Louis Vuitton presents the Collection des Extraits, five Extraits de Parfums created by Jacques Cavallier Belletrud in collaboration with architect Frank Gehry.
Master perfumer Jacques Cavallier Belletrud reinvents Extrait de Parfum with five fragrances that have no top, middle or base notes, but are like olfactory columns, stretched and rounded by the swell: Dancing Blossom, Cosmic Cloud, Rhapsody, Symphony and Stellar Times.
“I wanted to go where no one goes anymore. To reinvent the notion of an extract in a contemporary way. Add light, stretch the material, lighten up. Destructure the very architecture of perfume. This is how the Collection des Extraits was born: five fragrances with no top, middle or base notes. To reveal the quintessence of each family in each one”
Jacques Cavallier Belletrud
“I wanted to approach the project from a sculptural point of view. To bring something different to perfume. It’s not a finished geometric form, it’s just a movement. A visual movement with the added bonus of ephemerality”
Frank Gehry
Frank Gehry, one of architecture’s greatest living masters, designs his first perfume bottle. From the initial bottle designed by Marc Newson, Frank Gehry shifted the lines, stretching them. The gesture transforms the straight line into an ellipse, modeling the curvature to the point of suggesting an arc, a transparent sail skimming space. Taking a sheet of aluminum, crumpling it like a cloth, he covers the bottle with an airy, hand-polished cap, with an LV seal inside.
The Extracts Collection
To take to the open sea, to come back closer to oneself. When fragrance becomes aura, with no other destination than that of its motionless, free, suspended journeys. When the swell lifts a shape, rounding into a solar wave.
When the extract adorns the moment with new memories. When memory regains its breath, stretched by the crystal azure, the fleeting reflection of our dreams. When taken to extremes, the humility of the senses becomes a promise of infinity.
The eye, the hand, the sense of smell.
A nose, Jacques Cavallier Belletrud.
A look, Frank Gehry.
Frank Gehry and Jacques Cavallier Belletrud are united by their search for eternity in impermanence, for the singular in the universal. Each in his own way celebrates the movement within eternity, the harmony between line and curve, the tension that gives substance to beauty. To pure emotion. The
roundness of a bottle is matched by the quintessence of a gesture, of an olfactory breath: this is the reunited soul of material and perfume.
Perfume extract reinvented
“To reinvent the notion of extract, it’s important to twist the material, to reveal its expression in its original truth. To rediscover, without frou-frou, the rendezvous of seduction, that precious drop behind the ear. The extract is the silhouette of a perfume. A shared quintessence. Jacques Cavallier Belletrud
“I imagined scents before I smelled them,” says Jacques Cavallier Belletrud, a native of Grasse, the world’s perfume capital. With the Collection des Extraits, Louis Vuitton’s Master Perfumer takes hypersensitivity to the extreme, concentrating in five juices the essence of a craft, a tradition, a history in the making.
Five fragrances like five olfactory fugues on the cusp of a childhood he never needed to return to, as he declared to his parents at the age of nine: “I’m going to be a perfumer”. Five perfumes as an ode to those who made him what he is, a master never satiated with wonder. “It’s an exacerbation of feelings. Character. Of fragrances that stay on the skin without disturbing. Recognizable without being heady. In the raw material, I always find a reason to surprise. In an accord, I like to reveal what is eternally beautiful. My chance to create molecules with contemporary tools that embody the wind, to bring light to all that seemed extinguished.”
“I wanted to take up the great families of perfume. To twist them, to stretch them, to exaggerate certain facets, to reveal a purity. By revisiting chapters, florals, chypres, ambers, we create movements, rounded shapes, caressing each time. I wanted to imagine a freshness that lasts. And sensuality that doesn’t weigh you down.
Five fragrances with no top, middle or base notes, but like olfactory columns, stretched and rounded by the swell. Line, light and movement merge into a pure sensation. Classic and timeless. Here is the spirit of pure movement, undulating in the atmosphere like a swimmer splashing through the foam. Jacques Cavallier Belletrud, Louis Vuitton’s Master Perfumer, exalts this celestial rhythm through the olfactory palette of a collection of five extracts.
This is the first time that Frank Gehry, one of architecture’s greatest living masters, has designed a perfume bottle. All the more reason to condense the quintessence of a life. The soul of a vocation, the spirit of curves, his signature.
The art of movement is condensed here into a form stretched in space, in freedom. In its own way, it expresses the architect’s passion for sailing. “When you sail a boat, on the ocean or anywhere else, there’s a very intimate relationship between the person at the helm and the wind, and the visual impression that results. Because the sail moves delicately, the air moves and you just try to remain stable. There’s an idea of movement there, but it’s not like in a racing car.”
Frank GehryFrom the initial bottle designed by Marc Newson, Frank Gehry shifted the lines, stretching them. The gesture transforms the straight line into an ellipse, modeling the curvature to the point of suggesting an arc, a transparent sail skimming space. Taking a sheet of aluminum, crumpling it like a cloth, he covers the bottle with an airy, hand-polished cap, with an LV seal inside.
The soul of fragrance
The Collection des Extraits reflects the spirit of travel celebrated by Louis Vuitton since its creation. To go ever further, to extraordinary places. Where the extract condenses absolute beauty.
With highly concentrated, powerful fragrances revisited by a master perfumer. One who knows how to play with light and shadow, to find the right radiance,
the perfect note. Bringing out the invisible beneath the visible. A universal language of intuitions, of pure, scintillating movements, brushing against each other in the intimacy of a gesture, an apparition, a trail. For now and forever. Looking ahead, never breaking ties with a living, inspiring past. By opening up to the world,
through all its journeys.
When the universe becomes a chamber of echoes, a garden of waves. Where sky, earth and sea, iridescent with light, respond to each other in a halo of sensations. Enveloping and evanescent at the same time. Gushing from the stars and the depths.
Here’s love sublimated into an extraordinary bouquet, suspended in the air, here’s the sun on the horizon, the wind in the trees, an escape to an extraordinary island, a golden temple floating above time, here’s a play of sensitive illusions.
Five olfactory scores make up this imaginary odyssey: Dancing Blossom Cosmic Cloud Rhapsody Symphony Stellar Times
Immediate boarding, towards the dawn of a sensitive universe. Unprecedented yet familiar. Airy and generous.
Dancing Blossom
A hanging garden takes us far away, to contemplate it is to be invited into the metamorphosing realm of the seasons, to plunge into a “cascade of flowers”. Sambac jasmine, May rose, osmanthus and Indian tuberose. To bring nature to life. With the sensation of floating above the world, in a whirlwind of petals, a bouquet of overdosed feelings and subtlety. “Rose is the most faceted flower, with its fresh lemon, tea and spice notes. Jasmine is more animalic, more masculine…”. Jacques Cavallier Belletrud.
Cosmic Cloud
It’s a flight above the terrestrial world, an interactive plunge for the senses. A journey into the unexplored, to the frontier of the real and the imaginary, touched by the caress of musks and punctuated by the chocolatey sparkle of Venezuelan Tonka bean. It’s an airy round, a whirlwind of weightless notes: powdery, fruity musks, absolute ambrette, sprung from the pistil of a poppy grown in Peru… Patchouli stretches out, sublimated by the power of chypre, this oak moss with accords of cistus and bergamot, undergrowth and light. Cosmic Cloud is first and foremost a carnal, dazzling variation on a monochrome glowing in interstellar space.
Rhapsody
When the horizon traces its infinite line, the extraordinary journey begins, intoxicating, exhilarating. Where everything begins and everything is reborn, in an olfactory alchemy. “This is the heart of chypre, the first sophisticated olfactory form in modern perfumery. The elegance of a look. I tried to bring a modernity to it while magnifying its DNA…” says Jacques Cavallier Belletrud. Hence the sensation of light brought by the flowers, from jasmine Grandiflorum to patchouli and May rose… Not forgetting mate, for the fresh, transparent tone of green lily of the valley.
“We keep the sophistication, in this blend of woody, undergrowth notes, transformed by more vanilla notes, there’s vetiver, ylang ylang. The wood frames have become carbon frames to give transparency to what was more massive. Line comes first.
Symphony
Like a fusion between heaven and earth, a sensory dive, the endless pleasure of absolute light, the radiant vibration of islands in the breeze, the gentle spiciness of fresh ginger zest in a cocktail of bergamot and grapefruit. Radiance in tenacity, musky, fruity, velvety roundness. Solar vibrancy, a sensual score with faceted notes, to accompany the music of an awakening world and, for Jacques Cavallier Belletrud, “the fusion between earth and sky, the sublimated harmony of the elements”.
Stellar Times
A subliminal journey back in time, to the splendor of fairytale temples,
gardens embroidered with mosaics and marvelous fountains. “Classic amber is very vanilla-flavored, very resinous, so I decided to make a soft, woody, deep white amber,” says Jacques Cavallier Belletrud. In a golden palace in mid-air, these swirling notes of orange blossom mingle with the vegetal amber and leathery notes of Peruvian balsam. A totally reinvented, weightless Orient majeur. A beautiful escape on the magic carpet of dreams.
Extrait de Parfum100ml, 450€
In-store refill 100ml
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