Facebook X Email Print Save Story What does conspicuous consumption smell like? On a December afternoon in 2013, the Parisian perfumer Francis Kurkdjian was scheduled to meet with the renowned French crystal manufacturer Baccarat at the company’s chandelier-crammed headquarters, near the Arc de Triomphe. The C.E.
O. at the time, Daniela Riccardi, had commissioned Kurkdjian to create a limited-edition fragrance to mark the company’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary. Baccarat planned to produce two hundred and fifty diamond-cut crystal flacons of the new perfume, priced at three thousand euros each, and wanted the scent to reflect the quality and opulence of its vessel.
Kurkdjian (pronounced “cur-zsan”) is a fifty-five-year-old of Armenian descent, with close-cropped hair, smooth manicured hands, and Clooneyesque salt-and-pepper stubble. During three decades in the luxury-fragrance industry, he has created such hits as Narciso Rodriguez for Her, Burberry Her, and Jean Paul Gaultier Le Male. He is the head of his own perfume company, Maison Francis Kurkdjian, and since 2021 has also served as the perfume-creation director for the fashion house Christian Dior, a job that involves reinventing such storied scents as J’Adore and Miss Dior.
(Both Dior and Maison Francis Kurkdjian are subsidiaries of the luxury conglomerate L.V.M.
H.) For Baccarat, Kurkdjian had designed three samples riffing on scents that were popular at the time when Baccarat was founded. But he’d beg.