I discovered Alber Elbaz’s work in the 90s, when Pierre Bergé appointed him head designer of Yves Saint Laurent. I saw in Alber what I now see in my perfumers: an ability to modernize the classics for a new generation.

As fate would have it, Alber has now met his match in the perfume world. The result of our unique collaboration with Dominique Ropion, born from the convergence of creative vision and mutual admiration, is the elusive scent of a dress: a classic floral aldehydic perfume that structures Alber’s vision of an elaborate fabric in which everyone can find their own beauty.

Alber resists a world that seeks to impose categories rather than free us from them. He considers intuition to be an inexhaustible source of freedom in the face of hyper-order, and beauty to lie in the irrational and the inexplicable. Superstitious is an invitation to discover that this mystery is, in fact, beautiful. So as a confessionary gesture of shared superstition, Alber and I signed the black bottle with his sketch of the evil eye, drawn one day in a Parisian café on the corner of a napkin. Beauty, we have always thought, can be found in the most unexpected of places.

F.M.