How do you make something special even more so? In the case of Dior’s recently released Les Esprits de Parfum, the brand’s Perfume Creation Director, Francis Kurkdjian, chose to uniquely amplify five key fragrances from the La Collection Privée line to literally “capture their spirit.”
He redefined these scents’ olfactory “narrative line” to better tell their origin stories, “like a toile before the final design,” he says. The result: Luxurious concentrations that recall the significance of the moments that inspired each scent in vivid detail — and piece together elements of the house’s couture heritage. These heightened expressions further pay homage to Christian Dior, the man himself, and his own creativity in designing iconic perfumes.
Dior Icons Revisited
The first of these fountainhead fragrances is Gris Dior, a subtly sexy chypre scent, a woody floral. Gris Dior pays tribute to the the unique color of the building that houses the Christian Dior flagship at 30 avenue Montaigne in Paris. Christian Dior also considered gray to be the color that makes other colors come alive. In the Esprit, Kurkdjian simply “pumped up the volume,” amplifying the impact of the expression of stark black and white, noting that to him, gray represents a stormy sky, “the intensity before the storm,” he says.
Lucky represents Christian Dior’s devotion to the mystical and superstitious. It’s lily-of-the-valley composition is a nod to the lilies that Dior would secretly sew into the hem of his haute couture dresses for good luck. It’s also an homage to the designer’s favorite model, Lucie Daouphars, whose nickname was Lucky. “She had that way of making a dress come alive,” Kurkdjian says of the model, who he first learned about from his Aunt Francois, a fan. After resigning from modeling, Lucky built the first union for models. “I saw her as a very strong woman and a cool girl,” he exclaims. In the original scent, lily-of-the-valley is blended with many white flowers, but for the Esprit, Kurkdjian stripped back the formula to create a predominantly lily aroma.
Another scent in the collection that harkens back to the brand’s couture roots is Rouge Trafalgar. This was the name of the red dress that Christian Dior sent down the runway in the middle of the couture show “to wake up the audience,” explains Kurkdjian. Where does the name come from? No matter the season, the dress was always red. And Trafalgar stems from French history, as it’s the name of the battle the French lost against the British during the Napoleonic Wars, “for this reason, the word refers to something unexpected.” So he added something unexpected to the Esprit, inspired by the British dessert, the pavlova. The red fruit notes of cassis and strawberry are quite in your face, but they’re softened by a waft of rose meant to evoke the Chantilly cream on top of the pavlova.
A Couture Link to the East
The two additional scents in the collection are Ambre Nuit and Oud Ispahan.
Both are interpretations of oriental florals that recall the exotic glamour of the Middle East and a nod to the couture pieces Christian Dior would design for royalty from Iran.
On the Joy of a Compliment
Reimagining these fragrances was a labor of love for Kurkdjian. Of his process, the master admits that to create something, one must tread carefully. “I believe you have to feel in danger in a way. It’s about insecurity… and when you know it’s finished, it’s because you understand you’re not in danger anymore. You’re all of a sudden in a kind of comfort zone because you understand that everything clicks,” he explains.
Once a scent is ready for testing, he relies on tried-and-true friends for their honest opinion. “I always have two or three people around me that I know will tell me the truth if they like it or not.” And beyond them, it’s all about the random compliment. “The best thing is when you go to the grocery store and all of a sudden a lady asks you ‘what do you wear’,” Kurkdjian admits. “Or you take a cab and the guy says ‘oh, you smell good,’ because cab drivers are very good testers. They smell a lot of smells. So when I get the compliment from the cab driver, it makes my day, to be honest.”
