What is art today? It’s a good question, but not one you’d, generally speaking, ask a watch brand. That, however, has been on the mind of Jaeger-LeCoultre, the Swiss manufacture founded in 1833 behind the iconic Reverso. “Believe it or not,” says Matthieu Le Voyer, the brand’s chief marketing officer—filling in at the moment before a CEO is announced—“we’ve been looking for a formal definition and it’s not clear. So we came up with what art means to us at Jaeger-LeCoultre.”
Le Voyer refers to the Made of Makers initiative that the brand kickstarted in 2020. It began, then, with commissioning Zimoun, a Swiss artist who works with sound sculptures, on an original work for a Jaeger-LeCoultre exhibition. In a few short years since, the initiative has expanded greatly.
There have been 11 collaborations so far that span experiential installations, mixology, 3D anamorphic sculptures, patisseries, typographic design, music compositions, video sculptures, digital floral art, two-Michelin-starred gastronomy and streetlight painting.
The 12th and latest to join the fold is Nicolas Bonneville, a perfumer who has designed scents for names like Valentino, Dries Van Noten, Jo Malone, Givenchy and Acqua di Parma. His contribution, naturally, was to bring the haute horology of Jaeger-LeCoultre into the world of haute parfumerie.
It’s a major step for the brand, which has never attempted a fragrance. “We wanted,” explains Le Voyer, “to create the olfactory identity of our maison. What matters to us is that it is going to last over time. People are going to disappear, but this should remain for years to come.”
For Bonneville, the challenge called for a different way of working and creating perfume. “It was quite a challenge for me,” he lets on. “I had to push my boundaries for some raw materials and it was the first time that I could use them in such a percentage. I was surprised by what [the ingredients] revealed.”
Bonneville worked with three guiding principles: using rare, noble ingredients; uncluttered short formulas that give these notes pride of place; and a high concentration of these ingredients.
What may have helped is the lack of a commercial purpose for these fragrances. They will not be sold. Instead, they will be used— in personal eau de parfum, scented candle and diffuser formats—to expand on the experiential universe of Jaeger-LeCoultre.
“In French we say pas de prix,” Bonneville comments, translating roughly to mean that price was, blissfully, not an issue. “In that way, there was no commercial artifice to put fruit notes to please everyone.”
So how, exactly, did Bonneville craft the maison’s olfactive identity? The cornerstone of the three scents is Timeless Stories, a leather accord fragrance wrapped in balmy orris and fresh violet. Animalic and proud, it’s meant to recall the leathers and horses of the polo field, where the house’s famous Reverso timepiece was designed for. “If we needed to pick one, that would be the one,” says Le Voyer emphatically of the leather scent.
The Celestial Odyssey, meanwhile, uses an accord of diaphanous patchouli, warm mineral ambergris and solar vanilla tahitensis to evoke the moon, the sun and the stars—the heavenly markers of time that have long captivated watchmakers. Lastly, in The Precision Pioneer, a smoky haze of incense, cedar, guaiac and oud characterises the heat of a blacksmith’s fire. It’s a nod to the metallurgic ancestry of Switzerland that enabled it to turn raw iron from the earth into the metals and materials that timepieces are crafted from.
Vogue Singapore’s November ‘Nurture’ issue is now out on newsstands and available online.
