When Wood Works

Creative Direction: Kevin Breen
Photography: Jake Terrey
Fashion Direction: Kevin Breen & Kim Payne
Grooming: Kavya Rajpowell / MMG Artists
Senior Producer: Steff Hawker
Casting Director: Jean-Marc Modelet
Lighting Assistant: Scar Salario
Model: Ethan Haddad / Marylin Agencyo

There is a certain music to a woodshop before work begins. The bench is squared to the wall; clamps hang in quiet chorus from a pegboard; a chalkline rests like an idea across raw pine. Light arrives in planes rather than beams, and the dust in the air is the thinnest admission that a transformation is possible. You could call it theatre. You could call it ritual. Joinery, though, has a better word for it: preparation. What follows is a meditation on that measure, how elegance is less a spectacle than a structure, and how a fragrance can carry its own joinery. Amouage’s Opus XVI Timber belongs to the Library Collection, the house’s chapter devoted to knowledge; here the theme is not information but wisdom, the seasoned kind that knows when to hold and when to breathe. At first encounter Timber stands upright, woody, assured, “boldly vertical”, and then, like a well-made joint, it reveals the logic beneath the surface: lines ease, stresses resolve, and nuance steps forward without fanfare.