DRIFT AUDIO
Listen to this story
Choose a voice, then press play.
Madrid’s The New Society spent seven years dressing children, then women. Its newest object has no seams at all: a €75 unisex parfum called Late August.
There is no fabric in The New Society‘s new release, which is unusual for a label whose entire reputation rests on cotton, linen and wool meant to be worn out and handed down. Late August, a 100 ml eau de parfum priced at €75, is now live on the Madrid company’s own store, billed as its first fragrance and filed, like nearly everything the brand makes, under the heading of memory. The product page opens with three words, “A quiet beginning.”, and then spends most of its copy on a feeling rather than a formula: the final stretch of summer, sun on skin, the first sign that the season is about to turn.
View this post on Instagram
Signal. What happened: Madrid label The New Society has released Late August, its first fragrance, timed to arrive alongside its Fall/Winter 2026 collection, The Journey. Exact object: Late August Parfum, a unisex eau de parfum sold in a single 100 ml size at €75, made in Spain. When and where: list as in stock on the brand’s web store as of September 26, 2026, with delivery quoted at one to two working days within Spain, three to five across Europe, and six to eight for the rest of the world. Source: The New Society’s own product and launch pages. Why it matters: a mid-sized, founder-owned fashion label is entering fragrance at an accessible price rather than licensing its name to a beauty conglomerate, and it is doing so as an extension of a seasonal collection rather than as a standalone beauty line. Earlier: DRIFT’s September coverage of Patta’s first fragrance, Saffron Attitude, made with perfumer Marcus Elizabeth.
The timing is literal. The scent is named for the last days of August and it lands in the last week of September, just as the brand’s autumn clothing reaches the shop floor. The campaign video on the launch page loops soft, sun-bleached footage over a single line of copy promising a fragrance that feels both bright and grounded. It is a small release in the grand scheme of the fragrance business, but a telling one for a company that began, less than a decade ago, as a children’s clothing startup with a single founder and a wholesale order book.
stir
The note breakdown published alongside the launch describes a composition built on four families at once: citrus, green, floral and woody. The opening pairs mandarin and orange with fig, which the launch materials describe as green and creamy with an earthy edge. Fig is a note that tends to carry the whole tree with it in modern perfumery, the milky sap and the leaf as much as the fruit, and it is the clearest link between the scent and its Mediterranean framing. The idea, as the brand tells it, is a landscape that returns to you without requiring you to be there.
Violet sits at the heart, a choice that usually reads as powdery and slightly cool, and it is set against sandalwood to keep the middle of the fragrance from floating away. The base is where the composition leans toward comfort: tonka bean, musk and benzoin, a trio that tends to sit close to the skin and linger longest after the citrus has burned off. The brand pitches the result as a year-round wear rather than a summer-only splash, fresh but not thin, warm but not heavy, and says the fragrance shifts depending on who is wearing it.
What the brand has not published is the name of the perfumer. Neither the product listing nor the launch page credits a nose or a fragrance house, which is common for fashion-label scents at this price level but leaves open who actually built the formula. The shop page also skips the pyramid entirely; shoppers who land there get mood copy, a size, a country of origin and an ingredient list, and not much else.
huh
That ingredient list turns out to be the most revealing document attached to the launch. Mandatory under European cosmetics labelling, the INCI declare on the product page names the handful of components a buyer is legally entitled to know about, and several of them line up neatly with the published notes.
Near the top sits tetramethyl acetyloctahydronaphthalenes, the regulatory name for the aroma molecule better known as Iso E Super. It is one of the most widely used materials in contemporary perfumery, a dry, velvety woody note that many wearers describe as smelling more like warm skin than like anything recognizably perfumed, and it goes a long way toward explaining the brand’s talk of a scent that changes from one person to the next. Coumarin, the sweet, hay-like compound that gives tonka bean its signature, appears too, alongside vanillin, which fits a base described as leaning on benzoin. Limonene and pinene point to the bright citrus and green opening, and beta-caryophyllene adds a peppery, woody tone that often turns up in formulas built around natural extracts.
Two more entries are functional rather than aromatic. Butyl methoxydibenzoylmethane, better known as avobenzone, is a UV filter, included to protect the juice from light damage in the bottle. Pentaerythrityl tetra-di-t-butyl hydroxyhydrocinnamate is an antioxidant that serves a similar stabilizing role. Neither will change how Late August smells on the skin, but both say something about a product designed to sit on a sunlit dressing table, which is more or less the scene the campaign keeps returning to.
to
The New Society’s story starts with its founder, Estefanía Grandío, a Galician designer who spent roughly fifteen years working for other people before building her own label. According to a 2019 profile in Modaes, she spent more than six years inside Inditex working across the design teams for Zara Woman, Massimo Dutti and Oysho, and later reporting also places her at Burberry before she struck out alone. Spanish trade press dates the start of the project to 2016 and a seed investment of €60,000, while the brand’s own About page gives 2019 as its founding year, the season its first collection actually shipped.
View this post on Instagram
That first collection, Spring/Summer 2019, was a children’s line, and it debuted at trade fairs in Florence, Paris and Tokyo. FashionNetwork reported in 2018 that the label already had around fifty stockists before its first season hit shelves, with only about ten of them in Spain and South Korea accounting for roughly a third of revenue. Grandío’s approach from the start was wholesale first, building through independent boutiques abroad before worrying about her home market.
The shift toward adult clothing came from customers rather than a business plan. Grandío has said that shops and online shoppers kept asking for the children’s designs in women’s sizes, and that many women were simply buying the largest kids’ size, a 16, which fits close to an adult XS. A small women’s capsule followed for Spring/Summer 2021. By 2024, FashionNetwork reported that the women’s line accounted for 40 percent of sales and was growing faster than kidswear, with the company, fully owned by Grandío, forecasting more than €5 million in revenue that year. Stockists by then included Galeries Lafayette, Le Bon Marché, Printemps and John Lewis, and a 2023 Modaes report logged a new space at Harrods. In January 2025, FashionNetwork reported a €7 million target for the year, along with a new US sales agent for the women’s line working out of showrooms in Dallas, Los Angeles and New York. By then the United States had become the kids line’s biggest market by revenue, and the company said it was looking for a partner to take the women’s collection into Asia.
Late August is billed as a first, and as a finished perfume it is. It is not, however, the company’s first attempt at the category. In a 2021 report, Modaes noted that The New Society had previously tried home goods and cosmetics lines, only to pull them after they failed to reach minimum production volumes, and that Grandío intended to bring those categories back eventually. Five years on, the fragrance is the first of those plans to reach the store.
flow
The perfume is not a standalone beauty drop. It launches alongside The Journey, the Fall/Winter 2026 collection that runs across the brand’s women’s, teen, kids and baby lines. The collection is built around travel, specifically the way places leave traces in the things people carry home, and the fragrance slots into that brief as a kind of invisible souvenir. On the homepage, the perfume sits directly above the women’s campaign, sharing the same muted palette and the same slow, grainy footage.
There is a manufacturing distinction worth noting. The New Society’s clothing is designed in Spain and mostly made in Portugal by family-run workshops, a point the brand repeats across its site. Late August reverses that: the list states plainly that the fragrance is made in Spain. For a company that has built much of its identity around where and how its garments are produced, the perfume is the rare product that stays entirely at home.
Japan has been part of the picture since that debut. Tokyo was one of three cities where the first collection was shown to buyers, and by 2019 the company listed Japan among the markets where it worked through a local distributor, alongside Belgium, the Netherlands, the United States and South Korea. The connection is still visible today: the women’s section of the brand’s web store carries a dedicated Tokyo Selection, and the site prices directly in yen for Japanese shoppers. Whether Late August will reach Japanese wholesale partners, or stay a direct-to-consumer product for now, has not been announced.
fin
The name is evocative enough that The New Society is not the only house to reach for it. An unrelated label, Memree, released a perfume also called Late August in 2024, and Basenotes’ listing describes a very different composition, a rose-led floral with jasmine, tuberose and iris over amber and sandalwood. The two share a mood and little else, and there is no connection between the companies.
More relevant is the broader pattern. For fashion labels of The New Society’s size, fragrance offers a way to sell the feeling of a collection without the sizing, fit questions and seasonal markdowns that come with clothing, and a single bottle can travel to markets where a full wholesale range never would. Patta took that route earlier this month with Saffron Attitude, a €160 extrait made with Marcus Elizabeth, The New Society’s version is gentler and cheaper, priced closer to a knit accessory than to a niche perfume, which suits a label whose core customer first found it through a children’s rail.
For now, Late August exists in a single 100 ml bottle, sold through one web store, with no discovery size, no travel format and no announced stockists. The listing shows it in stock, and the brand’s free shipping threshold sits at €200.
