Celine
Slimane-era haute parfumerie, since 2019.
Céline Vipiana founded her Paris fashion house in 1945, and LVMH acquired it in 1996. The house's fragrance history is discontinuous: early perfumes appeared in the 1960s with Vent Fou in 1964, then ceased entirely until Hedi Slimane relaunched Haute Parfumerie in October 2019. Slimane presented eleven fragrances as First Chapter compositions evoking specific biographical moments — Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Eau de Californie, Reptile, Black Tie, Nightclubbing among them — with a Second Chapter expanding the collection in subsequent years. The collection is bound together by a shared powdery signature described as a diaphanous veil over skin, providing each composition with French-couture trail and an enveloping patina. Three perfumers contributed to the original collection, but their identities are a closely guarded secret maintained as a deliberate element of the house's mystique, with authorship attributed solely to Slimane and the house. The bottle, designed by Slimane, draws on seventeenth-century glass forms and Art Deco motifs, topped with a black lacquered cap. Celine Haute Parfumerie distributes exclusively through the brand's own boutiques and website, priced above €200 per bottle — firmly in the ultra-niche tier — consistent with the house's deliberate positioning outside the broader luxury-fragrance retail chain.
DNA over time
Each column is an era. Each colored band shows that family’s share of accord weight across every perfume the house released in that window. Bigger band = the house leaned harder on that family.
