream background, reminiscent of the unmistakable style of Fornasetti. Lacking any ostentatious decoration, understatement is preserved in the most typical English fashion. One would be hard pressed to do better for a perfume released by a periodical.
But that’s another story.

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Remember tomorrow is already here

Beauty, contents and containers: an interactive map for reading the contemporary world.

Packaging. A mixed blessing. Fatal attraction- you either love it or you hate it – that indissolubly forever binds us to goods.

In an evermore versatile and impelling way, packaging today constitutes the link between society and the world of industry, it is a bridge that connects territories that appear distant and yet that constantly interrelate.
As far as beauty is concerned, for over 45 years cosmetics and high-end Italian products have found a befitting setting in the Cosmoprof fair, place in which the atmosphere and the spirit of the times can be grasped close to; cosmetic packaging (along with food packaging) is in fact an absolute indicator of the changes in our lifestyles, intercepting the way trends are evolving, interpretation of the most advanced biotechnological studies.
By now you cannot separate a scent or a cream from the image that its packaging communicates – whether this belongs to a mass or a niche market, both if one is dealing with a new cosmoceutical finding or a biodynamic treatment. It is through the ways of interpretation offered by packaging that “pleasure goods” are able to appear more emblematic and intriguing. The task of the packaging hence is to adequately interpret the story that lies behind the development of a new cosmetic product, it being the duty of Cosmoprof to show it off at its best.

In other terms, one can say that it is indeed packaging that defines our daily experience, acting as a fact-finding interface, mass-medium through which we not only gain information but with which we form our taste, express our judgement, build our image. It is not by chance that it is considered an important worktool and motive of interest for many specialists, but that has also become an incredible field in which to experiment for artists and designers, directors, philosophers, intellectuals, writers and poets. Packaging marks out the folklore of post-industrial man and woman and to all effects has become a form of popular culture. You can no longer escape it.

As demonstrated by the magazine Impackt, that from 2002 to 2009 gathered and highlighted the reasons for so much attention, pinpointing the surprising connections between packaging and the liquid society in which we move; but also by uncovering and recounting exemplary as well as peculiar cases.
Well beyond the materic nature of the products and the physical nature of the product process, for Impackt packaging has always been a sign to be interpreted, a phenomenon to be investigated, an expressive means to be shared. Through packaging in turn Impackt has been able to grasp and transmit the most interesting aspects of our contemporary way of life and, to make the same accessible, it has become an alternative tool and way of interpretation.
Today, exploiting the opportunities made available by technology, Impackt again comes to life in the images of this interactive Map achieved along with Cosmoprof/Cosmopack, in a play of references between paper and the web that underlines the importance of a concept and of creativity, capable of going beyond the set pattern of things.
Framing the QR code on the image of the Map with smartphone, you enter into the world of Impackt, as ever a valid “tourist guide” conceived to cross the real and mental panoramas of the world of packaging.
Because if you aren’t born “”Impacktian“”, you still have the chance of becoming one.

Sonia Pedrazzini and Marco Senaldi

icona_pdf  Download pdf of the Map