Power Serge
The Age
Friday April 21, 1995
Serge Lutens hopes to teach the French a thing or deux about perfume.
PATTY HUNTINGTON meets the maverick genius.
WHEN the Japanese multinational Shiseido opened the doors of its unique perfume retail venture, the Salons du Palais Royal Shiseido, in Paris two years ago, the CEO of a rival perfumer invited to the launch dismissed the idea as gonfle (grandiose).
The notion of elite distribution through one, lavishly appointed perfumery may well have appeared ``grandiose" to some in the industry. It is, in fact anathema to the way in which perfume has come to be sold, that is, relatively impersonally across thousands of counters worldwide.
Yet this maverick concept is building brand awareness for Shiseido.
It may take a while before the company enjoys in perfume anywhere near the market share it now has in cosmetics but then, it didn't crack the latter, traditionally French-dominated arena overnight.
Shiseido is one of the world's top three cosmetic players, selling to more than 40 countries. And pivotal to its success has been the role, or rather roles played by Serge Lutens, the company's artistic director for the past 15 years and possibly the highest paid make-up artist in the world.
``Perfume is an essence; it is the seventh sense; it is not a system of consummation," notes Lutens, who is responsible for not only the Directoire-inspired decors of the Salons du Palais Royal Shiseido in the second-floor reception area of which we are now sitting, but also the perfumes on sale therein. ``Here it is not marketing, only the selling of perfume. We expose people to odors. We give them, if you like, the taste of perfume. We don't make socio-cultural perfume: you know, ``If you buy this bottle, you are la femme sexy; if you buy that one, la femme active". Here we sell perfume. We explain perfume. We teach perfume."
The role of perfumer is one to which Lutens comes relatively late in his career. It is the latest in a series of creative cameos embracing make-up artist, jewellery designer, stylist, photographer and art director, the confluence of which has produced some of the most intriguing images ever created in the service of fashion and beauty.
Lutens's distinctive campaigns for Shiseido in print and 35mm which have won industry awards in France, the US and Japan do not correspond to any contemporary formula in cosmetic advertising. There are no products, just a bizarre assortment of accessories and props that emanate from Lutens's imagination twice a year in response to each new season's theme. There is no sex either: the models' bodies are usually completely concealed beneath long-sleeved black unitards.
There are, moreover, no supermodels in the selling of Shiseido. The only prerequisite for its models is a long, oval, Modigliani-esque face that is then transformed by Lutens's exaggerated make-up. These pallid, ghostly women bear little resemblance to contemporary mannequins; they are more like the silent stars of German Expressionist cinema, a genre that fascinated Lutens when he was growing up in the French town of Lilles.
``What always interested me was developing a certain image of women.
I liked to transform, look at or arrange them into a vision I had of them. It's a projection, if you like. And it's very obsessive, that's obvious."
Born in 1942, Lutens began directing his own images at the age of 14, using a Kodak Instamatic camera and his friends as models. He devised their make-up, hairstyles, clothes and accessories. He moved to Paris at 19 and started an experimental styling studio, still working mainly on friends. When he was 21, however, he took some portraits to French Vogue, which gave him a commission on the spot: to create the make-up, hair and accessories for the Christmas 1963 issue.
This extravagant issue of Vogue provided a perfect springboard and Lutens quickly became the high priest of styling to the Parisian fashion press, solicited for his highly unorthodox make-up ideas that included the use of green to make white even whiter, false eyelashes made out of metal and minuscule pearls of color on lips and eyes. He also worked for Jardin des Modes, US Vogue and Harper's Bazaar in collaboration with the leading fashion photographers and models of the 1960s.
He had already been working as a consultant for the couture house of Christian Dior when, in 1968, the company decided to launch a cosmetics line. To Lutens's astonishment, they offered him a contract to create not only the new Dior make-up collection but also its international image.
``I was quite surprised by the invitation," he admits. ``I didn't have a typical profile. Dior was an old house with an old philosophy and I was young with lots of new ideas, doing very violent things; very pale women with very dark eyes and very red lips. It was neither a bourgeois, nor a conventional image of make-up. It was very strong and very new."
He made further make-up innovations at Dior, including the use of pink for eyeshadow, matte lipsticks, even transparent lipsticks (``one year before Estee Lauder," he notes). Diana Vreeland, then the director of costume at New York's Metropolitan Museum, described it as ``a make-up revolution". Within two years he was also executing the actual photography of the campaigns as well, branching out into film in 1974.
``I disengaged make-up and gave it a new meaning," he reflects.
``Make-up was something sad, boring and linear. One gave little bits of advice: `This will enlarge; This will reduce' etc. And I arrived with very bright colors pink, red, bright red lips. I changed the way of looking at make-up on women. After this it became something much more free. All the big cosmetic lines can thank me for these inventions. I was copied everywhere, systematically, in everything I did."
By 1980, however, he was restless. When Shiseido offered Lutens carte blanche to develop its international image, he jumped ship. Of his decision to leave a prestige name for what at the time was a relatively unknown quantity in the beauty world, he says: ``I no longer found it (Dior) interesting. I don't care about working in a house with a big name. What is important for me is to work, to develop something. I am interested in creation, I don't care if it is this one or that one. Dior was also an accident in my life. They approached me.
It wasn't me who knocked on Dior's door. Never would I have had that idea."
Shiseido's recruitment of Lutens coincided with the first major steps in the company's international expansion program. In the same year it also established subsidiaries in France and West Germany (an Australian subsidiary followed in 1982).
Founded as a Western-style pharmacy in 1872, Shiseido is now the leading Japanese manufacturer of cosmetics. Under the direction of current president Yoshiharu Fukuhara, the grandson of founder Yushin Fukuhara, the company has expanded domestically into pharmaceuticals, beauty salons, fitness centres, restaurants, health-food products and a myriad of toiletries. ``Outside Japan, Shiseido is a brand," says Lutens. ``But the importance of Shiseido in Japan is colossal. In Japan it's like a firm; it's not a product, it's a cachet.
``It's very different type of work now," he continues. ``At Dior I was, above all, very well known. One said: `Serge Lutens, maquillage'.
A lot of people didn't even know that I did photographs. But make-up is only a small part of my activities now. It interests me, but it was never my number-one passion. For Shiseido, I have done films, decors, packaging . . . " Lutens's Shiseido brief also embraced perfume. But while a strong new image was all the company needed to forge confidently ahead into international waters with its cosmetics, perfume proved to be a highly specialised market. In 1982 he created a first Shiseido fragrance: Nombre Noir. It was discontinued due to marketing and distribution problems.
Ten years later, he tried again with Feminite du Bois, with a highly unusual top note derived from the Atlas cedar of Morocco (where Lutens lives for most of the year). This time, instead of building an image around one perfume, Lutens and Shiseido decided to build an entire perfumery in Paris. It would not only provide a showcase for Feminite du Bois (which, to be sure, would also be sold via select counters internationally), but also imbue the Shiseido name with a sense of prestige and exclusivity. A series of fragrances, les Eaux Boisees, was created around the same cedar base, to be sold exclusively via the salon. .
TO enhance this exclusivity, Lutens chose the historic Palais Royal as a site. Nothing could have proven more difficult. Built from 1634-9 as a palace for Cardinal Richelieu, the Palais Royal acquired its name in 1643 when Queen Anne of Austria took up residence with the young Louis XIV. Not only is it situated far from Paris's luxury retail strip, the Rue du Faubourg St Honore, but today, as the official seat of the Conseil d'Etat and the Ministere des Affaires Culturelles, commercial leases are extremely rare here. Moreover, the timing coincided with an anti-Japanese campaign.
``(Former Prime Minister) Edith Cresson had started an anti-Japanese campaign to protect the French economy and the word `Japanese' had become a dirty word," explains the salon's director of communications, Liliane Menard, who had to go to exasperating lengths to acquire authorisations. ``At the same time the President said that we must absolutely prohibit the Japanese access to the French economy.
We didn't have many supporters."
The Salons du Palais Royal Shiseido finally opened in September 1992 to the tune of 20 million francs ($A5.5 million), making it at the time the most expensively appointed boutique in the world.
Simultaneously, Shiseido's subsidiary BPI (Beaute Prestige International) released its first designer perfume: the now highly successful L'Eau d'Issey, signed by leading Japanese designer Issey Miyake (followed suit in 1993 by Jean Paul Gaultier). At the end of 12 months, the salon had doubled business estimates and Shiseido's perfume activities had jumped from two per cent to 10 per cent of the company's global business figures.
The French have good reason to be afraid for their luxury industries. No French company thought of the salon idea because they didn't think they had to. Instead, they have been basking in what they assumed to be the untarnishable glory of their established luxury names. Meanwhile, not only have smart new competitors entered the fray, but the very essence of prestige has been evaporating from their perfume market.
In the early 1980s an insidious practice of discounting crept into the French perfume market. It escalated to the point where some retailers lowered their prices by 30 per cent. Service was sacrificed in the name of sales and many perfumeries turned into bazaars.
Ironically, at the same time the salon opened, the eternally democratic Pierre Cardin released his perfumes through French discount chain Carrefour, so that it sold for 25-30 per cent less than even the discounters.
This situation represents the pinnacle of a trajectory that began for French perfume in the 1950s, when distribution channels opened up to ``democratise" the industry, making perfumes and their newly created derivative products (such as eau de toilette) freely available. It was the same moment that French fashion ``went down into the street" and mass-made, ready-to-wear clothing displaced elitist haute couture.
With their hand-painted decors and tiny counters, the Salons du Palais Royal Shiseido are reminiscent of the type of old-world perfumery for which France used to be famous, and of which only Parfums Caron on Avenue Montaigne still remains.
``This is the haute couture of the perfume business," says Lutens.
``It's an experiment, a new form of distribution. Because with distribution, you are more or less dependent on the distributor, moreover on the image of the distributor. You're always compared with other products. I think that everything is going to change."
But not only does the salon pioneer a new era of perfume distribution, it may also herald an end to the incredible falbala that has turned the international industry into something akin to the Hollywood film system, whereby fragrances have become commodities that are created not according to creative inspiration, but to formulae and are then launched in a blitz of publicity. Someone once referred to them as ``hit-and-run perfumes". Lutens calls them: ``Les Parfums Kleenex."
``It's something he talks about all the time," Menard continues.
``They launch them, spending an enormous amount of money and then afterwards the client throws it away. So they do another launch. He also calls them ``Les parfums d'incest". In the marketing bureaus of the big perfume brands, they will say for example: ``We want the principle of the Feminite du Bois, plus the success of Dune and Issey Mikake." The chemist takes this formula and creates a perfume that resembles all the others. It's a tendency that has become generalised in the past few years but which in fact is killing the story of perfume.
``At the same time it reinforces the story of Shiseido and of Serge Lutens, who doesn't listen to anyone, who doesn't copy anyone, who does his own thing. No one has made a women's perfume with a cedar base, which is normally considered a man's fragrance. Not many people use rose. But afterwards, everyone says, ``This is what we have to do." And this is the success of the Shiseido perfumery. What gives it credibility is that it's a completely different story."
© 1995 The Age
