November 19, 2025 |
As charming beauty odes go in the upper echelons of the world of luxury, the three new Christian Dior Les Récoltes Majeures perfumes are surely some of the most poetic. A trio of the finest of fragrances, each represents a single flower and one of three notes that have always lain at the centre of Dior fragrances. The last of the threesome, jasmine, is available this month, following on from its perfume partners, lily of the valley, which launched in May, and rose, which came out in June.
Limited in number, all are crafted from the finest of ingredients. They’re inspired by the very heart of the story of the maison and presided over by none other than Francis Kurkdjian, Christian Dior Parfums’ creation director and a perfumer legend in his own lifetime.
Not, by the way, that Kurkdjian would necessarily thank you for the luxury tag. “It’s not a matter of being luxurious, luxury doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s just a posture,” he says over a Zoom call. “To me, what is important is does it feel right? How do you feel about what you have for the price it cost? Do you think that you have the quality, the feeling and the emotions? It’s very relative in a way.”
That said, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything as luxuriously exquisite as this perfumery triumvirate. The creation of each solifleur, to use perfume jargon for a juice created around a single flower, was inspired by the gardens of the Château de la Colle Noire. Once the home of Monsieur Christian Dior, it’s located in Montauroux, close to the Grasse region, which is known as the cradle of French fragrance. Bought by the designer in 1950, the château was a place of respite for him away from the pressures of Paris. It was also an area that provided him with refuge during the Occupation and he knew it well: the family home was also in Provence. His sister Catherine had inherited the nearby Les Naÿssès from their father, a WWII Resistance fighter; she also loved blooms and became a flower farmer, supplying rose and jasmine for Dior fragrances. In the gardens of La Colle Noire, Dior cultivated these three favourite flowers and championed them in his perfumes, the most well known probably being lily of the valley. It was used in Diorissimo, which launched in 1956 and was created by Edmond Roudnitska.
Now they are being celebrated in their own individual glory; each one like a combination of floral finery tinged with a swish of time travel. “The idea was to translate the feeling of a freshly cut flower, which to my knowledge has never been done before,” says Kurkdjian. “Usually, we talk about the extraction, we talk about the country, we talk about the soil. But here the idea was to translate the scent of the flower when it’s still alive, when it’s on the stem.” It’s as if you’re in the Colle Noire garden surrounded by the flowers? “Yes, as if Christian Dior was here.” The scents really do make you feel like you’re strolling around those grounds, brushing past flowerbeds that permeate and scent the air around them, that draw you in ever closer and make you want to close your eyes and just breathe in. It’s the sheer pleasure of nature in full bloom and all the senses it stirs far beyond that of the sense of smell: it’s freedom, joy, comfort, a lightness of being. It’s that fragrant inhalation that lets your imagination take flight.
Francis Kurkdjian, creation director of Christian Dior Parfums
The idea had been wafting around Kurkdjian’s head for a while. “It began a bit after I joined Christian Dior when I first visited La Colle Noire in October 2021.
I was impressed and amazed by the beautiful garden, because it’s a remote garden that is not open to the public, so I’d had no chance to visit it. At some point I wanted to reactivate it and pay tribute to lily of the valley, which was one of Christian Dior’s favourite flowers, if not his most favourite. He designed dresses after the shape of lily of the valley. He basically bathed himself and his employees in Paris at the Avenue Montaigne [headquarters] with the smell of Diorissimo and he was very superstitious about lily of the valley – it had a very specific place in his heart [Dior would even sew sprigs of the flower into the hems of his dresses]. I wanted to pay tribute to that.”
Kurkdjian worked on the fragrances concurrently over a period of six to eight months. And no, he says, there is no surprising difficulty to creating a solifleur. “A single note is a single note, so it has less complexity in a way,” he says. “It’s less complex than creating a totally new scent. At least here you have a starting point.” In other words, there was no extra faceting, no polishing, no combining quixotic elements or trying to recreate the man himself in his garden – and definitely no marketing brief to work to. It was simply about recreating each flower in all of its own natural purity and enchantment, “sculpting these three fragrances to reflect the characteristics of the flowers”.
But let’s not understate the case. A flower that signals the arrival of spring, lily of the valley – a bloom that cannot be extracted or distilled, and Dior preferred the Fortin’s Giant variety of it – required the use of headspace technology (which captures the fragrant molecules of a flower so it can be analysed and recreated) to bring out its green and grassy aspects as well as subtle almond and rose notes. With the rose perfume he brought out “every aspect of its honeyed roundness and fruity, spicy beauty”. It’s a rose “in a field, sovereign, green and lively, just as Christian Dior would have smelled it on his land”. The jasmine fragrance is about capturing “the olfactory complexity of these little white flowers that rises in the air in a fragrant vapour. There is a moment of perfect harmony between the animalic and green facets, the fruity and the floral notes, when there is no excess, only concord.” As such, there is intricacy to all this simplicity.
Les Récoltes Majeures (récolte is French for harvest) is a unique and specialised project that has allowed only the most exclusive ingredients to be used. “Because there’s a very limited number of bottles that are issued [200 of each fragrance], it gave us the opportunity to use our Grasse production. In the region, we have about 12 different flower producers with whom we work and we used the results of the harvest.”
from left: the new lily of the valley, jasmine and rose fragrances of Dior’s Les Récoltes Majeures collection, limited to only 200 handmade bottles of each
Alongside all of this has been the caretaking of La Colle Noire itself. After Dior’s death in 1957, the château passed into other private hands, but Parfums Christian Dior reacquired the property in 2013 and set about restoring the house and filling it with the spirit and aesthetics of the brand’s founder, with the inaugural results revealed in May 2016. The grounds, too, have required work. “The property was about 52 hectares but now we have only five left,” says Kurkdjian. And though the May roses were blooming again, “we just replanted jasmine in the autumn because there was none left, so in a way it’s going back to what it used to be”. What it used to be is still providing the inspiration for the here and now – and beyond.
Further elevating this endeavour, each year a different artisan will be invited to collaborate on the elegant amphora that house these rarest of juices and mirror the one Dior himself designed for Diorissimo. For the first partnership, the renowned Parisian embroidery house Maison Vermont took up the baton and created elegant 3D sculptures of each flower to adorn the top of the bottles. Given its heritage working with haute couture items, it’s unsurprising that the attention to detail here is exquisite. Lily of the valley’s little bells are made of white satin, embroidered with golden beads, with a white bead inside the centre of each. The rose is crafted from several shells of fabric to form a silk cocoon, with pale pink beads embroidered on gauze. Meanwhile, the jasmine required a layer of golden fabric paired with a second layer of brass-thread embroidery, also adorned with golden beads. Every detail feels like another word of a love poem set down.
Of course, there’s a certain irony to the natural simplicity of these blooms becoming the rarest of treasures. But, then again, what is more fitting than for these three flowers, which are so central to the fragrant story of the maison of Dior, being elevated to their own pantheon of excellence, fully represented, appreciated, valued and revered? And if, as for many of us, buying one of these is beyond your means, try to snatch a sniff of them if you can. They are truly transportive – and you can ask no more of a fragrance, whether you are lucky enough to own it or able to simply embrace each other in a passing encounter.
Taken from 10 Magazine Issue 75 – BIRTHDAY, EVOLVE, TRANSFORMATION – out on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
