Fashion powerhouse Louis Vuitton has once again teamed up with the renowned architect Frank Gehry, designer of the Foundation Vuitton in the Bois de Boulogne, and some of the luxury house’s key stores to design five new perfume bottles.
The French luxury goods house’s master perfumer Jacques Cavallier Belletrud has created a new collection of perfume extracts for this partnership. At the same time, Gehry conceived a bottle to hold the five different scents. Each flacon comes topped with a three-dimensional, solver-coloured sculptural work reminiscent of wind moving through and swirling a silver sheath.
The wind played a crucial role in Cavallier Belletrud’s conception of the fragrances, as he had in mind what scents are stirred in the air that wafts through Grasse, France, where his laboratory is housed at Les Fontaines Parfumées. To create the new scents, he took traditional fragrance forms and modernized them by removing the scent’s traditional structure, with top, middle, and base notes, for these long-lasting, fresh fragrances.
“My ambition was to reinvent the Extrait de parfum of the 21st century, bringing newness and new emotions without having any connections with the existing fragrances at Louis Vuitton and by breaking the rules,” explained Belletrud, during a press conference held in Paris on Monday.
Belletrud has formulated five scents for the collaboration. “Cosmic Cloud” boasts a powdery and fruity musk aroma with notes of bergamot; “Dancing Blossom” is a flowery scent of Jasmine sambac, May rose, osmanthus and Indian tuberose; “Rhapsody” features floral notes highlighted by fresh yerba maté and lily of the valley; “Stellar Times” is a deep, woody perfume with a touch of orange blossom; and “Symphony” boasts fresh ginger zest with bergamot and grapefruit. Each bottle is complete with a three-dimensional silver lid created by Gehry.
“I am all for an excess of beauty. Perfume creates moments of delight, intimate and shared pleasure. It is an act of love towards others, towards oneself,” Belletrud explains in a press release. “Frank Gehry and I share the desire to create an imbalance that might become balance, contrast and transversal lines between things that seem incompatible; there’s a desire to innovate without breaking with what has gone before.”
As for the bottles, Gehry’s starting point was the original Vuitton fragrance bottle designed by Marc Newson. Driven by the art of movement and inspired by sailing, he revisited the lines to create a curved flacon embossed with the brand logo. A sheet of aluminium was “crumpled like fabric” to make the sculptural, hand-polished cap stamped inside with the LV seal. The fragrance bottles are refillable.
“I wanted to approach the project from a sculptural point of view. To bring something different to perfume. It’s not a finished geometric form; it’s just movement,” Gehry said in a press release.
The Les Extraits Collection will be available in Louis Vuitton stores starting October 7, 2021.