"My Perfume: Azzedine Alaïa"
"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 archeologist 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. My perfume comes from far away, it is a perfume from the source… It does not reflect any particular era, but emotions from every era. It does not come from any country, because it has traveled through them all. It does not resonate with any one season, because it lives in all seasons. My perfume springs from the union of all my present moments, from a time that I could not myself identify, expressed only in the feelings that its creation revealed to me. My perfume accompanies time, it has the insolence of an eternal present. At the same time a fragrance for day and for night, my perfume is the complex architecture of my most paradoxical sensations, those that have brought me the most beautiful rencontres of my life."
Alaïa Paris - The Story
Olfactory Pyramid:
A Fresh Impression: Pink Pepper, Airy Notes
A Floral Impression: Freesia and Peony
A Bare Skin Impression: Animalic and Musky Notes
The Bottle
It has been conceived by designer Martin Szekely who wished it to become "a fetish object dedicated to women." Following his Black Mirror – pure, compact and strange – Szekely created a body of heavy and precious translucent black glass (half-way between a meteorite and a polished pebble), that he adorned, front and back, with the famous Alaïa laser-cut pattern, an emblematic pattern which first appeared on the leather corset in the 1990s. The cap? In contrast to the bottle, as if to enhance it, it is an homage to Alaïa's craftsmanship – a spool of golden thread which seems to takes its flight, made of zamak and pink gold. The packaging? Delicately framed with black, it carries the Alaïa nude – an intense pinky beige that evokes the skin – one of the creator's fetish colors.
The Commercial
In the visual, Azzedine Alaïa selected of his mythical dresses, the so-called "houpette" dress, in stretch and mousse de viscose duveteuse, from the 1994 spring-summer collection. A dress which echoed the first robes à bandes, inspired from Egyptian mummies and created as early as the mid-eighties. This long and sinuous dress, with its majestic neckline, leaves bare the shoulders and magnifies the neck. Supported by its white and central stem, its horizontal and oblique black bands draw the contours of the hips, reveal the slenderness of the waist, transfiguring the woman into a fatal goddess, as if writing her a poem of gold and jet-black." The presentation suggests a parallel between woman and bottle, between cap and hair. She is magnified by the astonishing talent of photographer Paolo Roversi, revealed by the allusive music of composer Nicolas Godin and sublimated by the refined hair design of Julien d'Ys. Thus, slowly emerging from the dark and mysteriously revealing their precious experience, both woman and bottle seem to provide access to the heavy gates of a mythical world, that of the creator. Paolo Roversi, one of the major fashion photographers of his time, describes his technique as a series of substractions. "You say goodbye, you smile, you are scared. I try to take all these masks away and, little by little, subtract until you have something pure left. A kind of abandon, a kind of absence." A true jeweler of light, with this photo, Roversi created a genuine paradigm of Beauty. Julien d'Ys, who invented beautiful and oneiric hairstyles for numerous fashion shows, is also a photographer and a painter. In this case, he did not concentrate so much on the hair itself, but rather on imagining the idea of a coiffure. He is responsible for Guinevere's gorgeous golden hair and golden collar.
Guinevere van Seenus, the top-model born in Boston, provides her gothic, arousing and slightly androgyn beauty for the advertisement photo of the perfume. As for musician Nicolas Godin, he composed the music of the film. From his architecture training, he brought a real talent in crafting sounds, at the crossroads between electronic music and psychedelic rock. He accompanies the emergence of Alaïa Paris with his surprising notes, echoing the olfactory pyramid.
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