Ted Lapidus

Ted Lapidus opened his fashion house in Paris in 1951 after training in Tokyo and learning industrial pattern-cutting in his father's tailor shop. He became one of the first French couturiers to apply ready-to-wear methods to luxury menswear, building the brand around the safari jacket, the unisex suit and a sharply cut white shirt. The perfume side launched in 1978 with the men's Ted Lapidus, an aromatic fougère, and expanded through the 1980s and 1990s with Création and the long-running Black & Gold. The compositions kept to a barbershop register — lavender, oakmoss, leather — that suited the house's tailored menswear identity. Ted Lapidus died in 2008 and the brand passed through several licensees. Fragrance is currently produced under licence and distributed through perfume chains and duty-free, with pricing pitched at the accessible end of the designer market.