EXCLUSIVE: Les éternels de Balmain Launches the Fashion House Back Into Fragrance
PARIS — Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing has wanted to develop perfume for the house forever. And now, the dream has become reality with Les éternels de Balmain, a collection of eight fragrances.
Four eaux de parfum in the line, including Bronze and Rouge, are completely new creations, while the remainder are historical concepts, like the reimagined Ivoire and ébène scents.
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This collection, which is being produced under license by the Estée Lauder Cos., launches Tuesday on balmainbeauty.com and balmainbeauty.eu, as well as in select Balmain boutiques. Each scent is priced at $300.
Rousteing’s love of perfume harks back to his beginnings.
“It’s like la madeleine de Proust,” said the designer, whose mother sported Guerlain’s Shalimar. His grandmother wore Chanel No.5. “A funny story is that when I got appointed at Balmain in 2011, my grandma told me: ‘You remember, I was wearing Ivoire?’”
That was a Balmain scent from 1979. As a teenager, Rousteing was obsessed with fragrances, starting with Le Male by Jean Paul Gaultier. Rousteing also adored the smell of the skin creams his grandmother used. “It felt like fragrance to me,” he said.
Another reason Rousteing wanted to work on beauty was that Pierre Balmain’s story has always been intermingled with it. The fashion house began in 1945, then its first fragrance élysées 64-83 came out in 1946, followed by Vent Vert in 1947.
“Mr. Pierre Balmain created incredible and iconic fragrances at the time,” said Rousteing, who explained he himself is always trying to reinforce the house’s DNA through his own lens. Beauty is the last facet of Balmain’s legacy he hasn’t yet touched.
Rousteing believes it takes at least 10 years to make sure people understand a fashion house’s codes, vision and artist direction. He has now been at Balmain for 13 years, transforming it from a sleeping beauty maison into one that is very much awake and among the hottest around. Balmain and Rousteing have become an online force, with a combined social media following of 22 million.
“To have Olivier in this role now — well-established over a decade, both the youngest creative director of a French fashion house, one of the major ones, and also the most tenured — is interesting,” said Guillaume Jesel, who oversees Balmain Beauty as president and chief executive officer, Tom Ford and luxury business development at the Estée Lauder Cos.
The Balmain beauty business has been practically dormant since 2017. That gave something of a clean slate for Balmain and Lauder, which announced the Balmain beauty licensing agreement on Sept. 26, 2022.
“With this partnership, the house begins a new chapter, making very clear all our commitment to maximizing cross-category possibilities as we move forward, determined to fully realize this house’s potential to become a true leader in the luxury world,” said Balmain CEO Matteo Sgarbossa.
Jesel would not discuss projections, but industry sources estimate Les éternels de Balmain could generate about $50 million in retail sales during its first 12 months in tight distribution.
“It’s a rare opportunity,” said Jesel. “It’s not something that happens every day — to work on brand creation with Balmain, which is one of the historical Parisian fashion houses.”
That, coupled with Rousteing’s approach, “which is visionary, was a gift,” continued Jesel.
“We took time,” said Rousteing, of the joint project, which will roll out to brick-and-mortar distribution starting next week, including Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman in the U.S., Galeries Lafayette in France, Selfridges in the U.K., Rinascente in Italy and KaDeWe in Germany. Freestanding stores are to open in New York’s SoHo and Paris’ Marais. Then a wider introduction is set to start in year two.
“He and the group understood clearly the vision of the house,” continued Rousteing of Jesel and the team. “We wanted to bring the luxury and the quality in this journey.”
Collectively, they also wanted to break boundaries and identify “what’s missing in the beauty world,” said Rousteing, who explained he’s been fighting “for diversity from day one.”
The designer has always been vocal about diversity and inclusivity, even when most people shied away from such topics years ago. “The fight is not over,” said Rousteing. “What we are creating with this beauty is really a love for diversity.”
Rousteing and Lauder are also working to express his connection to pop culture that is intrinsically linked to the 38-year-old’s youthful vision of his time. All these elements are part of the elixir with which Rousteing intends to change the world of fragrance.
To start learning about Balmain perfumes, Rousteing delved into the brand’s archives.
“Olivier, the house of Balmain and the Estée Lauder Cos. agree on the power of the archives, the power of the moment of creation for a company and of interpreting and connecting past, present and future,” said Jesel.
“In our first meeting, we asked for the archives, and boxes arrived on the desk of his office,” he continued. That was full of past Balmain fragrances, documents and related books. Rousteing was struck by a lot — Ivoire’s ultra-Parisian campaigns, for instance, and how the scent signified Pierre Balmain’s new French style.
élysées 64-83’s name nodded to the phone number of the Balmain maison.
“There was a certain irony, always with elegance, which I loved,” said Rousteing, who had an eye on reinventing that fragrance’s square bottle with a label overlapping the corner, which is now refillable and recyclable.
“There are some elements that he kept and elements that he modernized with his own vision,” Jesel said of Rousteing. “His vision for this bottle is to create something that is very timeless.”
Balmain’s signature black and gold remain, as do its iconic stripes covering the glass. The original bottle shape is extended into a lozenge. The cap’s PB monogram comes from Balmain’s 1970 labyrinth motif.
The new bottle shape was teased twice, once during Paris Fashion Week in February and also during the Met Gala, when it was made of sand and carried by Rousteing, in May.
“[Olivier] is a very modern marketer, communicator and storyteller,” said Jesel. “He adopted here an approach that is more common in filmmaking.”
Rousteing also became enamored of ébène, meaning Ebony, a Balmain scent from 1983. Vent Vert, which translates into Green Wind, also struck a chord as a scent symbolizing a new world after the end of World War II. Pioneering, it was conceived by a female perfumer, Germaine Cellier.
“I was extremely passionate about how Mr. Pierre Balmain wanted to fight for the world he envisioned,” said Rousteing. “All of them have a strong story.”
The designer, Rousteing continued, was as passionate for his fragrance as he was for his fashion.
Rousteing and Lauder wanted to begin with luxury — almost like couture — fragrance, he explained. What started as one fragrance ended with eight for this collection.
“Because we were like: If we want to push diversity, diversity is about different personalities, as well,” he said. “So we wanted to bring eight different personalities at the same time.”
Having a line of fragrances taps into the fast-growing luxury perfume segment, within which people tend to buy a collection or multiple fragrances. “The landscape that fragrance covers today is more complex and refined to deal with different emotions, occasions, usages and age groups,” said Jesel.
To identify scent he adores, Rousteing knew it would be hard without the tools and language with which to speak with perfumers.
“I asked him if he’d be willing to go back to school,” said Jesel.
Rousteing said yes, and attended one of the top fragrance schools in Paris. “I started reading books to try and understand the process of creating fragrances,” he said. At school he donned the traditional white lab coat. “And obviously my shoulder pads,” said Rousteing. “It was a pretty funny thing.”
He feels one needs to be humble when creating fragrances and loved the process of discovering a new world.
“It’s a really long process of patience, balance of all the ingredients that will define the smell that you want to remember forever,” said Rousteing, who learned to identify olfactive ingredients blind. “I wanted to start from scratch.”
“He has a very distinct approach to scent-making — one that is highly conceptual,” said Jesel.
Rousteing and the Lauder team began reworking Carbone, which first came out in 2010.
“It’s like my little baby,” he said. “It was like trying to define my and the Balmain personality, a sense of freedom and a reflection of your quest of identity, as well.”
Rousteing called this scent the most complex of the eight genderless perfumes.
“What is really important is the tension,” he said, referring to the musk note, which is strong and tough, and rose note that’s more delicate. Together, there is a strength, Rousteing noted.
To tease Les éternels de Balmain, the house launched Projet Confidentiel in February, first showing assets featuring a matte black unlabeled fragrance bottle. The unidentified Carbone was spritzed on models, as well as in the runway venue for the house’s fashion show on Feb. 28.
Other olfactive dichotomies followed, including in Sel d’Ambre, which Rousteing said “will define me a lot. There is this sense of fire, the scent of smoke, a bit of leather, but as well this amber.”
There’s ambergris, too.
“Sel d’Ambre for me was literally like this kind of fragrance [with which] you can imagine being in the middle of the desert,” said Rousteing, who also pictured a sky full of stars. “It’s about the dream. There is a bit of magic, as well, and a sense of incense.”
He described Bronze as having a tension between cedarwood — a strong, tough wood — and the subtleness of patchouli, plus coming again with a sense of fire.
“I started beauty right after a really bad accident,” said Rousteing, who suffered burns on his body as a result. “It was a really difficult moment for me.” This fragrance, therefore, is about healing.
“It was definitely the one about finding your own peace,” said Rousteing. “It was like a phoenix rising from your own ashes. This one really has a sense of rebirth.
“It was really like a therapy to create fragrances,” he continued. “Because it’s all about traveling in your mind, dreaming, escape and finding your own peace and who you are.”
Bleu Infini nods to the Italian Mediterranean island of Elba, where Pierre Balmain had a house. Rousteing thought of the infinite ocean and a sense of freedom. It contains notes of cistus absolute and salted lichen.
“It was more like thinking what would I wear in summer,” said Rousteing. “What could be the smell when you look at the ocean forever.”
To further pay homage to Balmain, Rousteing revisited the iconic Ivoire, with tuberose and vetiver notes.
“It’s a really strong floral,” said Rousteing.
Important here, according to him, is the sense of Paris and France. “But I wanted to bring my new Paris and the sense of unity, because Paris of today is not the Paris of yesterday,” said Rousteing, emphasizing this is particularly important to impart at this moment.
He reworked ébène.
“It’s all about ebony woods and myrrh,” said Rousteing. “This one was at the same time the bridge between Pierre Balmain and who I am, because I’m half Ethiopian and half Somalian, born and raised in Bordeaux. This was definitely a moment very important for me, because it was bringing my origins to the fragrances.”
Rouge has a mix of lily and georgywood notes; Rousteing described it as light and bright. “This one is about being addicted to love and passion,” he said. “I was imaging more like a sunset in L.A., where it’s time for you to fall in love.”
Whereas Vent Vert, a ground-breaking green scent, was among the first fragrance Pierre Balmain crafted, it was the last Rousteing worked on for this collection.
“Vent Vert is a citrus and is about nature,” said Rousteing, explaining it combines green of mandarin and jasmine notes.
All of the fragrances, which were created with Givaudan’s Quentin Bisch, Shyamala Maisondieu and Calice Becker; IFF’s Dominique Ropion, and Symrise’s Maurice Roucel, have a sense of timelessness, he said.
“It’s about forever,” said Rousteing, who also hopes people relate the Balmain scents to emotions experienced, among other memories.
There are eight different campaigns for Les éternels de Balmain, which star Dove Cameron, Soo Joo Park, Amira Ahmed, Mamour Majeng, Lulu Wood and Akuol Deng Atem.
“You mix men and women together, women together, men together, and you cannot define if it’s a women or men’s fragrance,” said Rousteing, adding the campaign has “different visuals, different attitudes and [brings] this sense of diversity into the smells.”
The talent wears Balmain fashion and jewelry, and carries its accessories. “It’s so important — the communication between the fashion and the beauty — because the future is going to be beauty,” said Rousteing.
He believes there is a common thread running through the scents and the campaign, which is a sense of self-confidence and strength. “Like when you wear a Balmain jacket there is a sense of empowerment,” said Rousteing. “It’s really important to build a sense of unity.”
That is the goal for Lauder, too.
Of Les éternels de Balmain, Rousteing said: “I feel it’s not going to be a new chapter only for Balmain, but it’s going to be a new book, with the beauty.”
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