Sauvage Parfum

In August 2019, Dior accompanied the launch of Sauvage Le Parfum with a campaign titled We are the Land, directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino and fronted by Johnny Depp, the face of the line's campaign since 2015. The film was shot in the Utah desert: wide open spaces, a campfire, a guitar, and openly Native American imagery — a dancer in ceremonial dress, a woman wearing a hide. The house presented it at the time as a journey into the heart of the Native American soul, on land it described as sacred and foundational.

The teaser, posted online on August 30, triggered an immediate reaction. Native American voices and activists, among them actor Dallas Goldtooth and activist April Reign, accused Dior of pairing a ceremonial dance with a fragrance bearing the word sauvage — a term whose colonial charge is reactivated by these images. The legitimacy of the campaign's face was challenged in the same breath: his role as Tonto in a 2013 western and his claimed Native American ancestry, unrecognized by the nation in question, fueled accusations of cultural appropriation.

Dior removed the teaser from its social media within hours. The house maintains that it had worked beforehand with the association Americans for Indian Opportunity, which was consulted on the filming location, costumes, casting, and staging, with the stated intention of steering away from clichés. The argument did not put an end to the controversy. The campaign remains a textbook case on the limits of Wild West imagery in perfume advertising; the fragrance's name, meanwhile, has not changed.