Adelle has been interviewed online by Dazed's olfactory aficionado Emily Dinsdale, discussing the art of writing about perfume, including an archive of personal photos from the vaults...
'We may have expensive dreams, but very few of us have ready access to luxury. We’re besieged by grandiose advertisements that suggest alternate worlds of decadence, success and sensuality. Perfume is one of the few ways we can possess or imaginatively experience this kind of fantasy – it’s a token, a portal.
Stripe began writing about the definitive perfumes she remembered from her youth. She found it enabled her to access latent memories of growing up and to conjure and explicate her recollections of her mother – an extraordinary “high glamour” hairdresser and “working-class capitalist” who loved Jilly Cooper and Margaret Thatcher alike, and whose memory casts a long and inimitable shadow in Stripe’s life. What began as straight-up non-fiction features on fragrances such as Rive Gauche, Dewberry and “the ubiquitous” Georgio Beverly Hills evolved into a series of autobiographical vignettes. “I realised the memoir aspect was far more compelling than the actual factual writing I’d done. I didn’t want to write a non-fiction account of perfume, I wanted it to be more personal, because perfume is so personal, isn’t it? It takes us to another place. When we smell it, we’re immediately transported to a place in time, another era. It has the ability to let us travel.”'