Dior’s latest perfume collection is a portal to its founder’s history

Though many would describe Christian Dior as a fashion house, they would, in some ways, be wrong. When the maison’s inaugural New Look design was revealed in 1947, along with it came its flagship scent, Miss Dior. With its sweet scent of pink pepper and damascus rose, Miss Dior is often the first scent coming-of-age girls display on their dressing tables. But Esprit de Parfum, Dior’s latest olfactory venture and the new addition to the La Collection Privée Christian Dior collection, breaks far away from the girlhood realm to enter a new and adventurous realm of luxury.

Francis Kurkdjian, Dior’s Perfume Creation Director has lent his style to create a concentrated reiteration of five of the core scents within the La Collection Privée Christian Dior Collection. Drawing from his own identity when forging the quintet, Kurkdjian’s similarities with Christian Dior himself — namely a pure love for nature, balanced with a penchant for hedonism — allow the perfumer to bottle personal elements of his predecessor’s life. Meanwhile, each scent represents an element of the fashion atelier (whether a favourite model or the building itself), highlighting the inextricable nature of perfume and couture at Dior.

Within the collection, two scents hark back to Kurkdijan and Dior’s shared love for nature: the chypre notes of Gris Dior and musky tones of Ambre Nuit evoke darkened woods and moonless nights respectively. Meanwhile, Lucky is a nod to the maison’s founder’s legendarily superstitious nature. Oud Ispahan, however, is an ode to opulence, while Rouge Trafalgar’s sweet, candy-apple notes speak to the indulgence that encompasses La Collection Privée Christian Dior Esprit de Parfum as a whole.

The casing of the bottles themselves harmoniously reflect the luxuriousness of the fragrances, which come in at an undeniably upmarket £380 each. In fact, the slim, dark bottles make the scents seem more like magical elixirs than perfumes, almost rendering the scents olfactory openings into the life of the master couturier and perfumer.

La Collection Privée Christian Dior Esprit de Parfum, £380 for 80ml from Harrods.