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Serge Lutens

Serge Lutens is one-of-a-kind in the world of contemporary perfume. A multi-facetted artist, he excels at every aspect of beauty, whether it’s fine fragrance, cosmetics, hair-styling, jewelry, objets d’art, home decorating, photography or film… and let’s not forget his veneration for writing! He has an intuitive feel for what’s beautiful and right.

Practically a prodigy, in 1962, when he was barely 20, he wowed the magazine Vogue with his photos, which unveiled both a rare elegance in his models and a boldness in his images. From then on, his talent made him famous the world over, and in 1967, the House of Dior invited him to become the artistic director for a line of make-up that had yet to be invented. The collaboration stretched into a nearly 12-year chapter of his life, and led him to explore every corner of the world of color, texture and material, like a painter working with an infinite palette of gouaches and pastels.

While he was born in the north of France, it was Morocco in 1968 and Japan in 1970 that created an emotional shock and revealed his true destiny. Morocco and the sensuality of the Orient nourish his vision of original perfume, one inspired by the ancient world and its odiferous waxes and balms. He has been living in Marrakech since 1974, and all of his fragrant compositions are inspired by the wealth of materials and scents that surround him there. Ambre Sultan, Chergui, Cuir Mauresque, Musc Koublaï Khän, Tubereuse Criminelle, RahätLoukoum – his house’s classics – have been joined by the more recent Chêne, Daim Blond, Borneo 1834 and Cèdre.

Japan incarnates Serge Lutens’s other polestar, thanks to the determining encounter with the founder of the cosmetics company Shiseido, a rich, cultured patron of the arts who called upon Lutens’s skills in 1979. The renowned artist focused international attention on the Far Eastern house. In 1992, the garden of the Palais Royal in Paris, became the luxurious, jewel-box setting for Serge Lutens’s fragrances, in an intimate boutique christened Les Salons du Palais Royal Shiseido.

This spring, the salon lets you discover his latest fragrances, as well as his Nécessaire de beauté, a range of eye shadows, lipsticks and kohl that he describes as “an essential minimum, simply evoking a way of making oneself noticed, because beauty is only beautiful if it shows”.

Would you say that the demanding work of composing a fragrance is a wide-ranging effort, with historical, cultural, artistic and personal dimensions?

Yes, it’s of the moment. It’s about life lived, about culture and, during the composition phase, about letting go. The raw ingredients are alive, they move around and create surprises. You have to be ready to guide the fragrance in an unconscious way.

Is the creator’s subjective and emotional contribution important for inventing fragrances that can outlast periods and trends?

I think that the contribution of will and letting go are the most important. A fragrance is a succession of accords, i.e. in accordance with yourself. It takes a year of craftwork to give birth to a fragrance.

Does talent depend on the designer’s personality, sincerity and absolute freedom of expression?

The fragrance chooses its own expression. Artistic sensitivity acts as a servant. A painter doesn’t know the finality of his canvas until it’s done. Just as in painting or writing, it’s the fragrance that reveals its true desire.

Is designing fragrance a job for an explorer, a trailblazer, a hunter of scents and emotions?

Hunting isn’t exactly the right word. The word “discover ” is better adapted to the emotional side of assembling essences. A sense of wonderment is at the end of the fragrance!

How would you describe the ingredients you work with?

Alive, enigmatic, mysterious, complex …Knowledge enriches, but it doesn’t enrich the work of expression.

Which ones do you particularly enjoy working with, which ones fascinate you or destabilize you?

I particularly appreciate the ones that I have discovered myself and that improve over time; woods, flowers and extraction methods can produce miracles. Working with words and essences is all part of the same phenomenon. Words are marvelous… forming a phrase is a perilous exercise!

The geographer Paul Claval wrote about the “ geography of smells ”, how smell is tied to a physical milieu and located at the point where physiology, psychology culture and linguistics meet. Discovering Morocco in 1968 (and Japan shortly thereafter) bedazzled you, and you have been living there ever since. What does the notion of “geography of smells” mean to you in terms of your fragrance creations?

I think Paul Claval’s statement expresses precisely what I could have said myself!

Do you think Morocco and the Mediterranean region can feed your imagination and creative impulses indefinitely?

My sources of inspiration are renewed, and aren’t necessarily part of a past. The accomplishment of a scent, the consciousness of an expression, have varied sources, sometimes tied to a particular moment, sometimes to infinity.

What do you feel when you are working on a single-scent fragrance (Un Lys, Rose de Nuit…) ?

Reconstituting a scent means dreaming it up, so it’s like a true lie. No single ingredient can give you a perfume. It’s the assemblage of molecules that can constitute a perfume. You have to understand that since the beginning of time, pollen has been carried by the wind, by bees… They were the first great perfume creators. Reconstituting a lily that doesn’t actually exist as a single raw ingredient is a precise, dream-like exercise. It belongs to the real world, but in the first-person sense.

Do you have a particularly strong attraction for trees?

Trees, flowers… anything can work for me, but each of them is tied to the emotion of an ever-renewed, ever-different moment. Trees give me the wood’s answer, just as flowers give me the soil’s… Smells exist within us in the present moment of our encounter with them.

How do you feel about today’s fragrance industry?

Personally, I don’t think it’s up to me to judge, as far as the vast palette of propositions is concerned. I’m happy with the role of the lover or the hater (I know what I don’t like).

Would you like to have a stab at other experiences like the one at EuraLille, in 2004, an olfactory trail where you introduced the public to smells of your own choosing, those of the North of France, where you were born and raised?

It was fascinating to be able to combine my taste for mystical architecture and certain sides of German expressionism, and to inscribe them in an imaginary olfactory trail that was all my own. I wouldn’t repeat the idea in the same way. I’m interested in new experiences. That one is already inscribed in my past. Still, I’m always open to utopian ideas that can illustrate that type of project (with an unlimited budget).

The adjectives used most often to describe your fragrances include “powerful, mysterious, bold, spell-binding, hypnotic, voluptuous, opulent, carnal”… Do these terms reflect some of your own personality traits? What you dream about sometimes?

Perfume is a transposition of the self in the moment. It’s the honest expression of a form in the moment through a fragrance. The moment I achieved it, when I can say, “That’s it!” As for myself, I’m too invested in defining the scent to be able to define myself at that exact moment.

You’ve had a life full of travel, design and extraordinary moments and encounter… What are your most lasting impressions?

I don’t really care for travel for its own sake. I like the impressions that it leaves in me… or let’s say that I keep of it. Nothing is more dazzling than the unconscious and that strange kind of memory.

What procures the most emotion for you now?

Whatever is unexpected, beautiful and right.

You have unfurled your artistic expression in every domain related to beauty. Which one would you like to explore or delve into further in the future?

All of them, in fact, so I can define what I don’t know yet, and will never know.

Is perfume an interior journey?…

Both exterior and interior, cosmic and private…

If you were going to a desert island, what would you bring?

I could be washed up on a desert island, but I would never choose to go to one! I suppose it depends on the island, but on principle, I wouldn’t take anything!

Special report by Astrid VITOLS