Hagiography of a Species Becoming a Menace

Once upon a time, in my former professional life, a life I would not exchange for anything, except perhaps a lifelong annuity and an island without Wi-Fi and without Bimbo, I encountered a creature whom Nature, in her boundless generosity, had placed firmly at the top of the luxury food chain: the junior product manager.

A remarkable specimen. Freshly extracted from a grande école whose badge she still wore like a Waterloo medal. Sustained on lukewarm PowerPoint and the unshakable conviction that the packaging industry naturally bowed before a presentation slide set in Didot type.

She would arrive. Always. With the serene confidence peculiar to those who have never signed off a printer’s proof, never looked an industrial furnace in the eye, and above all, never been required to answer for anything in front of an angry client.

Her opening line never varied, delivered with the disarming naturalness of a saint announcing a miracle:

“We would like to develop a bottle for a new fragrance… but we have no budget.”

A moment of grace.

I would then respond with the diplomatic tact that apparently earned me my modest reputation within the industry:

“Thank you for sharing this information. If this luxury group, owner of 5,800 five-star hotels, six yachts, and in all likelihood a discreet little fiscal republic tucked somewhere between Monaco and Liechtenstein, has suddenly found itself without a budget, then this is news of the utmost importance. My father, a journalist, would be delighted. Are you considering bankruptcy before or after the festive season? I ask for scheduling purposes.”

At that precise instant, a phenomenon of rare scientific beauty would occur: the young vestal’s features froze. Like mascara forgotten in a freezer. Like a sculpture by Camille Claudel. Like an executive committee meeting on a Friday at five in the afternoon.

For here is what moodboards do not teach, and what nobody dares say in open-plan offices scented with oat lattes and ingenuous optimism:

The bottle-making industry is nothing remotely resembling a cloud of jasmine.

It is heavy industry. Brutally, gloriously heavy. Molten glass at 1,200 degrees. Forty-ton furnaces that do not pause for a “creative rethink”. Moulds that cost the price of a Breton house with a garden and sea view, and even then, a house you will never own because your money has been spent on moulds for perfume bottles. Deadlines. Tolerances. Production rates. Logistics possessed of even less humour than a tax administration born of the Marshall Plan. And machines which, unlike product managers, do not run on enthusiasm.

It requires method, rigour and organisation. Three notions that circulate through meetings of young product managers after their third alternative coffee with all the regularity of a ghost.

But one must adapt. The great houses adore this sort of thing: segmentation. Of tasks. Of teams. Of responsibilities. Especially responsibilities. A marvel of managerial engineering in which everyone exercises sovereign authority over a minute fragment while never bearing the burden of the whole.

A system of formidable elegance, one must admit. In the end, when everything collapses, it is invariably the supplier who catches the live grenade and is expected to smile like a notary while doing so.

Meanwhile, the young product manager has already moved on to another brief.

Thus, in the beginning, there was the Moodboard.

And the Moodboard was without form and void, and darkness lay upon the face of the deep, but there was a Pinterest board, and this was the essential thing.

Upon it, invariably, as though governed by some uncontested law of physics, one would find:

• The architecture of a mosque in Isfahan photographed at golden hour,
• A cross-section of an exceedingly rare mineral discovered in an Icelandic volcano during summer holidays,
• A sculpture by Brancusi. Always Brancusi, never anyone else. Brancusi is the totem animal of the perfume industry.
• And, for reasons nobody has ever managed to explain without stammering, a photograph of pack ice.

The designer present at the briefing listened to all this with the gravity of a neurosurgeon describing a transplant to a medical amphitheatre. He nodded thoughtfully. He asked pertinent questions about the project’s “poetic intention”. Then he went home, reflected at length, summoned his talent, and produced what technical constraints had already decided on his behalf:

A gently rounded rectangular block.

Nine times out of ten. Ten times out of ten if one is honest after the first drink.

Not inelegant in itself, certainly, though its relationship to Icelandic ice and the mosque of Isfahan could only diplomatically be described as spiritual.

Serge Mansau might still have found something. But Serge Mansau has left the stage. And since then, we have entered the reign of the polished parallelepiped, confident minimalism, and the pharmaceutical hot-water bottle dressed up as a limited edition.

Then came the long season of meetings.

Numerous. Dense. Populated by people who possessed different information yet shared the same vocabulary. One heard the word “obvious” with remarkable frequency.

“Obvious” is the supreme grail of this world.

It signifies that the object appears to have always existed, that it predated its own conception, that the universe itself had merely been waiting for it. It is the highest compliment the luxury industry knows how to bestow.

People congratulated one another. Applauded one another. Validated.

Then, during a final, definitive, irreversible validation meeting, the managing director would suddenly experience “a different feeling about the neck height.”

A feeling.

About the neck height.

The project returned to development for another three weeks.

The mould-maker wept inwardly. The supplier revised his schedules. And I, I understood at that precise moment, with the tranquil certainty of a clinician, that there existed no rational explanation for such acute sensitivity to bottle openings.

In what world, Vuitton.

That was my former life. It taught me everything about glass, about people, and about the fact that pack ice has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with a perfume bottle.

Yet we continue to place pack ice on moodboards.

And perhaps that, in the end, is the true luxury.

FM