10 most iconic jewellery designers of the 20th Century
Vintage jewellery expert Lee Siegelson breaks down the must-know jewelry designers from the last century.
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A survey of the most iconic and important 20th Century jewellery designers is fraught with the same subjective pitfalls as any other assemblage of art. In an appraisal of Modernist paintings, for example, is Magritte’s The Treachery of Images relatively more or less important of an artistic icon than, say, Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2? And so it is with jewellery: On a short list of designers, reasonable people can disagree about the merits of Gérard Sandoz – after all, his career as a gem artist was cut short by a second life as an actor.
That’s why it’s important to ensure that anyone curating such a list of greats is qualified to opine. And Lee Siegelson certainly knows his gems. The third-generation jeweller has spent years assessing, collecting, and selling gallery-quality vintage pieces from the brand’s office on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. Louis, Lee’s grandfather, first launched the business in Brooklyn in 1920, originally specialising in watch repair. In the 1940s—with the help of his son Herman (Lee’s father)—Siegelson pivoted and began putting more focus on vintage jewellery. In time, he amassed a spectacular inventory of one-of-a-kind designs. In the global jewellery community, the Siegelson collection is among the most respected. To date, many pieces have been sold to or exhibited in museums—including New York’s Cooper Hewitt and the Smithsonian.
So, who better to walk us through the 10 most iconic, influential designers of the last century than Lee Siegelson himself? The expert will lead a concise crash course in jewellery history—from Calder to Van Cleef, he’ll break down what makes each artist stand out. Plus—what unusual brooch was Jeanne Boivin’s favourite? What did airplane design have to do with Jean Després’ pieces? Trust us, you’ll want to pocket a few of these conversational gems for your next dinner party.
Lee Siegelson exhibiting at a fine art fair. Photo: Courtesy Siegelson
# Suzanne Belperron
Suzanne Belperron is the single most important jewellery designer of all time. She created an iconic aesthetic of bold curvaceous designs that are immediately recognisable as Belperron. In fact, she is known for not signing her pieces stating, “My style is my signature.” And she is absolutely correct.
Belperron was known for using unusual carved hardstone materials such as rose quartz, rock crystal, and chalcedony as a mounting material for bracelets and rings. She also pushed her workshops to create intricate stone settings for pieces that included a large and varied amount of stone cuts. Each mounting had to be hand created to fit the individual stones.
This bib necklace is an iconic Belperron design composed of a field of irregular ovoid rubies interspersed with diamonds, all bezel-set in platinum. Although the rubies and diamonds appear to be randomly scattered, they were actually placed with great care by the designer, as an Impressionist painter might scatter drops of paint to create a more beautiful whole. The result is a magnificent liquid feeling.
Belperron was and is absolutely revered by fashion designers, editors, and wearers of haute couture. Her pieces have been collected by Daisy Fellowes, Elsa Schiaparelli, Diana Vreeland, the Duchess of Windsor, and Karl Lagerfeld, to name a few. She is the designer most sought after by people who understand clothing and jewellery can be art.
Art Moderne Ruby and Diamond Bib Necklace by Suzanne Belperron, Paris, circa 1945. Photo: Courtesy Siegelson
# Boivin
Jeanne Boivin (the principal of Boivin after her husband died in 1917) was fashion and jewellery royalty. She was a female director of the renowned jewellery firm and the sister of Paul Poiret, the couturier who forever changed fashion with his groundbreaking designs in the 1910s and 1920s. Jeanne gave Suzanne Belperron her start and also worked with Juliette Moutard. These three women together created some of the most important jewellery ever designed with a strong sculptural style usually based on nature.
The starfish brooch is the absolute pinnacle of Boivin design, and Jeanne even said this brooch was her favourite. This jewel was purchased by Claudette Colbert, the most recognisable Hollywood star in the 1930s after her Academy Award win for “It Happened One Night.” And she is pictured wearing the brooch in a period photograph.
Millicent Rogers owned a later version and she was pictured wearing it in Vogue. The Boivin starfish was actually pictured in Vogue four times between 1937 and 1945, an unheard-of number of times for a magazine on the cutting edge of fashion.
The Claudette Colbert Starfish: A Ruby and Amethyst Starfish Brooch Designed by Juliette Moutard for René Boivin, Paris, 1937. Photo: Courtesy Siegelson
# Cartier
Cartier has created more great pieces than any other jeweller—in fact their designs often define a particular era or style. There is no material or stone Cartier did not master. The Cartier family dynasty spanned a century with output from affordable silver table pieces to exquisite one of a kind jewelled creation made for maharajas and European royalty.
Cartier hired the best workshops and designers and gave them access to a broad library of art books and Persian miniatures for inspiration. This bracelet would have been purchased by a top client. It is exquisite in both construction and design. The black lacquer makes the form modern, while the three-leaf design gives a nod to exotic decorative styles. The green emeralds pop against the otherwise stark black and white palette and the lustrous pearls are exquisite terminals. Only Cartier could have produced this piece and when you hold it in your hand, you can see there is nothing out of place, it is a perfectly considered and exquisite piece.
Art Deco Diamond, Natural Pearl, Emerald, and Onyx Bangle by Cartier, circa 1925. Photo: Courtesy Siegelson
# Van Cleef & Arpels
Van Cleef & Arpels is known for absolutely elegant confections. They particularly excelled at using unusual stone cuts and design innovations such as the invisible setting, the minaudiere and the zip necklace. The company made particularly beautiful pieces using a marquise-cut they called the navette. This diamond fringe necklace showcases the expert way VCA layered varied stone cuts to accentuate the geometry of the stones and create a stunning construction that is elegant and luxurious and feels modern and wearable today.
*Platinum and Diamond Necklace by Van Cleef & Arpels, Paris, 1948. Photo: Courtesy Siegelson
*
# Boucheron
From their start in 1858, Boucheron received attention at international exhibitions for their thoughtful, beautiful, bold designs. At the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels the company created a complete design scheme including fitted pink shagreen cases decorated with geometric designs created for the exhibition. (The bracelet owned by Siegelson has the only known remaining box.)
This bracelet, one of the most important pieces of jewellery ever made, was created for the 1925 Paris Exposition. Stephen Harrison, Curator of Decorative Art at The Cleveland Museum of Art, said “Boucheron created an extraordinary bracelet of innovative Osmium set with cabochon rubies, sapphires, and emeralds, arranged as bubbles floating in the water.” The revolutionary design of this piece centers on the geometric arrangement of the stones encircled by diamonds that seem to slip across the surface of the bracelet, sliding under the diamond edge of the panels. Black enamelled rods, positioned diagonally, provide a dramatic foil for the coloured gemstones.
Art Deco Diamond, Enamel, and Gem-Set Bracelet by Boucheron. Exhibited at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Paris. Photo: Courtesy Siegelson
# Gérard Sandoz
Gérard Sandoz made his fantastic jewellery for only a brief time at the height of the Art Deco period, from 1920–1931. A charming, restless character, he was known to enjoy parties at Maxim’s and eventually left the family business of jewellery making for a modest film career.
The jewellery he made is an absolutely pure exploration of geometric shapes in varied materials, colours, and finishes that combine to create a complex layered shape. There is nothing else like it.
Sandoz himself said, “It’s possible to make very beautiful jewellery simply with gold and to make horrors with rivers of diamonds.”
Centering on a platinum rod passing through a peaked gold rectangle with gold and onyx “teeth,” like those on a gear, this brooch draws inspiration directly from the machines Sandoz loved. The center element is layered on a background of frosted rock crystal on a pave-diamond triangle. In this masterful brooch Sandoz reversed the standard order of materials in a piece of fine jewellery, which typically featured the most precious stones, with metal as a mere mount. Here, Sandoz uses the diamonds as a background, while exploiting the polished gold as the central element. The result is an iconic and important design masterpiece.
Art Deco Geometric Brooch by Gérard Sandoz, Paris, circa 1927. Photo: Courtesy Siegelson
# Jean Després
Born into a family of jewellers and forever influenced by his experience as an airplane designer during World War II, Després influenced the course of jewellery design with his carefully drafted machine inspired pieces known as “bijoux-moteurs.”
This bracelet by Després is an iconic example of Art Moderne design combining powerful simplicity with machine-inspired design. The design evokes the teeth of a massive gear, while the bracelet tapers to align to the sliming of the wrist. This subtle design adjustment acknowledges that this massive cuff is meant to be worn, and, as is shown in a period photo, is elegant on the wrist.
Art Moderne Silver and Black Lacquer Bracelet by Jean Després, Paris, circa 1931. Exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1931. Photo: Courtesy Siegelson
# Jean Dunand
Jean Dunand is one of the foremost Art Deco designers known for his lacquer furniture, decorative objects, and jewellery. He was hired to lacquer entire luxury rooms on fabulous ocean liners such as the Normandie.
Since Dunand created portraits as well as decorative arts and jewellery, his portraits often contained examples of his work. A famous and exquisite portrait of his mentor Madame Agnes came up at auction recently, and in it she is seen wearing a single giraffe necklace. The Giraffe is an iconic work for Dunand and it speaks to a specific moment in the 1920s when designers began to move away from the classical use of luxury materials toward a more modern design.
A similar model was made for and worn by Josephine Baker, who was Dunand’s muse; she’s shown wearing the set (and little else) in a famous photograph.
Recently returned from a major exhibition, The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s, at Cooper Hewitt and Cleveland Museum of art, this is the largest known set with six pieces total. This is a larger example than those owned by the Museé de Arts Decoratifs and Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is the largest set that will probably ever be seen on the market.
Red and Black Lacquer and Oréum Set of Three “Giraffe” Necklaces and Three Bracelets by Jean Dunand, Paris, circa 1927. Exhibited in The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York. Photo: Courtesy Siegelson
# Paul Flato
Paul Flato was the original jeweller to the stars, catering to the crème de la crème of Hollywood. He founded his company in New York City in 1928 and opened a Los Angeles store in 1937. His figurative style, often bordering on humorous, reached its peak in the 1930s when Adolph Kleaty, George Headley, and Fulco, Duke of Verdura, designed pieces for him. Flato made feathers, hands holding flowers, and brooches that were treasure chests fill of jewels, but with panache.
His salons were frequented by Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, and Vivien Leigh, and leading men Douglas Fairbanks, Laurence Olivier, and Orson Welles. His jewellery was worn by Katherine Hepburn in Holiday, Greta Garbo in Two Faced Woman, and Rita Hayward in Blood and Sand.
For this necklace, Verdura transformed an ordinary utilitarian item, a belt, into a show-stopping aquamarine and ruby necklace. This was a remarkable feat at a time when most jewellery featured flowers or geometric designs. The necklace is cleverly designed to look as though the belt were knotted, creating a piece which can be worn centered or off to the side, as it was in Vogue in 1944.
The Cole Porter Necklace: An Aquamarine and Ruby Belt with a Buckle Necklace Designed by Fulco, Duke of Verdura, for Paul Flato, New York, circa 1935. Photo: Courtesy Siegelson
# Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder is best known for his delicately balanced mobiles and sculptures that move in response to air or touch, but jewellery was his most personal and constant medium. Handmade by the artist, each piece was a unique combination of his hammering and the aesthetic and grace contained in his large-scale works. Calder’s jewellery, bohemian but refined, was collected by fashionable art collectors including Peggy Guggenheim, Mary Rockefeller, and Millicent Rogers.
Created of brass wire, this brooch displays the same sense of motion found in his mobiles and the geometry and dynamism found in his lithographs where he often explored repeated interlocking circles.
Elisabeth Agro, curator of the blockbuster Calder Jewellery exhibition said of the jewellery: “Space. It’s about occupying space. And he just sees the body as a grounding element for this other aspect of his work. Not that the body gets in the way — the body is one part of this larger work of art, when you put it on.”
Brass and Steel “Six Circles” Brooch by Alexander Calder, New York, circa 1940. Photo: Courtesy: Siegelson
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Still, selecting a fragrance is a deeply personal, even emotional, decision. Kurkdjian’s challenge was to make a big tent even bigger by offering a new—but not radically different—vision of something millions of men around the world already wear.
He started the project—where else?—at a desk covered in vials. Though a team of two associate perfumers works just down the hall from his office in Paris, one gets the sense that Kurkdjian prefers solitude. When I later ask one of his friends if Kurkdjian is shy or just French, they respond, “He’s shy. And French. Double whammy.”
But one-on-one, Kurkdjian is supremely self-assured, armed with the type of confidence you expect to see in a surgeon or first responder. “I don’t feel the pressure, to be honest, because I decided not to feel the pressure,” he says, in reference to the various demands of his role, including devising bestsellers, overseeing the other perfumers, managing Dior’s relationship with its flower growers in Grasse (the raw-materials capital of the French fragrance industry), and even training store associates how to express his ideas. “It’s not a job you can handle if you’re afraid, because fear is unproductive.”
Fortunately for Kurkdjian, he comes from brave stock. On both sides of his family are relatives who immigrated to France from the former Ottoman Empire early in the 20th century to avoid political persecution; his maternal great-grandmother and grandmother only narrowly escaped the Armenian genocide.
To instill a sense of pride in their heritage, Kurkdjian’s parents took him and his two siblings to the Armenian Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Paris every week. He still attends regularly. “When I’m in my final box, that’s where I’ll go,” Kurkdjian says, with a slight smile at his own gallows humour.
But the family also put a premium on a French sense of personal style and savoir faire. He remembers his mother buying fabric used in past-season Chanel collections to make her own suits. It didn’t hurt that one of her best friends, Françoise, was a petite main who once made dresses in Dior’s couture atelier. After Kurkdjian’s mother died in 2013, Françoise, now 87, became a surrogate aunt—but she has long been a link to the man whose memory Kurkdjian is now tasked with upholding. Because she worked closely with Monsieur Dior himself, Kurkdjian still calls her “whenever I need to fact-check something.”
As a teenager, Kurkdjian stole spritzes of his father’s small selection of classic colognes, which included the fresh, citrusy Dior Eau Sauvage, released in 1966 and unrelated (in the olfactory sense) to the 2015 scent, as well as the suave, vanilla-forward Pour un Homme de Caron. His mother wore perfume in what was then a novel way: different scents for different occasions, seasons, and moods, instead of a single signature. “She was loyal to my father, but she was never loyal to perfumes,” Kurkdjian jokes.
At first, he thought he’d be a ballet dancer—“I wanted to be Nureyev,” he says—but he failed the rigorous entrance exam to the Paris Opera Ballet School. Then, for a time, he thought he could be a couturier, until he came to grips with the fact that he couldn’t draw.
When he was 14, he became fascinated with a collection of perfume samples his sister had put together. A few years later, Kurkdjian saw a magazine article about fragrances that sealed the deal. He remembers feeling jealous of the perfumers on the page and wanted to join their ranks. “I was choosing my life,” he says, before paraphrasing a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre: “‘Choosing not to choose is still choosing.’ And this is, like, almost tattooed in my brain. I don’t know if I always make good decisions, but I make decisions.”
In 1994, two years after Kurkdjian graduated from ISIPCA, a fragrance school in Versailles, the industry was dominated by a small handful of huge companies. Designers in need of new scents would send out requests for proposals, and perfumers would enter a knock-down, drag-out fight to win the bid. Thirty years later, not much has changed.
“They still make perfumers compete against each other, even within the same house,” says Dawn Goldworm, an olfactive expert who has been friends with Kurkdjian for over 20 years. “So at Firmenich, you have a lot of perfumers competing against each other on projects,” she explains, referring to the leading French firm, “but they’re also competing against perfumers at Givaudan, International Flavors & Fragrances, and Takasago. It doesn’t really create a collaborative spirit.”
A chance meeting with the executive who owned Jean-Paul Gaultier’s fragrance license would produce one of the industry’s most consequential partnerships. At the time, Kurkdjian was just 25 years old and had enrolled in a master’s degree program at Paris’s Institute of Luxury Marketing. Gaultier was soliciting bids from the major houses for a new men’s fragrance. His brief was to evoke the seductive side of clean sweat, something Kurkdjian later described as “the idea of sensuality where you want to practically bite into a man’s skin.” The exec gave him three weeks to submit a formula as a sort of training exercise; Kurkdjian had never designed a fragrance outside the classroom. He took the assignment anyway—and won.
His composition used lavender, mint, vanilla, and a hint of cumin to conjure the musky aroma the designer was after—and it beat designs from far more experienced perfumers. Housed in a torso-shaped bottle clad in a striped sailor motif (Gaultier’s idea), Le Male quickly became a sensation, notable for how different it was from other men’s scents on the market, which generally conformed to generic ideas about masculinity: You could smell either clean, like a fraternity pledge getting ready for Friday night (à la Davidoff’s Cool Water or Issey Miyake’s L’eau d’Issey Pour Homme), or powerful, in the vein of an old-money financier (think Creed’s Green Irish Tweed). Le Male was far more nuanced—a little sweet, a little floral, yet undeniably masculine. Released in 1995, it was perfectly positioned for the metrosexual trend of the late ’90s and early aughts, which heralded changing ideas about what it meant to be a man.
“It was a unique combination of the freshness of lavender with the warmth of the vanilla and amber in the base—it was very modern smelling,” says Sebastian Jara, a fragrance consultant in San Francisco. Though Kurkdjian’s initial formula has since spawned 55 flankers, Jara notes that people still wear the original. “It’s one of the icons of the perfume industry,” he says.
Le Male also made Kurkdjian an overnight star in his field. “Most perfumers at 25 don’t have the breadth or the facility to do a global bestseller,” Goldworm says. “Francis is an anomaly, because he’s just brilliant.”
But Kurkdjian learned early that success can come at a cost. In short order, a rumour went around Paris that his formula was selected only because he was sleeping with Gaultier.
“It was not true,” Kurkdjian clarifies, obviously still hurt by the accusation, even if it was partly based on a simple misunderstanding: “Jean-Paul had a boyfriend at the time whose name was the same as mine—Francis.” He believes the rumour stuck because “in France, people don’t like success. Success is always suspicious.”
Though he should have been on top of the world, he began avoiding industry events, socialising only with a tight circle of trusted friends. Even now, decades later and at the height of his powers, the lesson still lingers. Kurkdjian will go as far as to confirm that he’s gay, but he won’t divulge anything else about his romantic life to the press.
His work is another story, and Le Male opened the door to plenty of it. It helped him land a job as a perfumer for Quest, a Dutch-owned company later acquired by Givaudan, where he created a string of best-selling and critically acclaimed bottles: Elizabeth Arden’s Green Tea, in 1999; Lancôme’s Miracle Homme, in 2001; Narciso Rodriguez for Her, in 2003. He even devised two scents for Dior’s halo line of fragrances, La Collection Privée, in 2004.
It wasn’t just his early successes that made Kurkdjian stand out. Perfumers are a small community, by some estimates numbering as few as 200 professionals. “Many people use the analogy that there are more astronauts than perfumers,” says Linda G. Levy, president of the Fragrance Foundation, a New York-based trade group.
“There’s a stereotype of who [can be a perfumer], and perhaps a lack of welcoming into the industry,” she says. Though that has begun to change, when Kurkdjian’s star was on the rise, his peers were mostly straight, older men descended from families in or near Grasse whose members had made fragrances for generations. Kurkdjian was a young gay man with no connection to the industry, outperforming the other guys and making it look easy.
One factor has long leveled the playing field: Most perfumers aren’t widely credited for their work. It’s something that seemed unfair to Marc Chaya, a finance and strategy executive who was a partner at Ernst & Young in 2004, the year he met Kurkdjian at a birthday party for a mutual friend. “When I learned that he was the man behind some of these beautiful perfumes that I already had in my collection, I was very intrigued and surprised,” Chaya says.
They became fast friends, quickly learning they had a lot in common: They were both gay and wildly successful; Chaya, who’s Lebanese, saw overlaps in their families’ histories. And they were both hungry to work for themselves instead of making heaps of money for other people. “I guess we met at a time where we were both looking for something, and we found an answer in each other,” Chaya adds.
In 2009, the two formally became business partners, launching Maison Francis Kurkdjian, for which Chaya serves as CEO. From its inception, Chaya ensured Kurkdjian would receive credit for his compositions, because his name would be on every distinctively faceted bottle.
“We know fashion designers by their names, but we know fragrances by the name of the fragrance,” says Lana Todorovich, president and chief merchandising officer at Neiman Marcus, the first retailer to carry the maison’s fragrances in the United States. “They were both on a pretty significant mission to actually bring to light the incredible talent of perfumers.”
Chaya, who stayed with the company after LVMH acquired it in 2017, believes there’s still a way to go. “I’m not sure that many people know who Alberto Morillas is. I’m not sure that many people know who Calice Becker is, or who Jean-Claude Ellena is, or Christine Nagel,” he says, referring, respectively, to the creators of Calvin Klein’s CK One, Dior’s J’adore, Terre d’Hermès, and Jo Malone’s Wood Sage & Sea Salt. “It’s about time we respect what they’ve done.”
Kurkdjian has long compared what he does, especially for other brands, to being an actor. The briefs are like scripts, and exploring a new fragrance’s mood or avatar lets him step into identities he wouldn’t otherwise occupy—say, the modern London gentleman with a classic sense of style (Mr. Burberry) or the off-duty mogul just trying to put his workweek behind him (Armani Mania).
The job gives Kurkdjian a far bigger stage than he ever would have had as a ballet dancer. He calls leading Dior’s fragrance department the role of a lifetime—one he has been able to make entirely his own. “It’s not even work,” he insists.
Still, he takes pains to keep the businesses separate. Some of that is down to confidentiality, but other aspects stem from personal preference. Take flowers, for example. “I don’t put them so much at the forefront in my own house, but at Dior, they’re part of the founding act,” he says, referencing Christian Dior’s love of gardening and his practice of modeling dresses after various blooms. “They’re the DNA of the brand. So at Dior, I love working with flowers.”
He calls the Sauvage franchise “the story of lavender being the core flower of masculine perfume,” which he attributes to its use in traditional British shaving tonics. It’s the shared ingredient among all five iterations of the scent. (In addition to the fresh, citrusy, and woody original eau de toilette, François Demachy, Kurkdjian’s predecessor, made three more concentrated flankers that play up different elements of the flagship.) But if the original is smooth and urbane, Kurkdjian’s Sauvage Eau Forte is both fresher and more complex: a little green, a little peppery, with an earthy undercurrent like a warm breeze rolling through a desert oasis. Dior has leaned heavily into the imagery of water in its marketing for the scent, because Eau Forte uses water as its base instead of alcohol. The result—in addition to its opaque white appearance—is that the initial expression lasts longer than traditional scents, which tend to evolve over the course of the day.
During a span of about 10 months, Kurkdjian created 120 versions of the scent before arriving at the final formula. Though he won’t say which ingredients hit the cutting-room floor, the ultimate makeup includes a “cold spice” accord (it smells of elemi, cardamom, and black pepper), bleached lavender, and musky, woody notes. What he will say is that he rarely steps foot in the lab. He’s old-school, still writing out all his recipes with pencil and paper and handing them off to be mixed by one of his team. (“I am super lazy,” he admits. “And when you are lazy, you need efficiency, because you need things to run fast.”)
It’s one of several charming idiosyncrasies he has developed. He no longer drives because the traffic in Paris has gotten so bad that he can’t safely satisfy his need for speed. Every morning, instead, he’s driven to one of his two offices—Dior or Maison Francis Kurkdjian—around seven o’clock.
He hasn’t worn fragrances since he was in perfume school, where he was taught not to distract his nose from the formula in front of him. Occasionally, he’ll give scents he’s working on a test run or put something on for the odd party. Otherwise, his brain starts to work—and not in the good way. “Like, ‘Is that good enough? You should have done that. Why don’t you try this?’ So it’s not fun.”
He confirms the rumour that his nose is insured, though he won’t say for how much, which is one of many indications as to just how vital his role is to the bottom line. LVMH’s 2023 investor report lists four strategic priorities across its fragrance and beauty business. No. 2 is: “Focus on developing Parfums Christian Dior in harmony with couture.”
“I think it’s telling that that’s how important Christian Dior perfumes are in the entire portfolio of brands,” says Burke, the consultant. “For a brand like Dior, the fragrance category is absolutely key and a significant part of the business.”
So, yes, there’s serious money at stake. But despite the aggressive revenue targets, his ambitious schedule (he’s already working on fragrances for 2026), and the knowledge that thousands of people depend on his success, Kurkdjian tries not to take his work—or himself—too seriously.
“It’s important to put everything in perspective,” he says. “It’s just perfume. We’re not saving lives. We’re trying to make life even more beautiful.”
Scents of Occasion
Francis Kurkdjian is a firm believer in the olfactive wardrobe, the notion that you can be scented 24/7 for a range of moods and purposes. Here’s how five of his notable formulas square with what’s already in your closet.
The Wool Topcoat: Mr. Burberry Eau de Parfum
You might not wear this earthy, spice-laden fragrance year-round, but it’s an indispensable and versatile layer in the fall.
The Oxford-Cloth Button-Down: Maison Francis Kurkdjian Amyris Homme
Rosemary, cedar, and the titular Caribbean shrub combine to create an eau de toilette that’s as crisp and comforting as a clean white shirt.
The Peak-Lapel Tuxedo: Christian Dior La Collection Privée New Look
Kurkdjian’s only Dior project without flowers is filled with soapy aldehydes, amber, and frankincense—the scent of masculine chic, bottled.
The Cashmere Crewneck: Maison Francis Kurkdjian Grand Soir
Soft, warm, and uniquely enveloping, this eau de parfum’s amber-vanilla accord has an alluring edge thanks to notes of resinous benzoin.
The Dressing Gown: Carven Pour Homme Eau de Toilette
A refined and relaxed blend of violet leaf, sandalwood, sage, and vetiver, codesigned with perfumer Patricia Choux.
Hero photo by Tiphaine Caro
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15/01/2025
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