Rumeur

Lanvin launched Rumeur in the fall of 2006 with Inter Parfums, its license holder. According to Women’s Wear Daily, the house wanted to build up its standing as a fragrance name: customers tended to associate Arpège, from 1927, and Éclat d’Arpège, from 2002, with the Arpège name more than with Lanvin itself.

Francis Kurkdjian composed the fragrance. It takes up the name of a 1934 Rumeur signed by André Fraysse without owing it anything: Angela, on Now Smell This, writes that it borrows the name but not the inspiration, and Elena Vosnaki that it has no olfactory link to the old one.

A name revived from the 1930s

Elena Vosnaki recalls that André Fraysse, who joined Lanvin in the 1920s, created Arpège, Scandal and Rumeur. To her, the old Rumeur is a dark, fruity chypre set on a bed of moss, which now seems heady at a time when oakmoss has left perfume formulas.

She sees the reuse of the name as a convenience: the house needed a new fragrance, and a brand-new name is hard to secure. A Lanvin spokesperson, quoted by Women’s Wear Daily in August 2006, intended it for women aged thirty to eighty, not for the youngest.