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If ever there were a context most suitable to the phrase ‘reeks of money’, it would be the VIP preview of a global art fair — Art Basel, for example. Care for a whiff? Well, for that, you’ll have to head to Paris next week, where the freshly rebranded Art Basel Paris opens on 16 October at the refurbished Grand Palais. We aren’t speaking figuratively, though. This year, the art fair behemoth has attempted to distill the event’s essence into a limited-edition scent by Parisian perfume house Guerlain.
The world’s first art fair-branded fragrance, the 2,000-bottle run of Guerlain’s Œillet Pourpre, will be available exclusively via the Art Basel Shop, the itinerant retail concept curated by Sarah Andelman, which debuted back in June at the fair’s Basel edition. The scent — “a daring, ultra-elegant yet sultry fragrance that can be worn by all genders”, Ann-Caroline Prazan, Guerlain’s director of art, culture and heritage, explains — will be presented in a flask and box designed by French painter Julie Beaufils, an artist collaboratively selected by both partners.
While, to some, the notion of an art fair-branded fragrance may seem an eccentric proposal, the fragrance is in fact an extension of what was already an entrenched partnership. “We’ve been partnering with Guerlain in Paris since the first edition of Paris+ par Art Basel in 2022,” Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz says over Zoom. “So this grew organically out of that relationship with the house, and our discussions about doing something more ambitious.”
The idea for the fragrance was born out of conversations addressing the new possible frontiers of exploration for Art Basel Shop, a pillar of which is the site-specific curation and commissioning of limited-edition artist collaborations for each version of the store. “We won’t be bringing what we have in Basel [Switzerland] to Paris, Miami or Hong Kong,” Andelman told Vogue Business upon its launch in June. “Each product will be totally bespoke to the particular week and city.” As such, the decision to work with a brand with such an evocative link to the French capital — where Guerlain was founded in 1828 — offered the possibility to “create a totally new way of engaging our audiences, particularly in Paris”, Horowitz notes.
Fragrance as art
So why fragrance? While a booming sector of the beauty industry, competition is notoriously fierce, with well-attested saturation among heritage players such as Guerlain. As the strictly limited run of the fragrance would imply, though, the launch speaks less to Art Basel’s ambitions to establish itself as a competitor within the fragrance market, and more to its aims to reframe perceptions of the fair as a forum for cultural experience, rather than solely for the art trade.
