The new perfume from this major fashion house is designed to smell like Dublin in the rain

With their perfume series Replica, French fashion house Maison Margiela create fragrances designed to target your olfactory imagination and bring you to a particular time or place. The scent Lazy Sunday Morning, labelled as the provenance and period of Florence 2003, is designed to smell like “soft skin and bed linen.” Music Festival, on the other hand, has notes of patchouli and ‘fresh bud’ and is set at Woodstock, 1969. There’s also Beach Walk, which smells of “sun kissed and salty skin,” set in Calvi, 1972, the squeaky clean Bubble Bath, set in Beverly Hills, 2005, the creamy Coffee Break, set in Stockholm, 2007, the fresh Sailing Day set in Paros, 2001 and all manner of poetic reproductions of familiar scents and locations, from By The Fireplace to Jazz Club to Whispers in the Library.

The latest location and period to become a scent in the series is When The Rain Stops, which aims to capture Dublin in 1967, or more specifically, “the recollection of sensations associated to the instants following a rain shower on a beautiful spring day.”

Maison Margiela Replica When the Rain Stops, 30ml, €56

It’s a clean floral and woody scent, with rose petal, pine needle and bergamot – think the wet fresh scent of Flower-Stall-On-Grafton-Street-After-Rain but a bit more woody. It’s a rich aroma of, as Maison Margiela puts it, “a promenade in the great outdoors — specifically, one of Ireland’s many lake regions — just as the rain stops falling. The air is filled with the scents of marshland, the nearby ocean’s salty spray, even a bit of asphalt from a country road in the distance.”

Perfumer Fanny Bal is the creator of the new scent and last year’s scent Autumn Vibes, and When The Rain Stops aims to bring a spring reimagination to that soggy forest fragrance for those seeking fresh air after a long period of lockdowns.

“I wanted to recall that precise moment when the sound of rain fades away, giving way to a soft light filtered by the branches of the surrounding conifers and the mist,” says Bal. “The warm smells of damp wood and fresh flowers wet with rain give us their most beautiful facets. When The Rain Stops celebrates a communion with the elements of nature: earth, water and wind. It is an optimistic fragrance: there is always good weather after the rain.”

The fashion house describes the scent as this;

“When the rain stops, the sky clears up. Clouds disappear, making way for bright, warm rays of sunlight. The landscape is dotted with muddy puddles. The air is filled with the invigorating smell of an early spring downpour. Raindrops drip from tree leaves. The dark, cold days of winter are finally behind us. It’s time to reconnect with nature.”

If you’re curious to take a whiff, Maison Margiela Replica When the Rain Stops, 30ml, €56 or 100ml, €113, is available now online and in store at Brown Thomas and Arnotts.

Photography by Maison Margiela. We may earn a commission if you buy something from any affiliate links on our site.