Troye Sivan Smells As Good As You’d Expect – This Australian Fragrance Brand is Why
January 1 | 7 minute read
Words by Kerri Gordon
Originally published on | July 29
Something To Give Each Other wasn’t just the name of the album he was about to release, but a promise to dedicate his craft, his platform and his years to radical habits of collaboration and generosity. Enter: Tsu Lange Yor.
With Sivan’s creative vision – and his brother Steele Mellet’s strategic direction – at the helm, Tsu Lange Yor (named after a Yiddish toast meaning ‘To long years’) curates Australia’s greatest makers in the pursuit of providing a global platform for local talent, and to give everyone access to evocative fine fragrance and artful objects with heirloom potential.
Today, Tsu Lange Yor joins the MECCA family as the first Australian fragrance brand on our shelves. Between tour legs, the brother-founder duo joined us at MECCA HQ for a flat white and a chat.
“I did candles as merch, like years and years and years ago,” recalls Sivan, noting he’d likely be in the business of home and fragrance regardless of his career in music. “It's always been on my mind, always, and I think it was just like, waiting for the right time.”
It’s a testament to his brother: “He knew how badly I wanted to do it – I knew how badly I wanted to do it – but it was one of those things where I was always like if I do it, I want to do it right.”
‘Right’, he explains, was undeniably Australian and hyper personal, with a red thread of playful expression. “I knew that was going to take a lot of time and a lot of effort, and I think I was just really intimidated by it,” Sivan continued. “Steele said, ‘I will do this with you if you want to do it,’ and I could tell how serious he was – it was the belief and the push that I needed to be like, OK, yeah, let's do this thing that I've wanted to do for a really long time.”
Mellet, an intellectual property lawyer at the time and now the brand’s managing director, practically beams with passion for ‘TLY’, and the joys of learning, or doing, something new every day: “Having a small but incredible team and a few good advisors and mentors that we can always lean on means we learn very, very quickly,” he says.
It’s the pool of creative talent that TLY taps into and continues to feed and nurture that makes this brand uniquely treasurable. It’s a gateway to the art world, providing access to works by artist and industrial designer Joel Adler (responsible for the brand’s bottomless Bowl, hand-cast Oil Burner and EDP lids), world-first fragrance notes by olfactory mastermind and native botanical expert Craig Andrade, and campaign and creative from teams including Joe Brennan, Lauren Bamford, Holly Gibson, Gillian Campbell and Fernnando Miranda.
“Collaboration is one of the core pillars of my life,” says Sivan, with a catalogue of co-created music crediting the likes of Charli XCX, Ariana Grande, and Spain’s Guitarricadelafuenta.
“It's one of the greatest pleasures to me in life, and one of our goals was for the brand to feel Australian in the way that we have such incredible creatives here, I wanted to celebrate them and work with them.”
He adds: “I love going overseas and showing people the Tsu Lange Yor work and being like, ‘Yeah we did that in Sydney, everyone's Australian’; it’s just really, really cool to me, and such an important part of this whole thing for us.”
Mellet continues: “It brings in a lot of different perspectives… It might be completely unrelated to our heritage or our own personal background, but because we've got this framework that supports collaboration, it still makes sense.”
Perhaps unknowingly, it is the brothers’ heritage and familial upbringing that allows this framework to, well, work. “Our home was a Jewish home, centred around really strong ideals about family and a very, very strong open-door policy,” shares Sivan. “It was about making people feel comfortable, and not being pretentious or precious, or too delicate with your home.”
A home, he adds, “is something to be shared and something to be enjoyed.” It's about creating a feeling, “bringing in people who are much more talented than you are, and hearing what they have to say, being open-minded, free and playful.
“I didn't want to rely on putting my face on something and just kind of putting it out there. The market is very saturated with a lot of people who work in entertainment trying to do other things,” he adds, implying, between the lines, that Tsu Lange Yor is not a fleeting, once-removed ‘celebrity brand’.
“The whole way, we've had to make decisions around doing things in Australia or doing it with the support Troye has in America,” shares Mellet, adding, “A lot of the time we've chosen the less-supported option.” Launching into MECCA, he says, “feels like validation, and like a reward for those tough choices.”
On our shelves, you’ll find three of each of the brand’s eau de parfums, candles and oil burner blends, together with the brand’s objects; the Oil Burner , and the Bowl (with a caveat from Sivan that they’re “just getting started”).
Named after his Hebrew birth year, TLY 5755 is Sivan’s signature scent, and the first the brand worked on. “Talk about steep learning curves,” he says. “It started with a session with Craig Andrade, the perfumer, in his studio in Sydney. We went through his entire scent library. It feels like so long ago now, but going into that session thinking that I didn't like citrus because I didn't like lemon is now so hilarious to me – bergamot is one of my favourite notes and it's in so much of what we do now.
“The scent is so dynamic and so layered, rich and interesting, that I still feel like I'm getting to know TLY 5755 every day, whether it's in its candle form, or on the oil burner, or on myself, or interestingly, when I smell it on somebody else. It treats its wearer with respect.”
The weighty brass alloy Bowl, with its ring-shaped, bottomless form, may be perceived as contrarian – but Sivan believes it encapsulates the true spirit of TLY: “It's playful and cheeky and interesting, but also still totally artful and thoughtful; I just love it.”
There’s a Yiddish term, 'naches' (pronounced with a throaty ch), that represents the visceral sense of pride felt for someone else and their achievements. It’s a hearty sentiment that runs through the brand and its founders, undeniably evident in the way they speak about their team, their collaborators, their creations, and each other. It also summarises how we feel, being able to share TLY’s marvels with our community.
Outside of TLY, “he can sneeze and I get naches,” says Mellet of his toddler, Sal, as Sivan adds, “I got naches yesterday because Sal inherently knows how to share.”
He adds, “Also, the fact that the whole world all of a sudden is just like ‘Oh my god, Charli XCX’ is giving me a lot of naches. She deserves it, she's been doing this exact thing for so long; it couldn't be happening to a nicer person.”
Sivan joins Charli XCX on the SWEAT tour of North America in September, before returning home to tour Australia in November. Tsu Lange Yor, however, is here, at MECCA, now.
