1881 Femme

Five years after the masculine, Cerruti gives 1881 its feminine counterpart. The brief is the same, a fragrance that speaks for the house, but the number engraved on the bottle still refers to the loom of Biella, never to a flower.

A flower with no smell

Flax is the house's signature material, the one from which Nino Cerruti built a signature cut. To translate it into perfume, a flax flower was needed. The plant itself yields no usable extract.

The note was therefore built entirely from scratch, from materials that have nothing to do with the plant. It does not imitate a model, it invents one, the way perfumery has long done for lily of the valley or lilac.

The stance is worth noting. A fabric house commissions a textile flower, and the perfumer delivers a smell that has never existed anywhere but in the bottle. The fragrance's thread is a fiction owned as such.

Claire Cain, a sole signature

The composition is credited to Claire Cain alone. Her name circulates far less than that of the masculine's perfumer, even though both juices have held their place on the shelf for three decades and occupy the same standing in the house's catalog.

A pink bottle, from the same designer

Serge Mansau, who had designed the masculine's bottle, reprises its lines for the feminine. Same frosted glass, same softened edges, but a pink tint that has long served to identify it on the shelf.

In 2015, the Édition Blanche entrusted a reinterpretation to Annick Menardo: a mimosa heart punctuated with heliotrope, vanilla and powdery musks, in an opaque white bottle evoking a whitewashed Mediterranean wall.

A floral that the shelf files separately

The family reads as floral, but the sandalwood and musk base pulls toward woody, to the point that most descriptions call it a floral-woody. The fragrance sits at the edge of two categories without settling into either.