In 2005 the Haute Couture Designers launched their first feminine fragrance, Flowerbomb, that officially created the union between haute-couture and haute-perfumerie for them.
Flowerbomb turned the fragrance world on its head. Traditional top, heart and base notes…? Out of the window: it’s a ‘floral explosion’, interacting with individual pheromones to deliver a different sensorial experience for every wearer – always soft, always sensual. And its ‘grenade-style’ bottle now graces dressing tables worldwide.
Bonbon launched in 2014 with another truly stunning bottle, as original as you’d expect from Viktor & Rolf. As the ‘noses’ behind the creation, Serge Majoullier and Cécile Matton, explain: ‘Our challenge was to create a bonbon à la Viktor & Rolf: a couture bonbon – sophisticated, unconventional, sensual, glamorous, on the edge – for supreme pleasure.’
It’s a luscious ‘woody floriental’, so they tell us: ‘an addictive delicacy, an haute confiserie.’ The name itself was the inspiration for the notes, the starting point a peach-flavoured caramel, which these well-known perfumers elegantly ‘dressed’ through a fruity overture, sparkling notes of peach and orange, and a base of creamy woods. The caramel, they explain, is evoked throughout: ‘clear, translucent and crackling in the top note, it becomes more flexible and milky in the middle note and finally darkens to give depth to the base note.’
And then, of course, there is Viktor & Rolf’s unashamedly masculine creation: the delicious explosion of notes that is Spicebomb. As Viktor Horsting said in an interview, at the time of launch in 2012, ‘We were jealous of all the women who had Flowerbomb, and we wanted to have our own bomb.’ Rolf Snoeren added: ‘We felt that if flowers were a very typical scent, spices were the masculine opposite.’
