MAN OF MYSTERY

A polymath whose career encompasses fragrance, beauty, photography and film, Serge Lutens has avoided the limelight since his pioneering campaigns for Dior Beauty and Shiseido. To mark the launch of his first home fragrance collection, we take an exceptionally rare tour of his sprawling Marrakech foundation, a kaleidoscopic complex of beautifully decorated riads he has transformed over the course of half a century

- MARY CLEARY

The mirrors in Serge Lutens’ home-turned foundation in Marrakech are sliver-thin, so you can only see fractions of yourself inside them. They are an apt reflection of Lutens, who likes to speak about the multifarious nature of human beings. ‘We have multiple people inside us,’ he says. ‘That’s what makes us so rich, and what’s surprising about meeting people; to identify these different facets, what their character is built on, how it is shaped.’

To meet Lutens is to discover a man with many, often conflicting, facets. A man who, since 1974, has been building a home to rival any palace in its opulence and beauty, yet which remains largely empty and rarely accepts visitors. A figure routinely lauded as one of the most influential figures in the beauty industry – for his iconoclastic approach to make-up, his subversive campaigns and editorial imagery, and his groundbreaking cosmetic lines – who has spent the past few decades living as a recluse in Morocco. A person so secretive that he largely refused interviews until recently, but will readily reveal deeply personal and painful aspects of his past. A man so shy that he avoids round spaces, finding them too revealing, preferring to ‘hide’ in corners, yet, when you meet him, is a beacon of warmth and charm, playfully self-deprecating, utterly captivating.