Why Louis Vuitton’s Long-Anticipated Fragrance Collection Was Worth The Wait

We just want people to like us. It’s the reason we work out, buy new clothes, and spritz cologne before a night out. That last, intangible element—scent—must be working somehow. It’s about a $40 billion worldwide market, and American men who buy the best, the high-end luxury juice, dropped a couple billion on the stuff in 2017 alone. Almost every major fashion house has a piece of this pie—except Louis Vuitton. That’s the brand with the unmistakable monogrammed luggage, the one that generated deafening buzz with last year’s Supreme collaboration and this year’s hiring of Off-White’s Virgil Abloh as its men’s artistic director. It’s been pulling ahead in every arena except fragrance, where it was leaving (heaps and heaps of) money on the table. Until now. This summer, the company is rolling out Les Parfums Louis Vuitton, a collection of five fragrances for guys who don’t think sophisticated is a dirty word. To create them, Vuitton hired fifth-generation perfumer Jacques Cavallier Belletrud and installed him in a maison in Grasse, in the south of France, the perfume-making capital of the world. He spent five years there refining
70 scents before settling on these five. (You get the sense he blew far past his deadline on this project, and also that the higher-ups at Vuitton didn’t much care.) Read more at Esquire.