SNIFF TEST

A maverick perfumer tries to make his mark on a storied fashion house.

- Rachel Syme

What does conspicuous consumption smell like? On a December afternoon in 2013, the Parisian perfumer Francis Kurkdjian was scheduled to meet with the renowned French crystal manufacturer Baccarat at the company’s chandelier-crammed headquarters, near the Arc de Triomphe. The C.E.O. at the time, Daniela Riccardi, had commissioned Kurkdjian to create a limited-edition fragrance to mark the company’s two-hundred-andfiftieth anniversary. Baccarat planned to produce two hundred and f ifty diamond-cut crystal flacons of the new perfume, priced at three thousand euros each, and wanted the scent to reflect the quality and opulence of its vessel.

Kurkdjian (pronounced “cur-zsan”) is a fifty-five-year-old of Armenian descent, with close-cropped hair, smooth manicured hands, and Clooneyesque salt-and-pepper stubble. During three decades in the luxury-fragrance industry, he has created such hits as Narciso Rodriguez for Her, Burberry Her, and Jean Paul Gaultier Le Male. He is the head of his own perfume company, Maison Francis Kurkdjian, and since 2021 has also served as the perfumecreation director for the fashion house Christian Dior, a job that involves reinventing such storied scents as J’Adore and Miss Dior. (Both Dior and Maison Francis Kurkdjian are subsidiaries of the luxury conglomerate L.V.M.H.) For Baccarat, Kurkdjian had designed three samples riffing on scents that were popular at the time when Baccarat was founded. But he’d begun to have misgivings. “I was not happy about what I created,” he recalled recently. “I felt it was too old-fashioned.” As he was about to leave his office, he opened a drawer where he keeps what he calls his “hidden treasures”—perfumes he’s created that have never been bottled—and picked up a vial labelled “HEVA.”