Azzedine Alaïa Designs a New Approach to Perfume

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Azzedine Alaïa, a.k.a. my bet to design Lady Gaga’s wedding dress post-her Grammys appearance, doesn’t do anything on anyone’s schedule but his own. He doesn’t show during the regular ready-to-wear schedule (he doesn’t even show every season), he doesn’t always appear for interviews when promised, and he generally works through the night, while others are asleep.

So it should probably come as no surprise that over 30 years after starting his business, and 14 years after selling part of it to Prada, and then Richemont, he has finally done something that other designers and celebrities generally consider a de rigueur early part of the brand-building process: introduce a fragrance.

Called Alaïa Paris, it was created in conjunction with Beauté Prestige International.

Still, the timing is not the only part of the perfume that is atypical. The brief, for example, according to the perfumer Marie Salamagne, was “the smell of cold water falling on hot chalk.” (Translation: airy notes and pink pepper; freesia and peony; animal notes and musk.)

The black glass bottle with a top that mimics a spool of gold thread was created by Martin Szekely, the French furniture/industrial designer whose works are in both the Pompidou and MK2 cinemas (Mr. Alaïa is a collector of furniture by Jean Prouvé, Pierre Paulin, Jean Nouvel and Marc Newson, among others).

And instead of the usual news release, Mr. Alaïa has issued a meditation of sorts on the subject of scent.

Excerpt: “Creating a perfume is to confide in a woman, to steal her thoughts of tomorrow and run away with her before she ever looks back. … Creating a perfume is also knowing that, at that precise instant, the words I use to recount my secret already no longer belong to me. … My perfume is not reasonable — it makes time lie. I dreamed of it like an archaeologist dreams of sculptures from antiquity lying at the bottom of the sea for millennia, sculptures of perfect bodies, matched only by the women of today — an ideal and timeless beauty.”

And more like that.

It’s a little abstract, but in a world where more than 100 new fragrances are introduced every year, many of which are gone before you can say the words “top note,” it’s an unquestionably different approach, which may be the point.

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A successful perfume is, of course, fashion and beauty’s equivalent of a Silicon Valley “unicorn”: a magical creature that is almost impossible to find but can grant all sorts of wishes. Like, for example, a steady source of income in perpetuity. Think Chanel No. 5 (1921), L’Air du Temps by Nina Ricci (1948) and Opium by Yves Saint Laurent (1977).

In any case, it turns out Mr. Alaïa has been thinking about a scent for a long time; it just took a while to find the right partner. B.P.I. has already created two unicorn scents in conjunction with other designers — Narciso Rodriguez’s namesake perfume, and Jean-Paul Gaultier’s Classique. And given Mr. Alaïa’s longevity and general elevation to French national treasure status (he recently had a retrospective that spanned the Palais Galliera and the Musée d’Art Moderne, and the Villa Borghese in Rome is planning a similar exhibit to open this summer), it may be that it has finally hit on a third.

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On the Runway

Vanessa Friedman writes about news happening in the fashion industry, from business decisions to designer moves.

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