FloralLes Parfums de Rosine
Les Parfums de Rosine is the house founded by couturier Paul Poiret in 1911, named after his eldest daughter, and the first perfume line signed by a French couturier. Swept away by the crisis of 1929, it was revived in 1991 by Marie-Hélène Rogeon, whose family had worked for Poiret, and has since devoted itself to rose as its sole subject.
Les Parfums de Rosine perfumes
FloralThe couturier who married couture and perfume
Paul Poiret launched Les Parfums de Rosine in 1911, named after his eldest daughter, the same year as the Ateliers de Martine, named after the second. He was the first to link a French fashion house to a perfume line, well before Gabrielle Chanel, and turned the launch into a celebrated party, the Mille et Deuxième Nuit.
This claim to priority deserves a nuance that accounts often leave aside: the London-based Lucile was already offering house perfumes as early as 1907. Poiret remains the first French couturier to turn it into a signature, which is the real significance of the gesture.
A house of perfumers and factories
Poiret opened a laboratory on Rue du Colisée and a factory in Courbevoie, equipped with its own glassmaking and box-making workshop for packaging. Maurice Schaller and Henri Alméras composed Le Fruit défendu, Nuit de Chine, Coupe d’Or and Le Balcon for the house.
The fashion house’s difficulties began in 1923, and the whole enterprise closed at the end of November 1929 under the impact of the economic crisis. Poiret died in 1944, partly ruined and forgotten; the Osmothèque has since traced these perfumes that were believed lost.
The 1991 revival
Marie-Hélène Rogeon bought the name in 1991 and reopened the house in Paris. Her own family had worked for Poiret in the 1920s, on bottle packaging, and this connection carried weight with the descendants at the time of the sale.
The house made rose its sole subject and reinterprets the flower from one perfume to the next, from the soliflore to darker readings. It has remained independent, and artistic direction now falls to Louis Rogeon.