Fashion Fragrances Are Making A Dazzling Comeback

Victoria Beckham’s earliest scent memory is of collecting empty Chanel No 5 bottles from a family friend. “Yes, they were empty, dry, with not a smidge left inside,” she tells Vogue, “but they were so stylish and magical that I didn’t care. I treasured them.” Later, the young Victoria Adams would find herself captivated, in a cloud of YSL Opium, as her mother dressed for a dinner party. “I would sit on her bed watching the whole getting-ready process,” she recalls. “It was the ’80s, so my mum was always wearing big, powerful fragrances that seemed so very glamorous to me.”

The fumes must have permeated her consciousness, because Victoria is one of several creative directors at major fashion houses launching big, powerful, glamorous fragrances of late. After a decade during which niche, cult and usually independent fragrance brands have dominated the market (“niche” accounted for approximately £2 billion in 2023), it would appear that the blockbuster scent is very much back.

What’s more, the new fashion fragrances are no longer a mere revenue stream to prop up less accessible ready-to-wear lines – they’re now an intrinsic part of them. Clothing design and perfumery interplay with each informing and inspiring the other. The likes of Hermès, Balmain, Carolina Herrera, Rabanne and Louis Vuitton all pushed new fragrances front and centre at their Fashion Week shows – sometimes literally, by spritzing the models before sending them down the runway.

“I have always scented my shows,” says Beckham, who has previously used her opulent, heady Suite 302 (inspired by a Parisian hotel room) to set the scene. “For this season, the new fragrance, 21:50 Rêverie, will be burnt in specially made candles.” Based on a memorable candlelit dinner with husband David in Java, an island in the Indian Ocean, the scent combines notes of sweet, rich vanilla and plum, warm tonka, delicate rice and creamy cedarwood. The overall effect is cosy, soft, luminously bold and scene-setting.

“It had to be at the show,” Beckham insists. “Fragrance has been such a pillar to the creative process for the whole collection. It informed so much of it. The colours of the bottles have mirrored those in my collections, the aromas themselves have been a constant throughout the design process. They create a mood across the whole brand. For me, one informs the other, and vice versa. Fragrance acts as my bridge between fashion and beauty. So many of us in the team work across both parts of the business that creatively, fashion and fragrance will always sit alongside one another quite naturally – it just makes sense. It’s all about how I’m feeling at the time of creation, what I desire. I want to invite everyone into that world.”