Up At Dawn Smelling Roses with Maison Margiela

Provenance and Period

Windsor, 2025

Fragrance Family

Floral Woody

Notes

How it happened? Well…I gave him a note. I still remember the scent in the air that morning fresh from the roses awakening, cool like bare skin touched by the dawn. We walked together until the first sunbeam. Nothing was said. Everything was felt.

It’s how the house describes their newest fragrance Up At Dawn. Dawn in Windsor, England in 2025. Quite a rare thing for perfumes in the Replica collection as inspirations are at least a few years if not decades away from the year the perfume is introduced to the market. It is by no means the first:

Flower Market was released in 2012 and inspired by 2011 Paris, France. Jazz Club was released in 2013 and set in 2013 Brooklyn, New York. Under The Stars was released in 2023 and set in 2022 Namibia. 

Memories don’t take long to become nostalgic, sometimes.

Up At Dawn opens fresh with pink pepper and its rosy facets with the pleasant smell of the soil wafting through in the misty air. You might expect a lighter rose as the perfume is called Up At Dawn, but it is precisely for this reason that the rose isn’t shy. Roses bloom early, their scent the strongest at dawn.

As the scent develops, we get a strong, jammy rose that somehow turns dewy. Like fresh rose petals meeting the misty morning air combined with orris and the sweet musky scent of ambrette. The rose and the musks become rather powerful as the earthy top note fades away.

The scent is grounded in more musks, a cashmeran note for the comforting early morning vibes. The patchouli is woody and mossy, giving this floral fragrance an edge you wouldn’t find in many rose perfumes.

It’s certainly more interesting than the other floral fragrances from Maison Margiela, like Springtime In A Park and Flower Market.

Let Perfume Mag know what you think of Up At Dawn.