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Pierre Dinand, designer

Interview with Pierre Dinand, designer.
by Julien Levy

Perfume is an animal that’s hard to cage”

Pierre Dinand welcomes me into his office on Passage de l’Hirondelle (“Swallow (like the bird) Lane”. He informs me that this narrow street in an old part of Paris was named for François I’s mistress, who was known for flitting like a swallow from man to man. His son, Jerôme, with whom he has worked since 1983 is there, his grandchildren have dropped in, too. “This is a family affair,” he says, chuckling. The tone has been set.
You could say that Pierre Dinand is to perfume what Keith Richards is to rock music… in a healthy, athletic version: black T-shirt, long white hair, quick with a joke and a smile. Pierre Dinand works directly with the most prominent creators. He has designed more than 500 bottles, many of which have become classics, yet he hasn’t changed, and is still a charming, open person. Two hours of anecdotes about the history of perfume, seen from the inside, from the point of view of the players, from an era that wasn’t all that long ago, but seems like a different world. Interview with a living legend…

How did your career start, how did you find this vocation?
I was sent to Indo-China when I was 20. Because I spoke English and German, I was made an officer and I was given the chance to study architecture at the Royal Art School of Cambodia. It was practically Club Med… except for the occasional gun shot from time to time…
I was lucky enough to be able to study the border between Indian and Chinese art, as well as the locals’ knack for sculpting small items. That’s probably where I acquired the taste for bringing refinement to relatively small objects…
My architecture studies were very useful for my design work… a fragrance bottle is sort of like a small house!
So that’s how I got started, and I’m still at it, 50 years later… now they say I’m a living legend… (looks like he has his doubts about that)
That is what practically everyone calls you – so how does it feel to be a living legend?
That’s what the journalists say, but it doesn’t mean much… The only legendary thing about me is the number of legendary couturiers, and talented creators, with whom I’ve worked…
So tell us about the early days, you worked with some of the biggest designers right from the start, didn’t you?
My very first client was Elsa Schiaparelli. She introduced me to Hélène Rochas, who introduced me to Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, Givenchy… I worked directly with all of them. Back then, there were no marketing people in the middle. I didn’t need to advertise, bottle designing didn’t exist as a profession yet. Word got around that there was a young man interested in bottles… and the young man was me. That’s how it all got started.
Bottle models were made out of plaster back then (he shows me some old plaster casts). They weren’t very appealing, as you can see… I would show up at the client’s office with plexiglass models. They were so much more attractive… So pretty soon, I opened a workshop within the design studio that was perfectly equipped for working with plexiglass.
It meant that I could have an idea in the morning and a reasonable model by the end of the day, which was great!

You were one of the first to work with American brands. How did that come about?
Very early, way back in the 60s, I went to the USA to see what was happening there. The man I was working for at the time, Albert Gosset (the head of Rochas) told me, “There’s no point in going to America, nothing’s happening there”… In the department stores, there were some products from a small company called Estée Lauder that caught my eye… I mentioned it to Gosset, who said, “Estée Lauder? No way, it’ll never catch on!” (he laughs), which just goes to show that the French were too self-centered!
So I started working for American groups, including the one Saint Laurent belonged to… (N.B.: Charles of the Ritz). In fact, Rive Gauche was a commission from the American group, before it was French. So I opened my office in the USA, and I was one of the first: no competition!
What about France in all that?
It isn’t easy to be “a living legend…” and you know what they say, “a prophet has no honor in his homeland.” In fact, most of my “greatest hits” were done outside of France… I’ve worked for Puig (N.B. the Spanish group that owns Paco Rabanne), for whom I did Calandre, and other designs. At the time, the peseta (N.B. the former Spanish currency), wasn’t exchangeable, so I couldn’t be paid, or I had to spend it all in Spain… But I didn’t care, my clients were nice, the projects were fascinating!
There weren’t a lot of exchangeable currencies back then, which complicated life when most of your work was overseas… I also had some interesting adventures with Russian clients who wanted to pay me in weapons! I never went along with that…
Along the same lines, in the 70s, after I had a hit with Paco Rabanne pour Homme, I was invited to work for the Chinese in Peking and Shanghai. They paid in bags of rice!
It was all very amusing…

Ok, so let’s play a little game: I’ll give you a scent to smell, and you describe the bottle.
No one’s ever suggested that before!
!!!

Madame Rochas 1960
My first bottle… At the time, nobody used caps, just stoppers that sat in the opening, rather than being screwed on. That meant the bottles had to stay put, and always be upright. I had an intuition that women’s lives were evolving. So I went to see the bottle-maker Desjonquères (later bought up by Saint-Gobain), and asked if they could make a perfume bottle with a screw top. We made it, and in the end, it was the first industrial bottle that was almost as beautiful as the hand-made ones, but was also more functional, more practical and much less expensive to make.

Eau sauvage 1966
Working with Edmond Roudnitska was really something! We got along well, but he was unbending about his juices… if a client asked him to change something, even the slightest thing, he refused to discuss it, he would just take his creation back. With him, it was take it or leave it! But history and the marketplace proved him right. Dior wanted Eau Sauvage to compete with Rochas’s Moustache, to the point that the name of the scent was originally supposed to be Favori (French for “sideburns”). Favori also contained the letters o, r and i, which were so dear to them because they were three of the four letters in the name Dior. So Favori was meant to be a sort of “super Moustache”! But the name wasn’t kept in the end…

Calandre 1968
I integrated galvanized plastic into this bottle, to give the outline a metallic look. It would have been impossible to create the same effect with “real” metal. It’s the same technique that the automobile industry uses for logos on car grills (“calandres” in French). I’ve always enjoyed understanding how things are made. That was the case for the logo on my old VW at the time anyway… and that’s what gave me the idea…

Opium 1977
That was a very risky project, it could have bombed; it’s the one I’m most proud of. One day in September ‘77, I was in a client meeting, and the head of L’Oréal called to congratulate me for the bottle I had designed for Opium, which had just come out. I had worked on it a long time before, so it had practically slipped my mind! He asked if we could meet… in 5 minutes! And he actually showed up – along with all his lieutenants – 5 minutes after that phone call, and he asked me to work on a project for Lancôme. Magie Noire came out just 6 months later, which is extremely quick for developing a perfume.

Obsession 1984
There’s a funny story that goes with that bottle. I have always played hockey. One day, during a round of golf– I was never very good at gold – I hit the ball like a hockey player, a bit too hard… so hard in fact, that I broke the ball! Well, inside the broken ball I saw a sort of marble made out of a material I didn’t know, some kind of plastic that looked a lot like glass. And I thought that with its hardness and transparency, it would be the perfect material to make perfume bottles out of… The ball was signed Dupont de Nemours. So I got in touch with them and asked for a sample of the material to study. It turned out to be a resin called surlyn… They sent over 200 pounds!
We used it for the bottle’s “blond scales” effect. Well, it turned out that surlyn wasn’t all that inert, and it absorbed the fragrance’s coloring… so we decided to cover it with an excellent sealant… That’s the flip side of the coin with innovation: you also have all the risks that come along with being the guinea pig!
Perfume is an animal that’s hard to cage…

Pleasures 1995
Madame Lauder was one tough lady. It was her idea to set the cabochon cap “askew”, slightly turned, as though you had started to open it already. At the time, Estée Lauder had hired Calvin Klein’s fragrance director, with whom I had had done some successful scents, including Obsession, to replicate their success. Well she told Mme Lauder that if she wanted a big hit, she had to hire Pierre Dinand!