L’Or de J’adore:
An Icon, Reborn

AN ETERNAL EMBLEM OF DIOR FRAGRANCES, J’ADORE NOW HAS BEEN REINTERPRETED BY FRANCIS KURKDJIAN, THE CREATIVE DIRECTOR OF PARFUMS CHRISTIAN DIOR. A POWERFUL OPENING GESTURE THAT BROUGHT L’OR DE J’ADORE TO LIFE IN A SPACE WHERE HOMAGE MEETS CREATIVE FREEDOM. INTERVIEW BY MARIE AUDRAN.

F607 J'ADORE RENO L'OR 23 P14D L’or Fleurs

F607 J'ADORE RENO L'OR 23 P17E Pétale Or_L4_F39

MARIE AUDRAN: J’adore has become legendary, a cult perfume. What does that Dior icon represent for you?

FRANCIS KURKDJIAN: An elemental part of me because I witnessed its creation by its author, Calice Becker, in 1999. I was on the same team in New York, so I followed every step of its conception. I had been a junior perfumer for three years, and we all supported one other with incredible emulation for this major challenge. Restoring its original historicity was very important to me, as it is with the Dior legacy. Every era has its icon: J’adore is the great unsurpassable bouquet that defined the archetype of florality. It has never been bettered; it’s a timeless “hit” that never goes out of fashion – it’s the epitome of Dior.

MA: How would you describe its incomparable aura?

FK: The great classics have a character that is the essence of a style, of an olfactory form. The floral theme speaks to femininity, to the mythology of women. J’adore synthesizes that spirit while also being avant-garde: it was the floral revolution that followed Poison, embodied by Charlize Theron in an iconic, unprecedented way. J’adore brought texture and sillage, a fragrance trail, and that’s what shapes a great success: a beautiful, creative idea based on technical prowess. The two are inseparable. Besides, perfume is not just a smell – it’s also a name. The exclamation “J’adore!” has become universal, like “Enchanté!”

MA: Since your return to the house of Dior as Perfume Creation Director, L’Or de J’adore is your very first reinterpretation, conceived like a pure quintessence. Why did you choose to begin with J’adore?

FK: At Dior, flowers are the olfactory motif that best defines the House. The J’adore story has a very strong framework. The good fortune of being at Dior means being able to revisit icons, the great archetypes of perfumery that marked their era. L’Or de J’adore presented a challenge: how far to push Calice Becker’s vision and style to create a perfume extract of complementary duality, of purity and voluptuousness. L’Or de J’adore has a very sensual side, more carnal and, precisely, voluptuous.

“The quintessence of J’adore is there. L’Or de J’adore goes back to the essence and exalts the beauty of flowers in a suave, radiant concentration. L’Or de J’adore is all about flowers.”

– FRANCIS KURKDJIAN

MA: You’ve said that with L’Or de J’adore, you’ve moved from Impressionism to abstract art.

FK: Exactly. Damien Hirst’s work inspired me enormously, going from pointillism to abstraction with an extremely enlarged, wide brushstroke that’s out of scale. For this new J’adore that embodies Dior’s grandeur, it was a bit like smelting gold to eliminate impurities, which is also evident in its presentation: the necklace seems to have become one with the flacon. This project is infinitely coherent. We kept the accord but concentrated the formula, tightened it and pixelated it in XXL.

MA: What was your fundamental inspiration?

FK: L’Or de J’adore is about flowers, its supreme treasure. Here, we wanted to give that floral motif a new sensation, an expression that’s no doubt fleshier, more radiant and luminous with a notion of brilliance. For me, the eau de parfum was a sort of enormous bouquet in homage to Madeleine, Christian Dior’s mother, who loved gardens; an ode to the Belle Époque with a constellation of connections to Dior’s heritage. With L’Or de J’adore, I wanted to impart the codes of today and tomorrow for the decades to come.

MA: Also expressed in L’Or de J’adore is this very Dior way of “respecting tradition and daring insolence”. How does that second part appear here?

FK: Insolence here is taking on an icon that seems untouchable for its symbolism as well as its great savoir-faire and the nonfigurative way its floral ingredients are placed next to each other. J’adore is like a large, pointillist bouquet in which no individual flower stands out, like in an Impressionist painting. That’s why it is remarkably virtuosic. Singling out just one flower would be a disservice to all the others; this infinitely subtle interweaving is J’adore’s strength. I (just) zoomed in on it without undoing the structure but instead paying homage to it. Christian Dior used to say that his models were “all the women in the world”. With the magic and power of J’adore still intact, I dared tell myself that I was taking on “all the flowers in the world”. And with all the audacity, immoderation and rigour that are the signature of the Dior spirit. So, L’Or de J’adore represents all the flowers in the world. And its bottle is the amphora, feminine curves and… a detail from Parisian balconies, too!

F607 J'ADORE RENO L'OR 23 P02 H Hero crop fond blanc_SW_F39

MA: What is perfume’s role, for you? A vital impulse, an extra dash of spirit?

FK: Taste and smell are what differentiate us, fundamentally, universally, from machines. “I smell therefore I am,” the sense of smell being the body’s first memory, constituted from the fetal stage, the one that saves us from danger and makes us feel alive. In French, sentir means both “to smell” and “to feel”. Casanova magnificently summarized this vital, existential sense: “I know that I have lived because I have felt, and, feeling giving me the knowledge of my existence, I know likewise that I shall exist no more when I shall have ceased to feel. Should I perchance still feel after my death, I would no longer have any doubt, but I would most certainly give the lie to anyone asserting before me that I was dead.”¹ Olfactory memory has that incredible power: to give the feeling of living and of having existed.

MA: How would you describe your creative process?

FK: I tend to stay as simple as possible because I learned that perfumery is a perennial quest for purity. With each of my formulas, I constantly ask myself whether I can make it simpler without betraying the message. With this J’adore, it was impossible to make it simpler, so we constantly pared back to get to the essence of J’adore. Creations that endure must align with that idea. It can’t become dry, arid, disembodied. The most important thing is to unlearn, to forget what we know in order to move towards the unknown while retaining an acquired technique, as Pierre Soulages expressed so well: “The artist’s approach is profoundly different from that of the artisan: the artisan goes towards an object he knows, that he knows how to make… The artist, with an intuition of what techniques harbour more than with learned knowledge, goes towards what he does not know.”² Approaching this almost pictorial abundance required that I dive into its formula head first, stir up its richness in order to retain what’s essential and create a new, immediately attractive sensuality. A J’adore that’s as curvaceous and alluring as a bare shoulder…

1. Giacomo Casanova, Story of My Life.

2. Interview by Tatiana Autajon, Daniel Abadie (dir.). Le cadre et le socle dans l’art du XXe siècle, Dijon/Paris, Université de Bourgogne/ Musée National d’Art Moderne, 1987.

L’Or de J’adore:An Icon, Reborn

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L’Or de J’adore:
An Icon, Reborn