Louis Vuitton introduces the Les Extraits Collection

Louis Vuitton launches a new collection of fragrances called Les Extraits, which includes five editions: Cosmic Cloud, Dancing Blossom, Rhapsody, Stellar Times, and Symphony. The collection was formulated by the house’s master perfumer  Jacques Cavallier Belletrud. American architect and designer Frank Gehry created sculptural fragrance bottles with a three-dimensional silver cap.

Les Extraits Collection magnifies the spirit of a vocation. Sensations on the skin’s surface, the facets of which this collection reveals by smoothing their edges in five major compositions. The collection is a hymn to freedom, to absolute movement, the breath of life, and the perpetual metamorphosis of nature. Getting to the heart of materiality, touching the emotions, embracing the breath of life. Liberating a scent by condensing it into an Extrait. Letting it blossom completely free of constraint. Neither space nor gravity seem to exist.

“I am all for an excess of Beauty. Perfume creates moments of delight, of intimate and shared pleasure. It is an act of love towards others, towards oneself. My stance is to create revolutions without rupture, to make tobacco with jasmine, tea with amber, and to create a world of illusions. Frank Gehry and I share the desire to create imbalance that might become balance, contrast, and transversal lines between things that seem incompatible; there’s a desire to innovate without breaking with what has gone before,” Jacques Cavallier Belletrud said.

With les Extraits Collection, Louis Vuitton’s Master Perfumer pushes hypersensitivity to the extreme, concentrating in five juices the essence of a craft, a tradition, and a story in the making. Five fragrances without top, heart, or base notes, structured like olfactory columns, elongated and rounded by a swell. Line, light and movement melt into pure sensation. Classic and timeless. Here is the spirit of pure movement, undulating through the air like a swimmer slicing through sea foam.

This is the first time that Frank Gehry, one of the greatest living masters of architecture, has designed a perfume bottle. All the more reason to condense the quintessence of a whole life. The spirit of a vocation, the essence of curves, his signature. The art of movement is condensed into a form extended across space, with complete freedom. In its own way, it expresses the architect’s passion for sailing.

“When you sail, on the ocean or elsewhere, there is a very intimate relationship between the skipper at the helm and the wind, and the visual impression it creates. The sail moves gently, the air moves and you just try to keep steady. There’s an idea of movement, but it’s not the same as with a race car,” Frank Gehry said.

Starting with the original bottle designed by Marc Newson, Frank Gehry altered and expanded the lines. His gesture transformed a straight line into an ellipse and shaped curves until they suggested an arc, a transparent sail skimming through space. Taking a sheet of aluminum and crumpling it like fabric, he topped the flacon with an ethereal, hand-polished cap stamped with the LV seal inside.

Such was the setting for a dream, a communion between two masters: the sharing of an ideal in a material form, and in an invisible one. A shape honed by the pulse of a world whose rhythms are revealed without fractionating or reduction. Instead they are transcended, radiant, inspired. As such, this collection is more than a collaboration, it is an encounter, a give-and-take, a manifesto. An ode to movement, its transparency, its fluidity. The complex self-evidence of seduction, the momentum of life emerging from Les Fontaines Parfumées in Grasse and the architect’s Los Angeles studio, from an infinite place: the imagination of the senses. For the landlubber and sailor alike, it is a dual celebration of expansiveness.