A World Apart
A little craziness never hurt anybody, says Nicolette Wong, least of all when it is in the form of Kenzo’s new fragrance
ou would probably have seen the video by now—it stars dancer Margaret Qualley, who begins the four-minute sequence sitting at a formal dinner and ends it jumping through a giant floating eye made of flowers. In between, she licks a statue, attacks a man in a tuxedo, and shoots lasers from her fingers before cartwheeling down an empty boulevard. Naturally, she does all of these dressed in heels and a floor-length green frock. But this video isn’t merely an artistic statement about the tendency for gala dinners to drive some of us crazy. It is, instead, an ad. For a fragrance, of all things. The video began life as an idea in the minds of Carol Lim and Humberto Leon, the dynamic duo behind fashion brand Kenzo. While Kenzo itself is known as both a fashion and beauty maison, the two worlds usually remain staunchly separate. In 2016, however, six years after Lim and Leon became the creative directors of Kenzo fashion, the time came for those two worlds to collide. Lim said that she and Leon wanted to “cater specifically to the kind of woman that we feel passionate about, and give them the opportunity to be excited about a scent”. The video was designed to generate that adrenaline and excitement. Venerated film-maker Spike Jonze (of Her fame) was then roped in to create the now-viral video, and master perfumer Francis Kurkdjian was recruited to concoct the appropriate juice. The product is Kenzo World, a fragrance that resembles its predecessors as much as coffee resembles tea—that is to say, not very much. Where previous Kenzo perfumes were quietly feminine, Kenzo World is youthful, spirited and punchy. Their commonality lies in the anonymity of the blooms. Kenzo Flower, the brand’s most iconic perfume before Kenzo World, was created to smell like a poppy flower, which has no real fragrance. Kenzo World, on the other hand, was created to smell like an unknown flower, one that cannot be solidly identified. Kurkdjian (of Jean Paul Gaultier Le Male fame), calls the Kenzo World fragrance “a very reassuring scent”. He explains, “If everything is too crazy, you lose the customer at some point. You can’t be too crazy.” Accessibility, in other words, was key—hence why Kenzo World uses the familiar notes of sweet red fruits, peony and Ambroxan or ambergris. Whether you fall on the more cautious or audacious side of the personality spectrum, you have to admit that Kenzo World is an interesting proposition.