Germaine Monteil

Germaine Monteil was a French-born couturière who arrived in New York in the early 1930s and built one of the first American beauty empires with a distinctly Parisian sensibility. She founded Germaine Monteil Cosmetiques Corp. in 1936 alongside her husband Guy Bjorkman, initially as a sideline to her fashion atelier on Fifth Avenue. The wartime severance of France in 1941 prompted her to pivot fully into beauty and fragrance, and she launched her first perfumes that same year — Laughter, Nostalgia, New Love, and Frou-Frou — each name reading as a small act of optimism against the decade's backdrop. Monteil won a Neiman Marcus Fashion Award in 1938, but she ultimately chose beauty over dress design, and by the 1940s the cosmetics company occupied her entirely. Her fragrances were sold in the finest American department stores alongside her skincare and spoke to a postwar clientele that wanted European refinement without European prices. The house is now largely a collector's territory, its vintage bottles found in specialist shops rather than counters.