L'Eau d'Issey

Issey Miyake founded his design studio in Tokyo in 1970 and signed with Shiseido, in 1991, the licensing agreement that would give him a perfume. L’Eau d’Issey came out the following year, the first juice from a fashion house that had never wanted one.

A couturier who did not like perfumes

Chantal Roos, then at Beauté Prestige International, recounts that Miyake told her from the outset of his distaste for perfume. She held her ground, listened to him, and got from him the formula that would serve as the brief: for a woman, olfactory beauty lies in the water running over her body.

The requirement was harsh — a perfume that would not smell of perfume, but of the smell of water. Jacques Cavallier, who had joined Firmenich two years earlier after Charabot and Quest, inherited the problem and drew from it his first great success.

A moon above the Eiffel Tower

The bottle carries three signatures: Issey Miyake, Fabien Baron and Alain de Mourgues. An unadorned glass cone, a matte metal collar, a crystalline sphere on top. The house tells its origin: a full moon seen one Paris evening, just above the Eiffel Tower.

The object says before the juice does what the juice is about to say. Set against the opulent bottles of the 1980s, it announces an aesthetic of restraint, and the shelf understands the message before smelling anything at all.

The name, and the pun

L’Eau d’Issey reads as the water of the designer and sounds like odyssey. Miyake claimed the wordplay in the trade press as early as March 1992. The name thus carries both the substance of the brief and the journey the house wanted to undertake.

The honors, and their shifting wording

The 1993 distinction appears in every archive, under two distinct titles. The trade press records it as best feminine launch in Europe; Miyake’s studio lists it as the award for best prestige perfume launched in the United States.

The discrepancy is not trivial: two territories, two categories rewarded, a single year. Nothing allows a choice between the two records, neither of which cites the other, and both are presented here as they stand, side by side.

The commercial success, for its part, has never been in question. Two years later, Chantal Roos and Jacques Cavallier did it again with a masculine version, and the brand has kept extending its eau ever since.