The History of the House of Lanvin Parfums

Few fashion houses have such an illustrious career in fragrance production that at least a handful of their old creations are considered classics beyond parallel: one could cite Chanel or Dior. Lanvin is one of them and although its endurance and shimmer has waned through the decades, a result of the brand passing through many hands who were not always respectful of the heritage, their fragrances are renowned for their elegance that transcends the decades. From the definitive Arpège (1927) with its aldehydic incandescence to the delectable Mon Péché (My Sin) from 1925, they entangle their fans in an embrace of true luxury. Acclaimed perfumer Edmond Roudnistka had pronounced quinoline-rich yet smooth Scandal (1933) as his preferred leather scent among all others by saying it's "a beautiful flower snapped inside a new leather handbag". [in an interview by Susan Irvine]

The tantalising names read like a sexy adventure as well: Prétexte (pretext), Rumeur (rumour), Crescendo, L'Ame Perdue (Lost Soul)... Some of the lost gems are poetically baptized, consonants and vowels rolling off the tongue: Pétales Froissées, J'en rafolle, Niv Nal, Lajéa...

The story of the house of Lanvin starts with the founder of the fashion house, milliner Jeanne Lanvin, born on the 1st of January of 1867 in Paris, eldest of 11 children born to the poor family of Bernard-Constant Lanvin and Sophie-Blanche. Luckily for them, Jeanne's grandfather, Jacques-Firmin Lanvin, is friends with Victor Hugo who helps them along every way he can.
At the age of 13, Jeanne, nicknamed «la petite omnibus» because of her habit to chase the bus, enters the workforce as a seamstress and milliner. As the years pass, so augments the admiration her work produces, earning her an apprenticeship at Félix and later at Cordeau's, working in Barcelona. Upon returning to Paris, Jeanne Lanvin will become mistress of herself: She founds her own millinery fashion house at rue du Marché Saint-Honoré. Her next address upon expanding her headquarters will be 16 rue Boissy d’Anglas while the final destination, still standing to this day, will be at 22, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The genius designs of artist Albert Armand Rateau will help her materialize her Hôtel particulier and her villas, the «Lanvin Décoration» division and he will decorate her boutiques. Together they will participate in the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in 1925 as well.

Aside from the professional, Jeanne's personal life will blossom too: She meets her future husband, le Conte Emilio di Pietro, at the Longchamp horse races and will have her daughter Marguerite in 1897. The little girl has been immortalised through the design of the iconic black boule bottle of Arpège. Her nickname is Ririte, but she will be referred to as Marie-Blanche ever since 1920, and she will be the inspiration for the many fabulous designs her mother devises which will be envied all over Paris and will create the fervent desire to emulate for the daughters of many well-to-do ladies of the higher society. The step from daughters to mothers is a small one and Jeanne will become a legendary couturier in no time!
Marie-Blanche will also be the inspiration for her mother's most enduring perfume, Arpège, conceived for the 30th birthday of Jeanne's beloved daughter and inspired by Marie-Blanche's musical-referencing comment upon smelling the first mod of the composition: "it smells like an arpeggio would". The formula was composed by perfumers Paul Vacher and André Fraysse, while the design of the mother dressing the daughter by Paul Iribe has become a modern icon. It's an irony that the passionate love the mother had for her daughter Marguerite will end up in drawing them apart...

Parfums Lanvin will begin their long-standing career in 1925 at 4, Champs Elysées with simultaneous openings at Cannes and Touquet. The perfume laboratory will be in Nanterre. Even though the background of the first few perfumes is shrouded in mystery and the allegedly Russian-born (and nebulous) Madame Zed ~or more truthfully Marie Zède*~ the fact is that it was the then young perfumer André Fraysse who created the triumphs of the Lanvin fragrance line from 1925 onwards. Such was his input that the legendary perfumer Edmond Roudnitska had once said that he considered Fraysse to be the best perfumer of them all.

The final recognition for Jeanne Lanvin came in 1926, when she became a Chevalier de la légion d'Honneur, and when in 1938, she received the rosette of Officier de la Légion d'Honneur by the hand of Sacha Guitry. She died 8 years later at the age of 79. The direction of the couture house was renegated to Marguerite/Marie-Blanche till her own death in 1958. Successors to the designer seat will include Antonio del Castillo, Dominique Morlotti, Jules Francois Crahay, Marry II Lanvin , Claude Montana, Patrick Lavoix and Christina Ortiz.
After a long hibernation and the passing into too many hands, the L'Oreal Group and the Vuitton family bought out the Lanvin house, organising the first re-orchestration of the classic Arpège fragrance; to outcries from the loyal fans which demanded and effectuated a needed twist in the latter part of the 1990s, albeit never to the grander glory of yore. Since 2007, parfums Lanvin are owned by Inter Parfums, while the fashion division is led by designer Alber Elbaz.
The official site of Lanvin can be accessed here.

The perfumes of Lanvin in chronological order are:

1923 Irisé (discontinued in 1926)
1923 Kara Dujenoun (inspired by a trip to Egypt and discontinued in 1926)
1923 Lajéa
1923 Le Chypre
1923 La Dogaresse
1924 Comme-Ci, Comme-Ca
1924 Niv Nal (discontinued in 1926)
1925 J'En Raffole
1925 Géranium D'Espagne (discontinued in 1962)
1925 Cross Country
1925 Mon Péché (My Sin) (discontinued in 1988)
1925 Le Sillon (discontinued in 1926)
1925 Friction Jeanne Lanvin
1925 Après Sport (discontinued in 1926)
1925 Où Fleurit L'Oranger (discontinued in 1940)
1927 Arpège
1928 L'Ame Perdue (Lost Soul)
1928 Pétales Froissées
1933 Scandal
1933 Eau de Lanvin
1934 Rumeur
1934 Eau de Cologne Lanvin
1937 Prétexte
1949 Prodige
1951 Spanish Geranium
1964 Monsieur Lanvin
1964 Figaro Lanvin
1964 Lavande Lanvin
1965 Crescendo
1966 Vétyver de Lanvin
1971 Via Lanvin
1979 Lanvin for Men
1979 Cardamome (Moyen Orient)
1979 Rumeur (relaunch)
1983 Clair de Jour
1987 Eau de Parfum d'Arpège
2000 Oxygene
2001 Oxygene pour Homme
2003 Lanvin Vetyver
2003 Éclat d'Arpège
2005 Arpege pour Homme
2006 Rumeur (new edition)
2007 Éclat d'Arpège Summer
2008 Rumeur 2 Rose
2008 Jeanne Lanvin
2009 Lanvin L'Homme Sport

We will review (and link) several of these fragrances soon!

*according to an official hand-written document in which Marie Zède from 13, rue Castiglione, Paris, orders raw materials from a supplier. [source & possession of document 1000fragrances]
Vintage Lanvin ads via cache1.asset-cachet.net, publicites-anciennes.com and ebay

A Smooth Leather for the Tough 1930s: Lanvin Scandal

~by guest writer Denyse Beaulieu

Though the fashion pendulum swung back to femininity, away from the androgynous styles of the Garçonnes towards a more traditionally feminine silhouette ~waists, breasts and hips caressed by bias-cut satin, bobs set in platinum marcelled curls~ the Thirties were in fact a much tougher era than the Années Folles. Perhaps all-out modernism can only occur in an era of financial optimism…


The France in which Scandal was born in 1932 was riddled with unemployment, political instability and financial scandals. In the wake of the newly fashionable psychoanalysis, surrealism delved into the subconscious and its disturbing images. From the 1932 Tabu by Dana to Schiaparelli’s Shocking in 1937, perfume names reflected these troubled times…
It is strange, though, that the house of Lanvin would be the boldest in naming its scents: the milliner Jeanne Lanvin actually launched her brilliant career by producing for her high society clientele the designs she had created for her beloved daughter – the house logo by Paul Iribe showed a stylised mother and daughter embrace. However, starting with the sensuous My Sin in 1925, on to L’Ame Perdue (“Lost Soul”) and Pétales Froissés (“Crumpled Petals”, perhaps a vague allusion to “damaged goods”), both in 1928, Lanvin launched a series of racily-named perfumes. A shrewd marketer, she was in tune with the zeitgeist. In the year following the launch of Scandal, the most resounding politico-financial scandal of the decade, the Stavisky affair ~in which several prominent figures were embroiled~ would rock France to its very foundations.


Was Scandal scandalous for its day? As we have seen in the previous instalments of this series, leather had already entered the feminine scent wardrobe a decade earlier. But unlike its Twenties forerunners Tabac Blond, En Avion or Djedi, and to a much greater degree than Chanel Cuir de Russie, Scandal plays up the animalic, leathery side of leather. According to perfume historian Octavian Sever Coifan, who commented about it on these pages, André Fraysse had also composed a “cuir de Russie” base (i.e. a mixture of different components for ready use in perfumery) for Synarome.
This is possibly the “cuir de Russie” mentioned in the breakdown of notes:

Top: neroli, bergamot, mandarine, clary sage.
Heart: jüchten (cuir de Russie), iris, rose, ylang
Base: incense, civet, oakmoss, vanilla, vetiver, benzoin.

Considered by many perfume lovers to be the ultimate leather, Scandal was admired by no lesser an authority than the late, great Edmond Roudnitska. It is one of the few classics he mentions in his book Le Parfum(Presses Universitaires de France, 1980), firstly as the prototype of a “fruity-aldehydic-leather” family and secondly, as a prime example of compositions that evoke rather than represent a note (which he opposes to non-representational perfumes such as N°5, Arpège, Mitsouko or Femme).

“Leather and tobacco”, he observes, “are already transpositions of natural elements since they undergo painstaking preparations which alter the initial odour.”

My own version of Scandal is a flacon of extrait, of which one third has evaporated. The aldehydic top notes mentioned by Roudnitska have all but disappeared, except in the first fleeting moments of application, with a slight hint of citrus.

What immediately dominates is, well, leather, with a stronger birch tar edge than Chanel Cuir de Russie, with which it shares several notes: rich, deep, smooth as a fine old Bordeaux or a single malt whisky, with its complex peaty-mossy depths – oakmoss certainly, possibly vetiver because of the earthiness. A sombre undercurrent yields a vaguely licorice-y tinge to the heart, in a moment of olfactory illusionism: is it the clary sage? The floral notes seem so deeply blended in that they don’t appear as such any longer, which could be an effect of the age of the sample – a common phenomenon in older extraits. In its pristine version, the aldehydic fizz lifting the dark wood-resin-animal base, churning through the stately cool iris, tender rose and flesh-like carnality of the ylang-ylang must made for an intoxicating experience.
As it is, though, it is still a compellingly complex, opulent leather.

Though Lanvin has recently re-launched a scent of the same André Fraysse series, Rumeur (there was also Crescendo and Prétexte), there seems to be no chance of their resurrecting Scandal, discontinued in 1971: British perfumer Roja Dove has appropriated the name which had fallen into the public domain for one of his own compositions, an opulent white floral. Lancôme’s 2007 re-edition of Révolte/Cuir, another animalic leather of the period, was quickly followed by its discontinuation, allegedly because it was too costly to produce.

Thus, the original Scandal seems condemned to the limbo of long-lost scents. The few drops remaining are all the more precious: a reminder of an age where to dab your skin in the scent of a flower-drenched leather would send an iconoclastic frisson coursing through well-bred salons…


Pics from the "Gosford Park" film by Robert Altman, set in 1932, courtesy of djuna.cine21.
Pic of the french film "La règle du jeu" by Jean Renoir from wikipedia.
Lanvin ad originally uploaded at cofe.ru