Ever since his limestone-and-titanium Guggenheim Bilbao revolutionized architecture a quarter century ago, Frank Gehry has imbued concert halls, museums, and towers from New York to Seoul with flickering luminosity and irrepressible kinetic energy. The architect’s fascination with the human capacity to feel, whether through music, art, or other pleasures, is evident in many of his buildings: sweeping overtures to optimism and fantasy that wrap the viewer in a crescendo of unexpected form.
“Frank creates places that have a spirit and stir a variety of emotions in anyone who enters them,” says Jacques Cavallier Belletrud, a longtime Gehry fan and the nose of Louis Vuitton since 2012. “It’s in the way that light traverses his buildings. You witness something permanent and solid but also unexpectedly moving. Few people can build like that.” Cavallier Belletrud should know, being a builder himself. Great perfumers speak of their creations as constructions, olfactory bodies that are layered to evoke wonder through a blend of intuition and craft.
All this makes the latest Louis Vuitton project a meeting of kindred minds. Gehry and the master perfumer have collaborated on a suite of five women’s scents called Les Extraits. (The French term for extract refers to the highest available fragrance concentration.) Working from Los Angeles, Gehry designed a sensuous glass bottle—his first-ever perfume flacon—featuring an exuberant aluminum cap. Meanwhile, Cavallier Belletrud formulated the extracts at Les Fontaines Parfumées, Vuitton’s scent think tank and nursery in the French perfume capital of Grasse.
Gehry has designed an exquisite container for the brand once before: the mirage-like home of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, in Paris. Cavallier Belletrud visited the Bois de Boulogne site before the building opened in 2014. “Those curved glass shapes and the technique he used to make them were so exceptional. One day I will create a perfume like this,” he recalls thinking.
Six years later, the two men found themselves having long, transatlantic Zoom calls, talking about how to transmute everything they love about life into their work. “I said to him, ‘You know, Frank, the best perfume in the world is the wind.’ ” The Frenchman was thinking of how air and light filter through the billowing glass sheets at the Fondation, an effect Gehry intended.
Gehry—whose creative passion remains undiminished at 92—took on the challenge with characteristic zest, seeing it as a continuation of formal experiments he began in the aughts and took to new heights at the Fondation. “When working with large panels of glass, the normal thing would be to avoid anything that would bend it,” he explains, speaking cheerfully from his sun-flooded Playa Vista studio. “But if you’re able to purposely bend glass to its limit, you can change the character of the building and get a feeling.”
The same obstinate search for nuance that produces Gehry’s gently dancing façades—where meticulous planning masquerades as serendipity—informed his bottle for Vuitton. Veering from the symmetrical flacons used in the past, the architect wanted to add sharp edges that offset his design’s obliquely feminine contours. His team went through dozens of prototypes and several hundred 3D models before settling on a final version. (Gehry is famous for doing the same for his buildings; during a tour of his studio, he eagerly showed off models for a raft of projects, from an arts center in Arles to fish lamps for a Gagosian show.)
The resulting vessel was difficult to realize, Gehry admits, but ever so worth it. “It’s a small move, a tiny little effort, but it totally differentiates the result.”
Much like Gehry, Cavallier Belletrud’s work involves an abstract idea that must become reality. Beyond the selection of materials, the perfumer’s artistry is to reveal the precise olfactory facets he envisions. For Les Extraits, he used natural ingredients from all corners of the planet. Jasmine grandiflorum (“The Romanée Conti among jasmines,” the perfumer says of the Grasse jewel) was extracted using Cavallier Belletrud’s low-heat method to preserve its most elusive aspects. Calabrian bergamot was retooled for extra zest, while poppies and precious oudh made the journey from Peru and Bangladesh, respectively.
“What’s novel in this collection is the way we reworked the natural extract to create a heart,” says Cavallier Belletrud. While the playfully named scents eschew the usual top- and base-note composition, each one delivers a radiant punch that lingers. In Stellar Times, musky ambergris is entwined with a leathery jolt; the floral intensity of 10,000 petals fills the air in Dancing Blossom. The remaining scents run the sensory gamut, with hits of citrus and spice segueing into vanilla and woods.
For the cap, Gehry conceived what is essentially an autonomous sculptural object, reprising a signature motif: the crinkled element, borne from accident. Flame-like, it renders the scents uplifting even before the first whiff. Movement, again, is present, as if the wind had made a stray, wilting bloom awaken.
“The crumpled form represents happiness—that’s what I liked about it and what perfume is about,” explains Gehry, ever poetic. The expert alliance between Southern California and the French Riviera seems to confirm that beauty lives in subtlety and surprise, in technical finesse suffused with je ne sais quoi. “The edges give the bottle a gravitas of something new, then you top it off with a feeling of joy.”
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