I never use two at the same time. I like to change, because if you don’t change, you don’t smell it anymore. I love Dior Gris Montaigne; it’s very good. It’s almost purple, a great scent for men. And recently, I discovered Byredo Bal d’Afrique and Ombre Mercure.¹

That’s Karl Lagerfeld, talking about perfume on the occasion of the launch of his latest him & her fragrance duo, developed under new licensing arrangements with InterParfums. Clearly the man has good taste in perfume, and presumably he has the wherewithal to hire the right sort of people to develop a hit fragrance, but so far, he hasn’t managed to produce a lasting classic under his own name: all of his earlier perfumes, under licenses with Coty and Elizabeth Arden, are off the market.

In stark contrast to the rather low-key launches of his last two releases, under Coty (the Karl Lagerfeld Kapsule trio and Karleidoscope, neither of which made much of a ripple in the market), the advance hype for the new fragrances was ferocious, and if you missed all the frenzy over #karlparfums on Twitter, fear not, you can still get an emotiKarl app for your phone, should you care to include emoticons of Karl’s gloved hand, or the fragrance bottles, or Choupette’s face, in your texts…

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