Philippe Starck

It’s finally for L’Air du Temps, the iconic fragrance by Nina Ricci, that Philippe Starck has signed its first perfume bottle. Few areas have remained unexplored by this prolific designer who signed furniture, houses, motorcycles, yachts, hotels, restaurants, lights, and of course several useful or decorative daily-use objects.

Reduced to the essential

The new bottle of L’Air du Temps created by Starck is emblematic of the uncluttered, intelligible and affordable style of the most well known contemporary French designers. “I am a man in search of the minimum,” he says.

Thus reduced to the essential, the bottle concentrates purely on the lovingly entwined doves. The airy transparency and velvety softness of the frosted glass accentuate the effect, right up to the galvanised white-metal cap, which takes the place of one the wings the two birds. Reduced to this airy concept, the L’Air du Temps bottle takes on another modernity, while remaining surprisingly in the line of the previous ones.

Forever updated femininity

It was an audacious bet since the “twin dove” bottle made by Marc Lalique in 1951 had become a hit, and was even voted bottle of the year in 1999. Created in 1948, the “Sun” bottle made by the Catalan sculptor Joan Rebull had a cap engraved with a dove. But the symbol of femininity was missing in the 1968 version of the bottle, which was marketed during the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, until its successful return in 1986 with a delicate and engraved vision of the “embossed doves”. The twin doves were so ” are emblematic of L’Air du Temps, that it could have seem impossible to modernise them without disappointing fans.

A technical challenge

The Verreries Brosse, a subsidiary of the Zignano Vetro group specializing in high-end perfumery vials, were entrusted with the difficult task to give birth to the bottle designed by Starck.

According to the French glassmaker, the industrial production of the bottle required to push back the technical frontiers of automatic glassmaking. The technical feasibility of the vial was not sure and implied a unique mobilization of development teams. In order to achieve the production of a bottle conformed to the original design, the glassmaker successfully adapted a drilling method. A meticulous work on the shape of prototypes was also required for the glass to spread as homogeneously as possible.

The cap placed was made by Qualipac in moulded, polished and galvanized Zamac.

An unchanging fragrance

If the bottle of L’Air du Temps was regularly updated, the fragrance, on the contrary, remained surprisingly unchanged. In spite of fashion variations and regulatory changes, the formula has stayed intact for more than 60 years.

That’s probably why Philippe Starck says: “I dislike old perfumes and I dislike new perfumes; what I like are eternal perfumes.