Francis Kurkdjian Reimagines Five Beloved Dior Fragrances

“When you create, you should feel like you’re in danger,” says Francis Kurkdjian.

The perfumer, who joined Dior as the brand’s perfume creation director in 2021, is seated at the head of a long table, surrounded by perfume bottles and scent strips, in a room on the grounds of Château de La Colle Noire (formerly Christian Dior’s house) in the south of France. The tree-lined estate is complete with a tranquil outdoor pool, lush gardens and 18th-century-style interiors. Christian Dior purchased the home in 1950 and kept renovating it until his death in 1957, and today the entire invitation-only property remains exactly how Dior designed it during those seven years.

“True creation involves insecurity,” says Kurkdjian. (I cannot stress just how difficult it is to imagine the world-renowned perfumer feeling insecure about his celebrated work, but, alas...) “French painter Pierre Soulages once said, ‘The difference between an artisan and an artist is that an artisan knows where they’re going but an artist opens a door without knowing where it leads,’” he adds.

Which leads us to Kurkdjian’s latest creation, Les Esprits de Parfum ($630 each), a reinvention of five beloved scents from La Collection Privée Christian Dior, the brand’s luxury couture-inspired line. His chosen five? Gris Dior, Rouge Trafalgar, Ambre Nuit, Lucky and Oud Ispahan.

Kurkdjian challenged himself to rethink the fragrances, sharpening them to accentuate their essences, in new ways that he describes as minimalist but radical. “If I already know that combining 5 per cent patchouli with 5 per cent rose is always going to smell good, that’s not creation; it’s just recreation,” he says.

So how, then, have these five fragrances been transformed and created anew? “Let’s go,” says Kurkdjian with a grin as he grabs a handful of scent strips off the table and prepares to dive in.

When asked how he knows a fragrance is complete, Kurkdjian says that following a bout of insecurity in the early stages of creating, “all of a sudden you find yourself in a comfortable place; you understand your formula and everything just clicks.”

And once a fragrance is out in the world, he eagerly awaits feedback from his favourite critics: cab drivers. “The best feeling is when you get in a cab and the driver asks ‘What are you wearing?’ They smell so many people every day,” laughs Kurkdjian. “When I get a compliment from a cab driver, it makes my day.”

The new fragrances of Les Esprits de Parfum, including Kurkdjian’s reimaginations of iconic scents from La Collection Privée Christian Dior.

Lucky

In the ’40s and ’50s, Christian Dior worked extensively with his favourite model, Lucie Daouphars, known by her nickname, Lucky.

“Lucky was very special,” says Kurkdjian. “She got her nickname because every dress she’d model would end up being that collection’s bestseller. She had that je ne sais quoi that would make clothes come to life.” Later, once she quit modelling, Lucky founded the very first union for models.

Kurkdjian explains that he “removed all unnecessary florals from Lucky eau de parfum” and kept only lily of the valley at its core. Lucky the fragrance is “underlined by a dark-green woody leather accord,” which represents the shady environment needed to grow the flower as well as Lucky the model’s strength and drive.

Gris Dior

“Grey was one of Christian Dior’s favourite colours,” says Kurkdjian. “He said that it allowed other colours to exist, to come alive.”

The perfumer added a sense of clarity to Gris Dior’s chypre accord with notes of Atlas cedar and Indonesian patchouli. Its floral notes are heightened, too, thanks to violet and Bulgarian rose. “I pumped up the volume on Gris Dior, but I wanted to maintain its duality of floral and woody notes,” he explains. “It’s never black or white; it’s something in between.”

Ambre Nuit

“The name Ambre Nuit is a pleonasm,” says Kurkdjian. “Because amber already suggests darkness, and nuit, of course, means night. So there was already some redundancy, and I asked myself, ‘Can we go even darker?’ I came up with the idea of a moonless night.”

To evoke a feeling of pitch-blackness, the perfumer removed everything in the eau de parfum’s formula that was clean, white or almost odourless. In the finished juice, musks and spices (particularly cinnamon and cardamom) combine with an amber accord for a scent that is as dark and moody as can be.

Rouge Trafalgar

“Dior Couture shows used to last almost two hours and feature 200 looks,” says Kurkdjian. “So to keep the attention of the audience, in the middle of the show, Christian Dior would send a Trafalgar dress (named after the French expression coup de trafalgar, which means ‘surprising outcome’) down the runway, and it would usually be red and completely unexpected.” When Kurkdjian smelled the original Rouge Trafalgar Eau de Parfum, he found it “a little shy,” so he took a cue from the original story of Dior’s Trafalgar dress.

“If you want to be disruptive, you have to shock people.” In this case, Kurkdjian’s attention-grabber is a red fragrance: “Traditionally you don’t have fruity notes in luxury fragrances. They’re seen as too mainstream, but I decided to embrace that.”

The scent is a blend of pink peppercorn, Turkish and Bulgarian rose essences and, of course, red fruits. “To me, fruity scents aren’t sexy when they’re sticky or syrupy; it’s almost like they’re melting,” says Kurkdjian. “But with Rouge Trafalgar, there’s a backbone; there is something that keeps you vertical.”

Oud Ispahan

Inspired by the Middle East, where Dior has dressed royal-family members for a number of high-profile weddings, Oud Ispahan is a luscious, opulent scent with, of course, oud at its centre.

“Similar to what I did with Gris Dior, I wanted to turn up the volume with Oud Ispahan,” says Kurkdjian. “I made it more precise and assertive.” Indeed, it is the “more is more” scent of the group. Alongside honeyed rose, there are more spices (like clove and cumin) and, yes, more

This article first appeared in FASHION’s October 2024 issue. Find out more here.