A FRENCH EXPERTISE

For me, French luxury is originality, being audacious. A FRENCH EXPERTISE DANIÈLE GLOBAL PRESIDENT MUGLER FASHION AND FRAGRANCES WHAT IS A COUTURE FRAGRANCE? What distinguishes a couture fragrance, is its ability to transcribe, in an olfactory sense, the whole DNA of a fashion house. And what’s so magical about Mugler is the direct link that we have with the creatives, the instant creative dialogue that we have with our current artistic director, Casey Cadwallader, and the dialogue we had in the past with Mr. Mugler. ANGEL, A TRAILBLAZING FRAGRANCE? A truly magical moment back in the day was when Mr. Mugler went to see a perfumer named Olivier Cresp and asked him to transcribe his childhood memories in a bottle. He really wanted to create a perfume that conveyed the fairgrounds, the scents of childhood. And Angel was really this daring bet, a bit insane to have such an overdose of sugar and praline in a fragrance enhanced, of course, by flowers and patchouli. And that gave birth to this olfactory family of gourmands that, before Angel, did not exist. AN INNOVATIVE DESIGN? What really sets Angel apart is this star with its very faceted edges, so angular. When you make a glass mold, it’s very difficult to achieve those edges. Often, they come out blunt, and there was a lot of back-and-forth with just the glassmaker, a lot of creative dialogue between Brosse glassmaker and the Mugler teams back then, in order to be able to keep this extremely faceted star. ANGEL, A PIONEER OF SUSTAINABLE PERFUME? Something that strikes me as obvious, even more so when I have this bottle in my hands, is that luxury is made to last and a very beautiful object like a perfume bottle is something you want to keep with you forever and to be able to refill it over and over again. I think that luxury brands today must be able to offer this to women, the ability to refill their bottle, so that they can use it and reuse it without having to part with the bottle. WOMEN AND THEIR FRAGRANCES IN THE 18TH CENTURY Women used to use perfume fountains to scent their clothes and gloves. This history of the perfume fountains in 18th-century France greatly inspired Mr. Mugler in his time, and that is from where the first fountains were born. A WORD TO DESCRIBE FRENCH LUXURY? In a word, French luxury is this originality, this audacity, this gap. And I find that the culture of deviation is very French, and it’s what marks a luxury experience today. And this was also the case for Angel. I think that, in that time, having made a blue concoction was completely outside the norms. It’s just quite bold. Already in the 1990s, all the perfumes were golden, pink, warm, and still today, it stands out in the world of women’s fragrances. And I think this daring little twist is precisely the hallmark of French luxury.