Flower By Kenzo

Kenzo launched its fragrance of the millennium on a wager no house had attempted before: giving a sillage to the poppy, a flower perfumers classify among the mute flowers. The juice appeared in 2000 and has never left the shelf since.

A photograph from October 21, 1967

Patrick Guedj joined Kenzo Parfums as photographer and marketing director, at the moment Kenzo Takada was leaving the house he had founded. He recounts that the idea, both for the image and for the fragrance, originated from a photograph taken that day in Washington.

The scene is well known: a young woman hands a flower to law enforcement officers during a protest against the Vietnam War. None of the sources gathered here name the photographer, so the name does not appear.

From this image comes the entire program. A flower that grows where it is not expected, between two stones, against concrete. Rebellious, strong and fragile at once, and one that wilts as soon as it is cut.

The campaign he did not sign

The web attributes the entire advertising saga to Guedj from the start. When asked, he corrects this himself: all the campaigns are his, except the first one. This nuance appears nowhere else, and it comes from him directly.

The rhythm, meanwhile, is set. A film every three years, each time in a different city, so that a fragrance that has become timeless keeps surprising. Buenos Aires, Miami, Paris, Brasilia, San Francisco each in turn receive this urban manifesto.

A mute flower

The term comes from the trade, and it is Guedj who provides it. The poppy yields nothing to distillation: it delivers neither absolute nor essence, and nothing sold under that name actually comes from the flower itself.

Morillas sees this as an advantage rather than an obstacle. With no reference to copy and no scent to respect, he states that he was handed a blank page, something a perfumer rarely gets on a launch of this scale.

The bottle, and its third author

Serge Mansau designed a tilted glass stem, with no label or brand name on its surface, where only a red poppy runs from the base to the cap. The object states the subject before a single spray.

Two sources of a different nature add a name that press releases leave out: the design came from an idea by the agency Air Paris. Mansau executed the glass stem, but the shape was born elsewhere.

What the tallies do not say

For the launch, Kenzo had fields of poppies planted in the middle of the city, at the foot of the Centre Pompidou, and elsewhere in Europe and Asia. The operation is documented and the approach has since been imitated.

The numbers, however, do not hold up. The figures circulating vary by a factor of a hundred from one page to another, with none traceable to a reliable source. They are set aside for lack of verifiable value.