page_title: Jacques Guerlain
section_title: Interwar period: Exoticism
hierarchical_section_title: Jacques Guerlain / Biography / Interwar period: Exoticism
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Flacon de Shalimar. Italiano: Confezione di Shalimar. Simple English: Shalimar perfume made using castoreum.
context_page_description: Jacques Edouard Guerlain was a French perfumer, the third and most famous of the Guerlain family. One of the most prolific and influential perfumers of the 20th century, over eighty of Guerlain's perfumes remain known, though certain estimates suggest he composed some four hundred. Among his greatest fragrances are L’Heure Bleue, Mitsouko and Shalimar. Though his work earned him universal renown, a considerable fortune and honours such as that of Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, Guerlain avoided public attention, never once granting an interview. As a result, relatively little is known of his creative process or personal life.
  Many of his major works are archived in their original form at the Osmothèque, donated by Thierry Wasser on behalf of Guerlain in 2014.
context_section_description: Jacques Guerlain's Mitsouko, released in 1919, was the result of several hundred trials with oakmoss and the peach-smelling gamma-undecalactone. Named after the heroine of Claude Farrère’s novel La Bataille (1909), the perfume conveys Guerlain’s considerable Japanophilia, inspired by accounts such as Farrère’s of Japanese supremacy during the Russo-Japanese War.
  "My grandfather would often tell me the story of how the might of Russia had collapsed," Jean-Paul Guerlain recalled. "To everyone’s surprise, the Japanese crushed – they didn’t just defeat, they crushed – the Russian fleet. The Japanese navy had been created by the British, and most of my compatriots saw Japan as the new Great Britain."
  Mitsouko, an imposing chypre, has also been interpreted as representing the new post-war woman, contrasted against her pre-war past as rendered in L’Heure Bleue, an essentially soft, ambery floral.
  In 1925 Jacques Guerlain presented his magnum opus, Shalimar, at the International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts, of which Pierre Guerlain was vice president. The perfume paid tribute to the eponymous Mughal gardens and was the culmination of four years’ work. Guerlain was fifty years old. Shalimar would become the archetypal ‘oriental’ of perfumery, remaining the house's bestseller well into the 21st century. In the words of perfumer Bernard Bourgeois, "Who does not know the troubling sillage of Shalimar?"
  Guerlain continued to push boundaries, the following year releasing Djédi (1926), referencing the magician of the Westcar Papyrus, a stylistic anomaly in Guerlain's oeuvre in that it is unusually severe. Liú (1929), named after the Tartar slave girl of Puccini’s opera Turandot, reflected Guerlain's admiration for the composer, and was his first aldehydic floral. In 1932 Guerlain became a member of the audit committee of the Bank of France and would remain with the bank as either a member or advisor for the next twenty years.
  In 1933 Guerlain created Vol de Nuit, a work of a rather sombre maturity. The perfume took its name from the novel Night Flight (1931) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (a personal friend of Guerlain's), based upon the author's experience at the Aeroposta Argentina. That year, Jacques Guerlain's father, Gabriel, by whose side he had long worked, died at the age of 92 in Les Mesnuls. Guerlain inherited the country estate and his father's stud, the Haras de la Reboursière et de Montaigu in Nonant-le-Pin.
  In the years following appeared Sous le Vent (1934), referencing the Leeward Islands and created for Josephine Baker, followed by Coque d’Or (1937), inspired by Diaghilev’s staging of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel, set in the Caucasus.
caption: Shalimar (1925)
exif: {}