Photographer Mert Alas Has Created Fashion’s New Favourite Drink

The celebrity-backed wine brand is almost ubiquitous at this point. Brad and Angelina did it, Kylie Minogue has done it – even Post Malone recently put his name to a bottle of rosé. But when Mert Alas – one half of the esteemed fashion photography duo Mert + Marcus – made the decision to embark on a drinks brand of his own, he had something quite different in mind. “I love gin!” he enthuses over the phone. “I’ve always been obsessed with it, to the point where I’d become a bit of a critic.” After years of holding court on how the gin he was sipping (Alas takes his neat, over ice) could be improved upon, the photographer eventually decided: “Enough of this. I’m going to make my own.”

Seventy One Gin is the result. But this was no lockdown whim – a way for Alas to occupy himself in his unexpected downtime. For one thing, he has spent four years on it. For another, the elegant bottle that houses the amber liquid is more objet to display than something to simply cram into your drinks cabinet and forget about until cocktail hour. Alas has brought all of the artistry that has made him one of the world’s most in demand photographers (he and his creative partner-in-crime Marcus Piggott have shot everyone from Madonna to Oprah Winfrey for the cover of British Vogue) to his passion project. Not to mention his notoriously high standards.

“The past 30 years of my career as an artist has been a fight to make something perfect,” says Alas. “And to make something perfect you must know all about it. So I approached this in the same way: I decided to learn everything about gin making. It was a big exercise in education for the first year or so,” says the photographer, who spent time with plant growers and distillers while immersed in the world of gin.

His crash course complete, Alas moved on to the “experimental” phase. “Once I had learned how it works, I became inspired by things that aren’t normally done in gin making,” he explains. His deliberately radical approach is why Seventy One is distilled like a perfume, aged for 71 nights in a variety of rare oak casks. Traditional gin ingredients have been elevated with wild ivy leaves from Albania, and grapefruit and damask rose from the photographer’s native Turkey. The final master stroke was the addition of the rare Queen of the Night flower. “It smells like an earthy, desert-y jasmine,” Alas says. “I was in love with this scent. Then I found out the flower has a beautiful, dark story behind it: it only blooms once a year at night, and with the first rays of sunlight it dies. I was like, this is so poetic!”

Alas, who was inspired by Art Deco buildings when creating the elegant bottle, wanted to distill his gin “like a perfume”.

Alas was “never just going to put my name to a bottle”, he insists – and especially not a traditional gin bottle (they’re all “short, round and chubby”, he tuts). “It couldn’t look like the rest of the gins,” says Alas, who took inspiration from Art Deco buildings and early Hollywood film sets. “It needed to be more elegant and more faceted. The visuals – the colour of the liquid, the bottle and so on – were as important as the gin itself. It’s a combination of all of my tastes in a way, visual, sensual and physical.”

Alas says his small-batch gin should be enjoyed neat, as he takes it, rather than with a mixer or as part of a cocktail. “I don’t drink a lot but I like to drink well, and in a very good glass,” he says. To him, the arrival of his decadent creation, which is coinciding with the longed-for renaissance of nightlife, feels timely. “I love the mystery of night,” he says. “I want to bring back a sense of glamour – it’s about having beautiful company, great music, something to dress up for!”

Alas’s career has taken him to exclusive venues all over the world, but asked to name the place he’d most like to enjoy the fruits of his labour, he says location is immaterial. “For me, my friends and their company is the most important thing. Anytime and anywhere that we are together, it always turns into a beautiful night.” Seventy One Gin, £140, is available now from Seventyonegin.com