Simon found the name, and I came up with all sorts of different designs for the packaging. We worked on this perfume for Barneys Co-Op called Outrageous. It was a new idea to embrace a perfume in that way and create your incredible smelling column.įrédéric: There’s one thing I will never forget you did, which I thought was very funny. Judy Collinson and Julie Gilhart were the most incredible ambassadors for you, because we didn’t really take on perfume brands like that. Simon: I remember you had big champions at Barneys. But I don’t remember-do you remember our first meeting? Before we launched, we discussed the layout of shop and what we were going to do. How did you first meet?įrédéric: We met at Barneys early on. And congratulations! What a huge milestone. Nick: I was just saying to Simon before you joined, Frédéric, that I wanted to bring you both together on, of course, the occasion of your 20th anniversary. You have the ring! I can see the lights in your glasses. I love the idea that you wear a tie at the beach, it’s so grand, so très chic. Simon: Yes, we sold our apartment in New York and we are here all the time.įrédéric: Have you? Good, that’s so wise. I don’t know why that would be a big shock, but I’m always like, ‘Look, it smells just the same.’įrédéric: Yeah, there’s a lot of juniper in it, so no wonder. Simon: In Shelter Island, our whole backyard is full of junipers, and when I get handfuls of berries and hit them with a rock it smells exactly like your perfume. Simon Doonan: I’m wearing Angeliques Sous La Pluie.įrédéric: Which you have for many years, being angelique yourself. Nick Vogelson: Frédéric, you probably can’t smell me from there, but I’m wearing my favorite of your fragrances, French Lover.įrédéric Malle: That makes my week, actually. It’s like people that are too perfect, you’d never want to sleep with them.” “When a perfume is too pretty, it’s too perfect, I look for the dash of vulgarity and we sometimes put a little bit in. He and Simon Doonan join Document’s Editor-in-Chief Nick Vogelson to reflect on their two decades of collaboration, share the scent memories that shaped them, and salute vulgarity as the spice of life. But Malle is optimistic about a sort of postwar energy rekindling our desire for personal, sensory connection. Barneys’s Fifth Avenue flagship remains shuttered, having closed in 2020, just shy of its 100th birthday. The streets, at least in post-pandemic New York City, are again filled with what the perfumer calls the scent “impressions” of strangers. Malle’s 20th anniversary arrives as perfume’s role in evoking memories and inducing private pleasures is more vital than ever. The olfactory “publishing house” champions distinguished and daring scent designers as artists or authors, elevating their concepts beyond the commercial while granting them full artistic freedom. (Ironically, the catalyst for Malle’s own eventual path to perfumery, and for his enduring view of scent as “self-inflicted pleasure,” was a bottle of Dior’s Eau Sauvage he discovered at the age of 10.) When Malle did finally launch Editions de Parfums in 2000, he was taking after his father-a voracious reader-as much as his perfumist mother. His mother was a perfumer, as was his maternal grandfather-Serge Heftler-Louiche had even helped a childhood friend named Christian establish Parfums Christian Dior-and Malle was planning to split from tradition with a career as an art dealer or art director. Malle wanted to give people a way to examine themselves in fragrances like Angeliques Sous La Pluie or Cologne Bigarade as a kind of casual voyeur, as if they had brushed past themselves on a busy street before registering the subtle changes in the scent trail left behind. Visual drama aside, the perfumer’s concept was pretty simple. Conceived by Malle, and brought to fruition with the help of Barneys’s head window dresser, Simon Doonan, the floor-to-ceiling chambers were christened ‘Beam Me Up Scotty’ by department store staff for their resemblance to the space chute from the Starship Enterprise. Twenty years ago, on the shop floor of Barneys’s Fifth Avenue flagship, the French-born perfumer Frédéric Malle unveiled a set of towering ‘ scent columns’ that looked more like an avant-garde art installation, or perhaps one of the department store’s famously outré window displays, than a reimagined perfume counter. For Document's Summer/Pre-Fall 2021 issue, the perfumer and the tastemaker discuss the scent memories of adolescence and the reawakening of our desire for personal, physical connection
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