Responsible for the design of landmarks such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Frank Gehry has championed a Deconstructivist architectural style that spellbinds viewers with futuristic and fluid shapes. But for his latest project with Louis Vuitton, he ventured into an entirely unfamiliar terrain: perfume. The new Les Extraits collection combines artful design with awe-inspiring fragrance and Gehry reflected his similarly imaginative architecture when designing the bottle.
With a curved, flowing shape, the bottle reflects movement, resembling a taut sail caught in the wind. Gehry’s design was heavily inspired by his passion for sailing. “When you sail, on the ocean or elsewhere, there is a very intimate relationship between the skipper at the helm and the wind, and the visual impression it creates,” he explains. “The sail moves gently, the air moves and you just try to keep steady. There’s an idea of movement, but it’s not the same as with a racecar.”
The cap is sculpted with sharp arcs in a reflective, metallic material. The irregular form resembles the sea spray as a sailboat cuts through a wave. The complete product encompasses the electrifying feeling of freedom of “catching the wind.”
In complement to this emotion-inducing design, French perfumer Jacques Cavallier created five magnificent scents—dancing blossom, cosmic cloud, rhapsody, symphony and stellar times—similarly inspired by a desire to reflect the beauty of movement, “I wanted to revisit perfume’s major families, then to give them a twist, expand them, exaggerate certain facets and reveal purity,” he says. “In revisiting chapters, florals, chypres and ambers, you create movement and rounded, caressing forms, every time.”
The five fragrances included in the Les Extraits collection achieve Cavalier’s vision, encompassing the spirit of freedom, and pair perfectly with Gehry’s design.
