Galliano’s Romantic Vision
By Jennifer Weil PARIS ? What’s easier to make: a couture dress or a signature fragrance?
According to John Galliano, who is introducing his debut scent some 20 years after launching his fashion brand, it’s the latter.
“We had about 360 tests ? more than for a couture collection,” mused Galliano, adding he’d long wanted to create a fragrance bearing his name. “Any designer dreams of this day.”
Galliano was involved with every step of the scent’s development. The outer packaging, for instance, was inspired by his “love of collage. My life is a bit like a collage,” said Galliano.
The British designer, who is also the couturier at Christian Dior, let his romantic vision run full throttle with the fragrance project, from scattering love letters throughout the room of its launch event to the multilayered references that figure in the final product. There’s the artist Baldini; Galliano’s frothy, bias-cut dresses; the powdery backstage at his fashion shows, and his childhood memories of freshly ironed shirts, to name a few.
“We were trying to capture the essence of the Galliano girl,” he continued of the fragrance due out starting at end-September.
To explain his idea, Galliano made up inspiration boards.
“We started working in the same way that we work on a fashion collection,” said Fabrizio Malverdi, executive director of John Galliano.
“John spoke of flowers, particularly of rose, peony, iris with its powdery side, violet and of transparence,” continued Brigitte Wormser, vice president creation at Selective Beauty’s luxury division, who added Galliano researched antique fragrance bottles, too.
He draped such flacons with actual fabrics and then made drawings of them. Galliano’s bottle designs culls various influences. The treatment of the bottle’s neck, for instance, was inspired by collars appearing in his first fashion collection, Les Incroyables.
Wormser added that to re-create on the bottles a play of light on drapery found in Baldini’s paintings, Galliano and the team used a technique allowing for a gradation from metallic color to an almost transparent hue. It is the first time such a process has been used in the fragrance industry, she said.
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