Industrial elegance is the mark of Hedi Slimane’s new scent for Celine. The brand released their haute parfumerie range in 1964 with a womens fragrance entitled Vent Fou, and Slimane’s new range of 11 perfumes promise to add a contemporary scent to the eponymous Parisian fashion house.
Nine of the perfumes will be released this October, with two to follow next season. The collection is divided into eight day fragrances and three night scents, with the evening names ‘Reptile’, ’Black tie’ and ‘Nightclubbing’ suggesting a heavier side of intrigue to the collection. The names of the perfumes are simple and pared-back, aligning to the brand’s minimalism.
And Paris remains at the heart of the collection, with Slimane’s own secret Parisian journals serving as inspiration, the same private journals which he uses to inspire Celine’s fashion collections. The scent of Parisian life is evident from the names themselves, which have been extracted from notes of his journal, including ’Rimbaud’, ‘Dans Paris’ and ‘Saint-Germain-Des-Prés’. The only exception is ‘Eau de Californie’, which represents Slimane’s hedonistic youthful period spent in the US state.
Whilst his journals inspire a modern scent, Slimane’s inspiration is spritzed with additional research into the traditional role of the couturier parfumeur, staying true to the responsibility that comes with developing intrinsically French perfumes.
As seen in the brand’s teaser video, the sensorial largely figures in Slimane’s vocabulary through tactility. The video stars with close-ups of the bottle (an alternative to the celeb-fests usually provided by fashion houses). The bottle comes with steely elegance, housed within the paper encasing of the perfume box, which is a model of the woodwork paneling in Celine’s atelier at the Hôtel Colbert de Torcy.
Whilst the layers of the collection are very diverse, the single note threading through the whole olfactory range has been stated as a “powdery tone”, a tone also used in Slimane’s private parfum collection for Dior in 2004. Whilst this may be an illicit reference to the club-kid scene, “powder” also promises a lightness and signature clean aesthetic that has long-been associated with Celine.
To view the teaser video, click here.
