It’s easy to be cynical about beautiful people doing interesting things in fabulous spaces. Especially when influence is business, baby, and cultural currency is clocked in followers, sales, and AI-powered performance stats grading every moment of human interaction. Meeting someone at the tippy top of their industry who still leads with gut instincts and sensitivity can be disarming, actually, which is what I experienced in Paris sitting on a couch next to Olivier Rousteing in his sharp-shouldered black blazer. The creative director of Balmain, who’s spent 13 years creating high-drama runway collections (and building an “army” of millions of fans) reveals a new chapter today with Balmain Beauty and its Les Éternels de Balmain scent collection of 8 “different personalities” and “emotions.” He’s refreshingly honest about it all.
After a freak accident left him burned and “weakened” in 2020, Rousteing escaped from the spotlight and began thinking about a different kind of expression. It was a Tuesday after the Met Gala that he first visited Estée Lauder’s New York headquarters to discuss the idea of launching a scent, talking for hours and feeling a sense of mutual appreciation. He approached the world of perfume “with a lot of respect” and enrolled in fragrance school to find “a new way of being a creative director.” It was therapeutic to “actually express myself in a different way than I could with fashion” at a time where he admits to not feeling “as confident as before.” It helped him to reconnect with the outside, he says, and regain a kind of “momentum that maybe you lost or you forget in the back of your brain.”
His first “baby” is Carbone, a musky mix of tobacco, suede, cumin, and rose. The first time he smelled it, he had a vision—of Dove Cameron. “I got the phone call when I was on a plane back from Paris and I started to cry immediately,” Cameron tells me on a Zoom from Montreal, where she’s filming an erotic thriller (“I’ve never done anything that’s quite so nude or adult.”) and preparing for her next album drop. Before she received that call in October, she’d shared some early tracks with Rousteing. “I was really touched by her new songs,” he remembers, agreeing that mixing a perfect pop song is not so far from mixing a perfect scent. “There’s a darkness, there’s a bit of danger, there’s toughness,” he says of Carbone’s notes reminding him of Cameron. “She’s not trying to do something that someone else has done, and she’s that kind of beauty that is so mysterious as well.”