Celine’s Hedi Slimane Reinvents French Fragrance

Perfume is the je ne sais quoi to every outfit and coveting the right perfume for your personal style can nothing short of a challenge. Many high-end fashion houses curate perfumes, but expanding into fragrance is a big risk with high stakes. The new creative director of Celine, Hedi Slimane, is taking the fragrance world head-on and for the first time since 1964 the French fashion house will be serving up…fragrance. The first scent, Vent Fou, was a floral bouquet with notes of jasmine and rose, however, since the early 1960s fragrance has not been part of Celine’s repertoire. Now, almost two years into Slimane’s tenure, not one, but 11 perfumes will be released—a smart business move in the fragrance industry—is expected to be worth over £60 billion by 2024.

Just because the fragrance scene is new-ish to the Celine brand doesn’t mean that the Celine Haute Parfumerie Collection will smell nouveau-riche. On the contrary, Celine fans are in good hands, as Slimane is a fragrance pioneer. During his time at Christian Dior, he was the one who helped create Dior’s perfume collection in 2004 the first of its kind since 1947. With the changes that have already been made to the brand’s aesthetic, fans are excited to covet each and every new scent.

Celine’s line of 11 gender-neutral scents will hit store shelves late 2019, early 2020 and each will be more nostalgia-invoking than the last. The Haute Parfumerie Collection gives nod to the perfumery age of the 1960s and 1970s; smoky Parisian nightclubs and a day-to-night aesthetic loaded with notes of iris, chypre accord, rose, and moss make the range perfect for men or women looking to live the Parisian high life. A press release by the brand spoke to the unique idea of an entire fragrance line being unisex, “by questioning for over more than 20 years the societal notion of gender in his collections and photographs, Hedi Slimane is closely and culturally associated with the advent of a masculine-feminine style in both fashion and photography and, more particularly, with an androgynous definitely of masculinity.”

By Amy N. Pugsley