Notes on Feeling: Supriya Lele on Nostalgia and the Courage to Create

British-Indian designer Supriya Lele reflects on memory, complexity and the courage of making work that feels wholly her own, through the dusky, seductive world of Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle’s Northern Love fragranceFrédéric Malle  

“My earliest memory is arriving in India with my mum when I was very young. I remember stepping off the plane and being completely overwhelmed by the heat, the noise, the colour – everything all at once. The smells, the traffic, the ambient sounds in the background felt so different to the textural landscape I knew in the UK. It was almost a culture shock, but an incredible one: it was raw, emotive and visceral. I remember waking up at my grandparents’ house to the overhead fan, animals outside, traffic in the distance. My grandmother would pick fresh jasmine from the garden in the morning and pin it into her hair, or leave it on her table. Those sensory memories have stayed with me. They became part of my identity, and eventually part of my work – that feeling of two places, two worlds, existing at once.

“Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle’s Northern Love brings me back to that instinctive place. There’s something dusky and seductive about it, something almost makeup-like, which feels familiar to the things I’m always drawn to. I’m uncertain all the time when I’m making work, but that’s the beauty of it. You have to embrace the unknown. Sometimes I make more, sometimes I step away. That push and pull is part of finding your way through. Showing the work is where courage comes in. It’s vulnerable because the work is an extension of myself. It’s like inviting people into my private mind. But making it has taught me that courage is really just being fully yourself – doing your own thing on your own timeline and owning it.”

Supriya Lele’s relationship with fashion has always been deeply bound up with identity. Raised in the West Midlands in a British-Indian family, she initially enrolled to study architecture at the University of Edinburgh before switching to fashion, later completing an MA in fashion at the Royal College of Art in 2016. A year later, Lulu Kennedy selected her for Fashion East, the non-profit talent incubator which nurtures emerging talent, where she made her London Fashion Week debut. Lele launched her eponymous label in 2017, developing a language that draws together the sensuality of the sari, Nineties minimalism and the push and pull of her British and Indian identities. After three seasons with Fashion East, she received Newgen support from the British Fashion Council, staging her first standalone runway show in 2019 and becoming a finalist for the LVMH Prize the following year. Since then, Lele has refined her craft into something unmistakably her own: sheer fabrics, draping and body-conscious silhouettes that reveal as much as they conceal. Her collections continue to circle questions of femininity and cultural inheritance, materialising the visual codes she grew up with into clothes that feel intimate and modern.

Northern Love is the new perfume composed by Bruno Jovanovic for Éditions de Parfums Frédéric Malle. 

Composed like a bittersweet hug, it is a meditation on the courage to feel: to not resist our emotions, but embrace them. An ambery woody perfume of rare warmth, nostalgia and complexity. 

Northern Love by Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle is out now.