The Magic of Christian Dior, Distilled: Why The Fashion House’s New Perfume Book Is Worth the Read

By Sandra Ballentine

Dior: The Perfumes by Chandler Burr, $115; rizzolibookstore.comPhoto: Courtesy of Dior

Leafing though the new book Dior: The Perfumes on the morning of the iconic fashion house’s spring show (which took place today in Paris), I was transported on a cloud of tuberose back to 1985, and my first “grown-up” fragrance purchase—a darkly dangerous-looking flacon of Dior’s Poison. Until then, my nascent perfume repertoire had been limited to sickly sweet one-note wonders like Giorgio Beverly Hills and (horrors!) Love’s Baby Soft. Poison, on the other hand, was my first waft of sophistication. I didn’t exactly know it at the time, but it was pure sex in a bottle. Or, as the book’s author, perfume expert Chandler Burr, describes the heady eighties juice, “a massive rush of hot Madagascar wind bearing the scent of a thousand tropical flowers on a base of dark green rainforest leaf . . . wrapped in a succulent neon-candy carapace.”

Filled with archival fashion photos and art and advertising images, the lushly illustrated tome weaves together nearly 70 years of the House of Dior’s fragrance and fashion history, both of which have roots in the legendary designer’s formative years. Having grown up in a prosperous merchant family, Dior was exposed to elegant women at an early age, and his memories of them were intrinsically linked to fragrance. He said, “Of the women in my childhood, I retain above all the memory of their perfumes, perfumes that lingered—more clinging than those of today—filling the elevator with fragrance long after they had gone.” This type of Proustian musing (combined with a strong sense of commercial savvy) led the designer to commission the house’s first fragrance, Miss Dior, in 1947. His directive to perfumer Paul Vacher was simple: “Make me a perfume that smells of love.” The resulting elixir, comprised of rose, jasmine, and gardenia, and tempered with undertones of oak moss, was a liquid version of the beloved gardens of Dior’s youth, and the beginning of an empire that now includes around 60 perfumes, including feminine classics like Diorissimo and J’adore, as well as masculine institutions like Eau Sauvage and Fahrenheit.

Francois Demachy, Dior’s perfumer-creator since 2006, is mindful of the house’s heritage when creating new scents (like the recently released La Collection Privée Christian Dior Cuir Cannage). “I try to respect our history and continue in a way Mr. Dior’s work.” But he also draws inspiration from present-day designer Raf Simons’s modern take on what it means to be Dior. “The act of composing a fragrance hasn’t changed much over time, but there are new processes, like CO₂ extraction,” he says. “We have at our disposal new molecules created using biotechnology,” like a “patchoulol” note which results in a Patchouli that’s much more “clean” or “pure.” Adds Demachy, “And then there are others which I don’t wish to talk about yet.” Spoken like a true designer.