The Next Wave
Bet you never imagined owning an original Frank Gehry design— but now you can
Famed architect Frank Gehry’s latest collaboration with Louis Vuitton—for whom he designed the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2006, and Louis Vuitton Maison Seoul in 2019—is a suite of five bottles for a new line of fragrances, Les Extraits Collection.
“[LVMH] has become kind of family for me,” he says. In July this year, director of Louis Vuitton Delphine Arnault kicked off Paris Haute Couture Week with a party at Fondation Louis Vuitton to celebrate the new scents.
Alongside Gehry, attendees included the likes of Larry Gagosian, Nicolas Ghesquière, Virgil Abloh, Florence Pugh and Bella Hadid.
When asked about the difference between designing a building versus a product, Gehry says, “A building is interactive. People use it, live inside it, sleep, listen to music and work there. The object and the building both express feelings that people can relate to, and then they in turn express their own feelings with, for, or because of it.”
Due to be released in October, the new fragrances range from deep, woody scents to potent florals, and feature romantic names like Dancing Blossom, Symphony, Cosmic Cloud, Rhapsody and Stellar Times.
The bottle design is inspired by the “undulating motion of fish; the spatial expression of that slow, continuous back and forth, the interplay of unstable equilibrium and gliding underwater”, says Gehry, a keen sailor who picked up the sport while studying architecture at the University of Southern California.
“I was invited on a boat trip. I was very poor; I couldn’t afford to do it by myself. But once I felt nature, and the ocean, I was hooked,” he recalls, adding that later in life, when he could finally afford a boat of his own, he continued with the sport.
Designed to resemble the dance of underwater currents, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao architect’s design for Les Extraits Collection is a humble ode to the sea.
“I wanted to sculpturally engage so that there was something different than the bottle to give it stature,” Gehry says of his design. “The knife-edge of the glass brought a certain precariousness to it; that it was not a finished thing. The object is static, but it translates movement.”
If it all sounds a bit over the top, well, that’s kind of the point. “I am all for an excess of beauty,” says Louis Vuitton’s maître parfumeur, Jacques Cavellier Belletrud, who formulated the collection. “Perfume creates moments of delight, of intimate and shared pleasure.”