A new air of paradise at Nina Ricci The 1950s were particularly prolific in terms of artistic creation in France. Perfumery was no exception at the time and celebrated the joy of a newfound freedom.
For Robert Ricci, founder of the Nina Ricci haute couture and perfume house, perfume was an act of love. With L'Air du Temps and its joyful, luminous facets, Robert Ricci offered postwar women love in a bottle and happiness in a fragrance. Having become iconic and so representative of its era, L'Air du Temps has managed to transform and be reborn through the recompositions offered by renowned perfumers over the years. In 2018, L'Air du Temps, reworked once again by Calice Becker, became L'Air du Paradis, demonstrating, if further proof were needed, that great classics never go out of style.
When L'Air du Temps becomes L'Air du Paradis through the talents of Calice Becker for Nina Ricci
While Robert Ricci's haute couture house was born in the 1930s, its founder's great love for perfumery led him to abandon couture in the 1940s in favor of perfume creation alone. From the very first bottles, Robert Ricci offered joy and flowers to an absolute femininity that would find its place in both traditional perfumery and a certain modernity. L'Air du Temps, launched in 1948, was a perfect example of this marriage between past and present, between classic accords and olfactory innovations.
But L'Air du Temps is not only a magnificent perfume, it is also a fragrance meant to be light and joyful, entirely designed to appeal to women who, after years of war, wanted freedom and independence. L'Air du Temps quickly won the hearts of a wide audience and, above all, became one of the most timeless perfumes of its generation.
L'Air du Temps remains definitively the bestseller among Nina Ricci perfumes, even 70 years after its release. As a result, the house enjoys presenting it in different lights, such as with Calice Becker's sublime reinterpretations for the 2016 Collection Lumière or her magnificent 2018 L'Air du Paradis.
L'Air du Paradis, fruity and floral notes modernize the great Nina Ricci classic
L'Air du Temps is such a timeless, rich and complete perfume that it can afford every boldness, every modernity. Calice Becker had already reworked it in 2016 to offer three bottles representing the different hours of the day (l'Aube, Le Zénith and le Crépuscule). In 2018, she gave L'Air du Temps a new journey, this time a geographical one, thanks to exotic notes from paradisiacal islands that she added to create the limited edition L'Air du Paradis.
L'Air du Paradis retains the opening freshness of its beloved ancestor, but this time these notes are far more exotic thanks to lime and sweet, sugary passion fruit, which for the first time dare to give L'Air du Temps fruity notes. Then in the heart, the precious jasmine remains but is dressed in sunny, opulent floral notes of frangipani flower and Mahonia Japonica, flowers native to Thailand. The sensual, woody depths of L'Air du Temps are preserved, giving this L'Air du Paradis a burning warmth that blends beautifully with these new paradisiacal scents.