Real luxury is invisible
What is luxury?” asks Marc Chaya, the CEO and founder of the start-up — one might say upstart — French luxury firm, Maison Francis Kurkdjian. “Is luxury a 250-euro 50 ml black bottle with a gold stopper? Is that privilege?
“Is luxury going to a store where you feel intimidated, where two huge muscle guys are staring at you the whole time as if you were going to steal everything inside? If you don’t have 25,000 dollars coming to your bank account every month, you don’t go in there,” he shrugs.
All right, what is luxury? He cites the Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, now playing in the window of Adora at Greenbelt 5.
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s is an inspiration to us,” Chaya says. “In the movie Audrey is poor and chic, she goes inside Tiffany’s with 10 dollars, and the only thing she can afford is a phone dialer. But she gets the same attention from the staff as the clients who spend thousands of dollars.
“We all work hard in our daily lives,” he continues, “and price should not be the factor that determines what luxury is. At Maison Francis Kurkdjian, we believe that luxury is in the details. Luxury is not about price or intimidation. It’s about taking someone out of his day-to-day life and giving him a magical time.”
Maison Francis Kurkdjian is named after the perfumer, one of the most renowned “noses” in the world. His creations include Le Male for Jean Paul Gaultier, still the number one selling fragrance in any door in the world, For Her and For Him for Narciso Rodriguez; F by Ferragamo; Rumeur by Lanvin; Cologne Noire and Eau Blanche for Dior; and Guerlain Rose Barbare and many other acclaimed fragrances. Kurkdjian was a 24-year-old trainee at ISIPCA, the only professional perfumery school, when he designed Le Male for Gaultier. He went on to create a wide spectrum of scents for Elizabeth Arden, Armani, Hedi Slimane at Dior, and Galliano. He did Opium and Kouros for Yves Saint Laurent. By age 30 he had won the Coty Award recognizing a lifetime’s achievements.
While he worked and continues to work with famous brands, Kurkdjian started his own atelier for bespoke fragrances. “The same way he was working with a designer to build a fragrance for a designer brand, he could work with an individual who wanted his own signature scent,” Chaya says. The bespoke fragrances were a huge success. “The cost is 8,000 euros, which is expensive, but no more than a nice piece of jewelry or a watch,” he adds.
The luxury brands followed suit: Hermes now offers bespoke fragrances for 50,000 euros, Cartier for 60,000. “We are the pioneer and still the leading brand in bespoke fragrances,” Chaya declares.
Maison Francis Kurkdjian brings together the perfumer’s various activities: the perfumes, the bespoke creations for private clients, and a newly-created range of perfumed products including the ground-breaking incense paper for that shot of perfume in the air, scented bubbles, candles, and the breakthrough perfumed leather bracelets. These fragrances in their distinctive crystal flacons with grey zinc stoppers and gilded wrapping are available at Adora, one of only three stores in Asia chosen to carry the line.
“We want to be in the best places,” Chaya says, “and it’s fantastic that Manila has a place like Adora. It’s the sort of place where people of a certain level of education can go, but which at the same time has the courage to carry items that are accessible.”
Kurkdjian had always wanted to combine his art of fragrance with the other arts. In 2006 he created olfactive installations at Versailles — scented bubbles in pear, strawberry, and melon, the three fruits that Louis XIV grew in a greenhouse on the palace grounds. He has created scents for the Opera Garnier, for the ballet, for pastry chefs. Seven years ago he met Chaya and they began to plan a house that would give him the means to build on his visions. Maison Francis Kurkdjian opened its doors in September of last year.
“It’s been a while since a perfumer has put his name on a bottle,” Chaya notes. “This is the only industry where the real talent is sitting behind the curtain.”
He explains how the billion-dollar global perfume industry works.
“Perfumers toil in laboratories for years, then they receive a marketing brief that might say, ‘We want a fragrance for a woman who’s a mother with three kids, but is at the same time a karate master and James Bond girl. And it has to be floral and be the bestselling fragrance of the year.’ When the perfumer wins the bid, the fragrance house starts ordering and selling tons of fragrance.”
Last year, because of the world economic crisis, only 400 fragrances were launched, Chaya says. The number is usually 800 a year, with only a couple of successes. “The fragrance industry has become a kind of financial instrument — companies launch, launch, launch, sweat every asset they have, the assets of fashion houses, then celebrities, then sports personalities. The industry has stretched this model to its absolute limit, and people are getting tired of that.
“Niche brands, of who we are not, were a great way for people to have more intimate relationships with a brand, but it’s now overcrowded,” he observes.
“Some brands say, we have the most expensive fragrance because we use the most expensive raw materials. That doesn’t exist. We all use the best raw materials. It’s a regulated market: all perfumers use the same instruments. Some marketing concepts claim to use only organic fragrances — that does not exist. An organic fragrance will get you a salad bowl.
“An all-natural fragrance does not exist,” Chaya stresses. “It’s like telling Jean Nouvel to build a huge modern museum using only wood and mud. We’re tired of marketing concepts. We want authenticity.”
He likens the situation in the perfume industry to visiting the Tate Modern in London, looking at a painting by Francis Bacon, then identifying it as “A Tate Modern painting.” Or going to the opera and saying, “This is not Mozart, this is Opera Garnier.”
“The current business model will be around for some time, but we think it’s time for more legitimacy, more authenticity. It’s time to redefine luxury.”
Maison Francis Kurkdjian is bringing a very modern and contemporary twist to the industry. Chaya calls it “A small revolution. We are breaking every code while anchoring ourselves in the knowledge of the art of fragrance.”
Their boutique at 5 Rue d’Alger in Paris is a 325-square feet gallery open to the street, with scented bubbles and an animated window featuring a magical Paris. “It’s a place where people can walk in, and even if they don’t buy anything, they get a small piece of the dream,” Chaya says.
“If someone goes into Maison Francis Kurkdjian and wants to spend only 15 euros, he can leave with a small part of the cake. Our prices go from 10 euros to 8,000 euros for the bespoke fragrances.”
One of Kurkdjian’s avowed objectives is to bridge “the ridiculous gap” between fine fragrances and the scent of detergent and other household solutions. As someone who works with scents all day, he himself does not wear fragrance. And then he realized that without meaning to, he was wearing a scent. He smelled like the commercial detergent used to wash his clothes.
“People bathe with a shower gel, then they put on a shirt washed with detergent and fabric softener, and it produces a huge olfactory mess,”
Chaya says: “Francis was very frustrated that he could not find a detergent that goes with the fabric softener, then goes with the eau de toilette.”
This frustration led Kurkdjian to create Aqua Universalis, his own interpretation of the scent of freshness, composed of lily of the valley and mugwort, a white flower bouquet. The “universal water” is available as a unisex eau de toilette, perfumed candle, incense paper... and as laundry washing liquid and fabric softener.
Another product pays homage to the origins of perfumery, when glove-makers were also creators of scent. The idea came to Kurkdjian when he re-created the perfume of Marie Antoinette and re-scented her glove for his Versailles art project. In the past, gloves were made of leather treated with horse urine and other noxious substances; glove-makers had to make fragrances that would mask these odors.
Not everyone wears gloves these days — try putting them on in this record-setting summer heat — but almost everyone wears bracelets. Maison Francis Kurkdjian introduces Tour Atour, the perfumed leather bracelet with a magnetized silver clasp. The leather is treated for six months in a bath of essential oils so the fragrance stays for six months to a year. It’s a different way of wearing scent: instead of spraying cologne on your skin, you wear it around your wrist (the leather bracelet is customized to your measurements in Adora). When the scent fades, you simply take it back to the store.
In closing, Marc Chaya offers his personal definition of luxury. “Luxury is eating pasta with pesto cooked at the right temperature while sitting on the carpet with your friends, instead of being with people you dislike in a Michelin three-star restaurant, drinking champagne at the wrong temperature and eating caviar with people that are boring.” Freedom from boredom is surely the ultimate luxury.
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Maison Francis Kurkdjian is available only at Adora Department Store, on three levels of Greenbelt 5, Makati.
