Louis Vuitton to debut men's scents on June 1

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
May 23, 2018

Two years after launching its first women’s scent Louis Vuitton will debut a selection of men’s eaux de parfum. With the first products reaching stores on June 1.

Like the ladies’ perfumes, the gentleman’s scents have been created by Louis Vuitton Master Perfumer Jacques Cavallier Belletrud. While the launch marks the latest development of Vuitton from a high-end baggage business into a fully-fledged luxury lifestyle brand under the management of CEO Michael Burke.
 
It being Vuitton, these men’s scents are priced at the upper end of the market: an entry level 100 ml eau de parfum retails for €210; while its travel case in Taïga leather costs €430. While at the top of the range, a sweet-smelling adventurer can buy a monogram Eclipse fragrance travel case, without the accompanying bottles, for €3,700.

Cavallier has developed a quintet of fragrances created to evoke the idea of travel, and pioneering adventurers. One cologne, Nouveau Monde, references the 19th century explorer, and Louis Vuitton client, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who commissioned an early fold-out cot that became known as the Brazza trunk-bed. Though the explorer would go onto to give his name to the Congolese capital, Brazzaville, the idea for one scent came from a whiff of Mayan chocolate and its composition from Ivory Coast cocoa resin transformed in the southern French region of Grasse.
 
Other choices include L’Immensité, suggesting new horizons with dashes of ginger, labdanum and ambroxan; Sur la Route; Au Hasard; and Orage, designed to be as “somber as the buried roots of Javanese vetiver fractionated in Grasse,” the cradle of French perfume, where Vuitton’s perfumer was born. And where this nose of LVMH develops new perfumes for Vuitton in his state-of-the-art creative workshop Les Fontaines Parfumees.
 
Though the new men’s scents are very much the result of Cavallier’s peripatetic global wanderings, as he gathers Calabrian lemons and bergamot; Guatemalan cardamom and Peruvian balsam. Though each time transformed back in Grasse by molecular distillation into modern LV colognes.
 
Fans can begin buying Vuitton’s first men’s colognes on June 1st, though only in a selection of exclusive LV stores.