There is always something to learn from a man with experience, knowledge and love for his craft. Frederic Malle is no doubt one of these men. He’s the man behind the niche fragrance house Editions de Parfums, launched in 2000. Born in Paris in 1962 to a family in the perfume industry; his grandfather Serge Heftler founded Christian Dior Perfumes and his mother worked as an art director for the house, which enabled Frederic to have a head start in the exclusive world of fragrance. He was fortunate to be exposed to the inner workings of the industry at a tender age.
Initially choosing to read Art History in New York, Frederic made a change in 1986 and accepted a position at the famed perfume lab Roure Bertrand Dupont. At Roure, he learned about raw ingredi-ents, composition and all aspects of perfume creation from some of the finest professionals in the business. Later in 1996, he collaborated with another “nose,” Pierre Bourdon, on Mark Birley for Men. But in 2000, using his connections and experience in the industry, Frederic invited nine top perfumers to create their own original perfumes, with complete creative freedom and with no financial restrictions regarding ingredients or technologies. These fragrances were packaged in bottles that feature the name of the perfumer, which was a first in the industry, where the perfumer is traditionally behind the scenes and credit for the scent is given to the fashion house or celebrity on the bottle. The perfumes were marketed at a specially designed boutique. Later, the perfumes were also distributed in partnership with select department stores around the world.
This way of marketing was a roaring success, with the original nine perfumes now legendary in the industry, and with the perfumers behind each creation finally getting the recognition they deserved.
Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle has expanded to offers candles, innovative home scents, soap and body care products, all created with the same freedom as the first nine fragrances.
Tell us how it all began for you?
In 2000, when I started this there was only one brand left that was true luxury in Paris and that was Serge Lutens. He started this whole resistance in a way because all the brands were adapting their products for self-service environments. They were becoming super commercial and the whole focus was around image and not content.
I was obsessed by one thing, I wanted to explain to people that unlike other small brands (or some larger brands) traditional fine fragrances could be treated as a contemporary art by something that was modern.
If you look at these small brands that were niche brands from the ‘80s they were barely surviving. They all had packaging that looked nineteenth century. It was as if they were saying great fra-grances were something from the past and the new stuff were rubbish. My idea was to put perfum-ers forward as something more interesting and promote them as the real artists.
When I designed the packaging, I wanted it to be simple and minimalistic. The first impression of the fragrance is important. It needed to say it’s a modern perfume that can live in a modern environment. Each of the fragrances that we did were a re-edition of something that had existed before, such as a floral fragrance like a tuberous that was completely revisited, or something that was completely new. When you set creative artists free, give them all the raw materials they need and the time to work their magic then they come up with something new.
How did you advertise your products?
When we started, my point was not to advertise. My point was to put all the money in the content that was inside the bottle. Instead of spending billions on renting a store and buying advertising pages, we relied on the quality of the product to sell it. I felt if we do something better than the rest of the market people will understand and spread this news by word of mouth.
Are synthetic materials important in fragrance?
We use natural and synthetic materials. If you use fragrance that is just natural you will create something terrible. There is a huge misunderstanding when it comes to synthetic material. If you just use natural products you will sell rubbish. Fragrance is a technological art made with ingredients that are more or less precise. We are probably the brand that looks at the biggest amount of naturals in the industry. But if you only use natural materials there will be no shape to your perfume.
Perfume has been an art since the beginning of time. In European history, people like Marie Antoi-nette used fragrances and recipes were in books. Anyone can find ingredients and make recipes with roses and violets. The truth is no one has done it. Some pretend but they are lying because it smells horrible and shapeless, it doesn’t infuse and it’s not precise. We use precise formulas espe-cially now we are in a digital world. Apart from one or two great structures that dates back to the seventeenth century, which is just made of citrus, there is nothing in our industry which dates before 1889. Perfume has been relying on chemicals since the end of the nineteenth century.
The idea of using just natural products are nice but nature can smell disgusting. Sometimes you walk into nature and find a disgusting smell. One thing chemistry can do is create smells that come from nowhere. It is like adding colour to your rainbow. Imagine you are a painter and you are given colour that doesn’t exist and it is coming from no where. Synthetics create more dimension to a fragrance.
Is there a demand for unique niche fragrances?
The industry was all about mass when we first began. They disappointed hundreds of people. People were pretentious with their fragrance and they were going to be bankrupt. Slowly but surely we came up with niche fragrances that were high quality and contemporary, but we were doing things differently. In the beginning, people were a bit annoyed and amused. They were calling us an epic anomaly.
After five years, they realised that the press kept on coming back and publishing worldwide positive news about us. Slowly, they thought there may be something to our approach and we gained pub-lic respect.
Hermès hired Jean-Claude Ellena; there’s Chanel Les Exclusifs and Estée Lauder with Tom Ford. Each of them had their different reactions. Many of these were very good. Now you have big brands that have initiated this and who have created a market. This became the solid market and every single store in the world started selling this. For perfume connoisseurs, there are mass per-fumers and luxury perfumers. Mass perfumery felt abandoned and their brands were dying so they felt they needed to do what the others were doing.
Last year, 960 fragrances came out. You have all these people making all kinds of fragrances but it is like a person buying a cushion and saying I am an interior designer. There is no substance or real knowledge behind that.
What was the first scent you wore and your first memory of fragrance?
My mother use to work with Christian Dior and she made Christian Dior Eau Fresh for my grandfa-ther. She watered it down and she called it Baby Dior and it was made for my brother and I. We were covered with it. The first thing I smelt was the original Miss Dior which was what they are sell-ing now.
By complete coincidence, my parents bought an apartment that use to belong to the Guerlain family. I was coincidently raised in the same bedroom as Jean-Paul Guerlain. I had a conversation with him, he knew that my parents bought his old apartment, and he asked me which one was my bedroom. We discovered my bedroom was his room. His mother, Mrs Guerlain, would wear a lot of perfume and the apartment smelled of Guerlain fragrances for years!
What is the fragrance that is most dear to you?
Musc Ravageur is extreme. I hardly did anything with it. I called Maurice Roucel, who had created great perfumes, and I told him to take his time to make it. He looked at me suspiciously and came back a few weeks later with a few sample bottles. He pulled out one from his pocket and said: “This is the best thing I have ever made and no one wants it because it’s too daring and difficult. It’s too sexy in a world that has to be so bleak and boring.” I smelt it and to me it was nothing shocking. I relabelled it and I gave it to my assistant who was quite good looking. She had the worse time getting back home because everyone was looking at her and she was getting so much attention. But one thing we didn’t like was the fragrance had no foreplay; it was just instant, like a car accelerating into full speed at once. It needed to slow down before it accelerated. So I asked Maurice Roucel to do something about that. He was furious so I tried to do something myself and I went back to him in 1999 with a modification. I loved it and he agreed with me; it was perfect. My assistant wore it again and she was totally irresistible to people. This is the fragrance that set us apart from the rest of the industry.
To what extent are you involved in the production of each fragrance? You have an impact of course, but how much are you involved?
I almost had no involvement with Musc Ravageur. There are perfumers like Dominque Ropion and Pierre Bourdon, who are probably the best perfumers of their generation, that I’m extremely close to. I am particularly close to Pierre Bourdon because his father use to work with my grandfather and Dominque Ropion and I worked in the same lab for 28 years.
Many years ago my father used old fashioned mouthwash because he loved the taste of it. I al-ways loved the red colour it was also the same colour from a product at the end of the nineteenth century that you would put in your hair. And as it happens, I bought a toothpaste that was made with the same products as the mouthwash my father used. I liked the taste because it was minty, it had cinnamon and benzoin. I thought this is interesting and we could create a men’s fragrance from this. Dominque Ropion loved the idea and for nine months we worked on it together and turned it into a real fragrance that is now Geranium Pour Monsieur.
When you smell Geranium Pour Monsieur at first it is fresh and minty. In fact, there is patchouli and sandalwood and you have benzoin too, which is very musky. One of the best products we make is the shower gel for this product. I love the shower gel; it is one of the products I use everyday. At the end what is left from the shower gel is the back; not the freshness but the back. In one of my thousands of conversations with Dominque I told him look at the back of that. Maybe we can take all the freshness out and make a big oriental fragrance just from the back. Move the back so we make it so big it becomes the front of the fragrance and ultimately becomes the whole thing. We worked on it for nine months.
We were excited with the results but there was a dimension missing. He came up with the idea of bringing lots of rose to it. It became Portrait of a Lady. It’s one of my favourites. You take the fresh-ness out and pump up the back notes. We don’t see it like the public do because we know how it is made. It is like seeing a painting. The artist understands the background and how it was made, but the viewer won’t fully know.
What do you think of the art of layering? Is it becoming a trend now?
It’s always been a trend in the Middle East. Layering is something that I am very uncomfortable with, except in the Middle East. Earlier you asked me about my contribution to fragrance we make. Either the idea comes from me, from someone else, or the perfumer – it is irrelevant. I work with them generally and sometimes I am not really involved. However, sometimes I am very involved, like with Dominique, and we work together every step of the way. We tune these things for up to a year. It takes hundreds of trials. It’s a huge effort by experts to create something that is perfect to us, like a work of art, for a moment of pleasure or a lifetime of pleasure for someone to own.
People don’t know how to layer in Europe, they have no idea. They want to layer because they want to be unique. It is like taking a Picasso and painting something horrible on it. To me, it is heartbreaking. Most of the time it is disgusting when it’s not done in the right way.
I think the Middle East is really the heart of the perfume world. Middle Eastern woman have a nose and they have knowledge about fragrance. I’m comfortable putting my fragrances in their hands. They’ve made little masterpieces in the Middle East because they know how to do it. I am not as opposed as I am compared to other regions where they would make a mess with it.
I was invited to Riyadh by a friend who was layering Portrait of a Lady with the best oud that she could get. She had access to a good one that smelt so good. The minute I smelt it I called Dominique from Riyadh and I told him we should take this idea and develop Portrait of the Lady further. And we did just that and it’s the fragrance we did for the Middle East. We went for the best source of oud from India and we took a things out of Portrait of the Lady put in a lot of oud. We rebuilt it and reinterpreted it.
What is coming out for the Middle East?
This product is available now. It’s called The Night. It’s smoky. It has an aromatic smell and there is depth. It has the biggest amount of natural oud in the industry. Its retail value is ¤1,040 for 100 ml.
What are your plans for the rest of 2016?
I am creating extraordinary products around Portrait of a Lady with new bases and new daring oils. I am working on a men’s fragrance in the Middle East and regardless of the fact that I’m part of the Estee Lauder family now, I launch when I am ready so we are still working on it.
What advise would you give people looking for a fragrance?
We are matchmakers, quite simply. I give freedom to these perfume artists, which allows me to push them to go as far as possible to take what we produce and learn to understand it, and give it to the right person to buy.
If you sell in an impersonal way then you will need a one size fits all-type. Then you have to do commercial fragrances. Important factors are the quality of fragrances made by the best artists, with the best raw materials and synthetic naturals, and my expertise if they need it. It is done in a very personal way.
We want people to talk about themselves. We want then to tell us who they are and what they want to do with the fragrance. Do you want to make an impression? Do you want to be discreet? Do you want to be seductive? If so, seductive in what way? There are so many ways to be seductive. For instance, if you want to seduce, do you wear a fragrance to be a good office girl or boy? Or do you want to make an impression in the nightclub?
When you wear the fragrance try to picture yourself with it. And if you are comfortable with it then that is right for you. If you buy a fur coat and wear it to Saint-Tropez you will die of heat. If you buy a bikini and wear in St. Moritz you will also die of cold. Wear the right fragrance for the right season. Be yourself; be comfortable.
By Lara Mansour Sawaya
