Standing until the last rays of sunlight illuminate the garden, Chantal Roos speaks, perfumes, captivates. If anyone missed the beginning, it doesn’t matter, she starts again: “White Song, on a full moon evening, I dance and get drunk all night long. I live the Dolce Vita. With Chantal, life has the smell of the movies, and the darkness of the night melts into the film as the images of a career flash past. But the final word is not yet written.. After sharing her stories with some of the world’s greatest perfume houses – Yves Saint Laurent, Jean Paul Gaultier – Chantal dedicates her olfactory tales to Roos&Roos. A project she is carrying out with her daughter, Alexandra. A more intimate project? No, something that goes beyond individual experiences: “Women’s stories told by women”.
Roos&Roos: the “&” cannot be forgotten. So it seemed essential to leave room for this other half, so as not to betray the story. Chantal Roos evokes professional and artistic encounters, the spirit of couture, the elegance of women. Through it all, she tells the story of a mother, an artist and an entrepreneur who rose through the ranks of the luxury industry, in the shadow of the Paris Left Bank.
A share of memories
Chantal’s work? Translate the spirit of a house into a story, then find the perfume notes that will translate the essence of that story into a signature fragrance. ” When you work with a great couturier, you immerse yourself in his universe, the richness of all his creations. This has been and will continue to be the case for Opium and Paris. Arriving at Yves Saint Laurent at the dawn of the 1980s, Chantal took up a crazy challenge: to renew the image of masculinity with a fragrance that would become a hit. “Kouros. She balanced Saint Laurent’s strong persona with the story of ancient virility, embracing a male audience whose sensitivity to fragrance was growing. . “Yves Saint Laurent’s Pour Homme represents him: he poses for his ad and will always wear it. For Kouros, we need a new masculine, more powerful than the first (…) We’re going to look at what else exists on the men’s market. I share all this with Monsieur Saint Laurent. We’re going to have to combine strength and classicism, the aesthetic imperative in this house. We’re also talking about purity, light, white, strength, and naturally Monsieur Saint Laurent will be thinking of Greece and ……….”. 15 years with Saint Laurent: Chantal recalls them without the impudent, bitter taste that can come from a collection of of teasing anecdotes.A way of recounting memories that is in itself a perfume. Sober, Saint Laurent class. She translates this for Ross&Ross with “Song for a QueenSong for a Queen”, “or the memory of those magnificent women parading in Haute Couture at YSL: a fragrance dedicated to generous, haughty, loved women ……”.
He was so thoughtful and loved working on his perfumes – Chantal Roos on Yves Saint Laurent.
A career without false notes
Beyond the history of Saint Laurent and the history of perfume, Chantal has left her mark on the history of man’s relationship with beauty. At Issey Myake and then Gaultier, she works to the same exacting standards and the same rules. . “We mustn’t forget that perfume doesn’t live alone in its own little universe, it’s part of a whole that includes the great currents of the ages. Fashion evolves, art in many forms, architecture, painting, decoration, music and so on”.. A taste of perfume as reminiscent of the Zeitgeist of an era: an important point that sets Chantal’s expertise apart “You have very well-known perfumes that don’t bear the name of a couturier, but that of a major brand that has created a ‘raison d’être’ for these fragrances” (…) “It’s not fashion that’s most important, but style, as famous personalities have said”. Well, Saint Laurent is here again.
De Filles en chansons
White Song , La Dolce Vita mother-daughter
Torking with Alexandra is more than just passing on know-how – it’s sharing and exchanging. Each Roos&Roos fragrance is “a tale, a love story, a journey, a memory”. A mother and a daughter: the experiences of one feed the stories of the other, and vice versa . upstream, we talk, we exchange. Sometimes one fades away, but everything is always in harmony. Then our perfumer enters our stories for inspiration. If one of the brand’s watchwords is “perfume as heritage” , this should not be seen as the
triptych
Jean Paul Gaultier, Issey Miyake and Yves Saint Laurent as overwhelming the Roos&Roos DNA. Chantal’s legacy is not just her professional life. Alexandra offers her mother her artistic vision, and they pool their memories of women to transform them into universal fragrances that remain on the skin beyond the bends and fashions. After all, style remains.
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