About Aleesha
Founder & Creative Director
Inspired by memories
My journey into fragrance began, unknowingly, in the back of a campervan.
Travelling through Europe with my parents as a child, I went from inner-city Birmingham to places that felt entirely different to anything I knew.
Exploring the landscapes of the continent was a sensory adventure like no other. What stayed with me wasn’t just what I saw, but the palpable shift in how places felt, and observing the ways in which people lived differently.
Honed by expertise
Years later, wine gave me a framework for understanding that feeling. Terroir, the French concept that describes how environmental factors such as climate, soil, and landscape influence a crop, offered a way to articulate what I had sensed, the impact of place.
The first Ouverture collection pays homage to this, drawing directly from the regions where I first learned to recognise and refine that connection.
But the pull for me went deeper than this.
Established with thoughtfulness
My work has long centred on the cultural and ritual life of drinks, what they represent, why they matter, and how they are used. While writing my first book, exploring the anthropology of indigenous drinks, I began to understand the deeper origin of that focus.
For many, a sense of belonging is reinforced through inherited rituals, landscapes, and sensory memory. For others, those links are less intact. As someone of mixed heritage, I have often been aware of that absence, where cultural continuity has been interrupted, and where familiar markers of identity, rituals passed down, homelands moved away from, feel more distant.
Ouverture London is my way of sitting within that space. A way to create a sensory language that allows connection.
Each fragrance is shaped by landscape, culture, and ritual, whether of place or of use, giving a sense of place.
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