Francis Kurkdjian came to Berlin for one evening. He stayed for a conversation that lingered like a great fragrance — long after he had left the room.
The night of June 8th, at Kino International on the famous Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin, something quiet and extraordinary happened. Around 500 people gathered to watch ICON(S), a multisensory documentary built around a single perfume, Baccarat Rouge 540. On stage afterward, its creator stood in a masterclass and did what few people in the luxury world ever do: he showed his work. Not the finished product, gleaming in its red-lacquered bottle, but the thinking, the uncertainty, the slow accumulation of craft behind it. The next afternoon, the evening still fresh in the air between us, he talked about all of it, with a precision and warmth that made the conversation feel less like an interview than a continuation.
Francis Kurkdjian is, depending on how you look at him, many things: the founder of his own Paris-based perfume house, the Artistic Director of Christian Dior Parfums, a former teacher, and one of the most quietly radical thinkers working in luxury today. Baccarat Rouge 540, created for the crystal house Baccarat in 2015 before eventually finding its home at its own maison, has become, without anyone planning it, a cultural object. Referenced in rap lyrics, reviewed by millions on social media, and worn by people who have never owned a luxury product, and people who have never worn anything else. A perfume as a phenomenon.
Did he see it coming? He laughs. “It’s impossible to predict. Success doesn’t depend on you. It depends on the audience.” He pauses. “Think about Van Gogh. The match never came while he was alive.” There is no bitterness in this, only a liberating humility. Kurkdjian often speaks about humility. Not as a posture, but as a practical precondition for serious creative work.
ICON(S) was born from the same impulse. A production company approached him about a documentary around Baccarat Rouge 540, and rather than making a film about himself, he assembled a group of artists; a musician, a chocolatier, a sculptor, and let them respond to the fragrance, each in their own medium. “What is important to me is for people to understand where inspiration comes from and where it leads you to,” he says. “The film shows the uncertainty of the creative process. What you see was crafted over a year and a half. That you don’t see.” In a culture increasingly seduced by the appearance of effortlessness, Kurkdjian is quietly insistent about duration. About how long things actually take.
The Berlin masterclass was, by several accounts, revelatory. He described it with characteristic directness: “I propose. I explain my job as well as I can. And people take a chunk of it and make it their own.” One guest, he recalled, had a small breakthrough: he suddenly understood how his brain could distinguish the layers within a smell. That jasmine carries banana, but also nail polish, but also something earthier still. “Who better than a German to do so?” he says with a smile. “A German writer wrote the best book ever on perfume.” He means Süskind’s Das Parfum, which he first read at seventeen and returned to last winter, forty years later. He would love to meet Süskind. He is sure something is lost in translation. The film adaptation, he dismisses in a single sentence: “Dustin Hoffman with his nose up like a beast. It was stupid.”
Asked about the grammar of luxury; heritage, aspiration, restraint, he makes a distinction that feels important. “‘Tradition’ is the worst word in luxury,” he says. “Traditions are, at some point, always a disaster.” Heritage, by contrast, is a living thing: “It must be nurtured. It’s a legacy. You build on it like a tree. You water the roots, you take care of the trunk, you look up toward the light.” At Dior, where he has served as Artistic Director of Parfums since 2021, he applies this thinking daily. How do you keep an eighty-year-old brand relevant without betraying it? His answer is elegant: go back to the founding act, not the founding design. “The design is just a translation of the meaning. I prefer to stick to the meaning.”
Berlin, he says, is a city he loves precisely because it is not finished. “Munich is like a pretty girl — a bit, but pretty. Berlin is more like a volcano. There is a boiling thing within it.” He is drawn to its extremes: the Nefertiti bust in the Neues Museum, the avant-garde energy, the memory of Herbert von Karajan heard on French television as a child. He arrived on a Sunday, left on Tuesday, and already regrets not staying longer. He will come back.
The final question drifts toward the largest possible frame: what is scent, in the end, in a world increasingly mediated by screens? Kurkdjian’s answer is both scientific and philosophical. Smell, he explains, is the only sense that functions as a bodyguard. Every other sense can be blocked — you close your eyes, you cover your ears. But the sense of smell reports directly to the brain on whether it is safe to breathe. “It’s not just hedonistic. It’s the sense of your integrity.”
This, he believes, is what separates us from machines. His next project, revealed with quiet excitement: working to convince space agencies to integrate scent into long-duration space travel. Three years to Mars and back. “We need to bring that sense of humanity up there.” Robots can hear, see, speak, and walk. But they don’t need to smell. “So they will never be able to be like us.”
As we finish, I describe driving through the Berlin night after the event — on a scooter, the smell of a summer city, linden trees, warm asphalt. “Think about the robot that takes your scooter home,” he says. “It does things. But there is no warmth to it.”
He picks up his bag. The day is already full.
Francis Kurkdjian’s Maison Francis Kurkdjian is available hier. The documentary ICON(S) is touring internationally and available on Amazon Prime.