La Petite Robe Noire Eau de Parfum

A little dress born in boutique

In 2009, Guerlain put an eau de parfum on sale in its boutiques alone, as a limited edition. The name is already the one everyone would come to know. The bottle is that of Mitsouko, dressed in a black gradient and the silhouette of a dress.

Delphine Jelk signs the formula, at a time when she is a young perfumer and completely unknown. She does not work for Guerlain: she is at Drom, in New York, when she submits her idea to Sylvaine Delacourte, who directs the house's fragrance creation.

The idea comes from a film. Jelk recounts having watched Sofia Coppola's Marie-Antoinette eat pastries in Converse sneakers, and having drawn from it an accord of raspberry-morello cherry macaron and rose, lifted with facets of smoky tea and licorice.

The project takes up two years. Ann Caroline Prazan, in marketing, writes the story of this dress that speaks in the first person. Auparfum describes, at launch, a gourmand almond-licorice accord, quite Guerlain-like despite a name the magazine judges Chanel-esque.

The batch sells out within weeks and runs out of stock. A boutique exclusive had just demonstrated that a fruity gourmand could work at a house for which this was not familiar territory.

Model No. 2, a follow-up nobody mentions

In February 2011, Guerlain gave it a follow-up. It was called La Petite Robe Noire modèle n°2 and this time bore the signature of Thierry Wasser, the house's in-house perfumer since 2008, with Sylvaine Delacourte overseeing creative direction.

The direction changes. Auparfum describes a composition built on iris and orange blossom, and judges it pale. It does not find the reception its predecessor had, and the magazine wonders at the time whether this was another test before something bigger.

This second dress matters, even though few people remember it today. It explains why the eau de parfum sold everywhere descends from the 2009 exclusive and not from it: the house turned back toward the first accord.

The 2012 reworking, and the question of authorship

In March 2012, La Petite Robe Noire left the circle of boutiques and went into worldwide distribution. The name does not change, the accord closely resembles that of 2009, but the formula was reworked by Thierry Wasser.

Guerlain presents this reworking as a way of bringing the fragrance back in line with the house's style. Jeanne Doré, in Auparfum, offers another reading on March 24, 2012, and this reading has never since been withdrawn.

According to her, what mattered most was that the fragrance stop being signed by someone other than the official perfumer. A light retouch would have sufficed, sliding along the way toward a more conventional fruity-patchouli aesthetic.

She reads a loss in it: a bit of the original's singular charm, perhaps too sharp for the general public. Her judgment appears in the very month of the launch, which gives it the weight of a contemporary account rather than a memory.

One question remains open. Guerlain writes that Delphine Jelk joined the house in 2014: the accord of La Petite Robe Noire was therefore born outside its walls, five years before the perfumer arrived.

The dress, the bottle, and the soundtrack

The 2012 bottle leaves Mitsouko’s for the inverted-heart bottle designed in 1912 for L’Heure Bleue, dressed in a dress drawn by Florence Deygas. The launch film, made with Olivier Kuntzel, does without a celebrity face and sends the silhouette walking through Paris to a Nancy Sinatra song.

Success was immediate. LVMH, Guerlain’s parent company, presents the fragrance as the best launch of a women’s fragrance in French history: nine weeks at the top of sales after its release and, beyond that, second place among women’s fragrances in the country.

In April 2013, the Fragrance Foundation France gave it four awards: best feminine fragrance, best feminine campaign, best feminine bottle, and the public’s choice award. Since then the house has extended the line with an Eau de Toilette, Couture, Intense, Absolue, and many other editions.