The scent is “everybody can feel at ease.” It’s a stable point where you’re not bombarded with too much information. If you want to create a successful perfume you have to somehow anchor it into something just to ground it somewhere where people can start to follow you. You can’t be too avant-garde in the perfume business, because the sense of smell relies on one’s own past, and the olfactory memory. If you’re too far away from that starting point, then you don’t get to people. You need to anchor the people to something they might think they know, and then bring to something, to somewhere they don’t know.
— Perfumer Francis Kurkdjian, talking about Kenzo World Intense. Read more at Exclusive: A&E Interviews the Man Behind Kenzo World Parfums.
“You can’t be too avant-garde in the perfume business,”
And yet, the best perfumes I own (i.e. Serge Lutens at his peak) are exactly that, “too” avant grade. Over the last few years, MFK, much like serge and all the other dimming mass prestige lines, have gone the route of dumbed down, watered down, uninspired derivative perfumes with skyrocketing price tags.
That’s not a good way to get to people or to make them feel at ease.
Well, I have mixed feelings. There isn’t much point in doing overly avant garde for Kenzo — the audience is different than that for Serge. But I did not think Kenzo World was much fun — “uninspired” seems pretty fair.
The questions is that Francis Kurkdjian is not talking about us, fragrance perfumistas or people crazy for fragrances and he is talking about success in the mass market. And he is right, see that many of the more avant-gard fragrances of 2000’s where discontinued because they didn’t sell well. The cold truth is that bold fragrances sells very little. Some you can do a progressive strategy to make people get used to them, but still it is an investment that can take years to return (see Angel for instance).
Even Lutens, facing competition, doesn’t relly anymore on bold fragrances, see the new brand launches
That is quite true (about SL). And agree, he is talking about a different market. I still say Kenzo World was unnecessarily dull, and you don’t have to necessarily push boundaries to make a fragrance that isn’t entirely faceless / boring! In fact, he has done it, more than once.