How Frédéric Malle’s Portrait Of A Lady Became A Modern Classic Scent

Cult Status is TZR’s series that highlights an iconic item from brands both established and buzz-worthy. In these features, you'll discover the fascinating history of how one extra-special piece exceeded expectations and became a forever product. This time, the focus is on Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle Portrait of a Lady.

One of the most enduring modern masterpieces of perfumery celebrates a landmark birthday this year. Portrait of a Lady, the number one bestselling scent from Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, turns 15. She was an oriental floral when she entered this world and has now been reclassified as an amber-floral chypre by some and a woody amber by others, in the vocabulary of today. No matter the nomenclature, her full-bodied, uncompromising power remains undiminished.

Lady is not demure about serving us her foundational ingredients. She opens with an embarrassment of rose: no coy flashes or transparent notes of the flower in this one. These rose tones are on the way to worldwide domination, with patchouli, incense, and amber equally present on the front lines. Blackcurrant and raspberry flash fruitily and sandalwood brings up the rear guard.

She’s also a scent to whose name many legends are attached. Apparently, 400 Turkish roses go into the making of a single 100ml bottle. Her fandom reportedly includes Madonna, Catherine Deneuve, David Beckham, and makeup artist Val Garland. And, as it happens, she’s the one creation that made her originator, Frédéric Malle, suffer the most doubt at launch. “One of Frédéric’s fears was that Portrait of a Lady would be too sophisticated. But he loved that fragrance. We talked about it and decided to follow our conviction,” Lady’s perfumer Dominique Ropion tells TZR.

But to truly appreciate how this surfeit of sophistication came about, we have to go back to a different time to understand the house that birthed her and transformed perfumery.

The Making Of A Maverick

It was the turn of the century, and Malle was frustrated. Everywhere he turned, mediocre mass market perfumery was proliferating, and perfumers had been overtaken in the scent business hierarchy by marketeers. A fragrance obsessive with an ancestral scent pedigree, Malle could not abide this landscape.

Malle is the grandson of Serge Heftler-Louiche, the founder of Parfums Christian Dior and a childhood friend of the designer. Malle’s mother, Marie-Christine de Sayn Wittgenstein, was a director at the perfume house for nearly four decades. He grew up marinating — physically and spiritually — in the fumes and lore of subliminal scents like Miss Dior and Eau Sauvage. Malle studied art history and worked in advertising before landing a job at Roure, the manufacturer of perfumery raw materials, working for its legendary head, Jean Amic. That’s where he realized that perfumery wasn’t just a family passion, but a calling for him as well. Consulting stints at Hermès, Chaumet, and Christian Lacroix followed, but the seed to create something himself was germinating.

Apart from the generic, uninspired quality of mass perfumery, one other factor troubled Malle: the fact that perfumers, the very originators of these olfactory masterpieces, were rendered invisible by the brands who employed them. “As recently as the ‘90s, perfumers were invisible. The brands almost never acknowledged them or allowed them to be interviewed,” says Michael Edwards, a fragrance historian and author of several meticulously-researched tomes on perfumes.

In 2000, as an act of resistance and with the determination to do things differently, Malle founded Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, a niche fragrance house where quality juices and perfumers reigned supreme, unfettered by budgets and marketing briefs.

Malle was enamored by Gallimard — a French literary publishing house that brought notable writers including Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus to the world — and channeled its look and spirit. He thought of himself as a ‘publisher’ of fine fragrance, commissioning celebrated perfumers like Ropion, Jean-Claude Ellena, Pierre Bourdon and Maurice Roucel, among others, to create with complete creative freedom, giving them resources for the finest materials and enough time to craft and perfect their art.

The visual grammar of the brand is also inspired by Gallimard. The publisher had a common format for all their book covers no matter the content: a cream background bearing black and red type. In a similar vein, the packaging for every Editions scent follows a uniform visual identity: the perfume box sleeve is a glossy red pillarbox with black and white lettering, while the cylindrical glass bottles are encircled by a black band that bears the names of the perfumer, the fragrance, and the brand, in red, white, and orange.

The bottles, in fact, were born from the creative imagination of photographer Irving Penn. Malle worked with him when he was a consultant for other brands. Penn hated the bottle they were photographing and outlined his ideal of what he imagined a modern bottle should look like. “It was his description that I applied when making my bottle,” Malle revealed in Edwards’ book Perfume Legends II, which tells the detailed origin stories of the most seminal scents.

Restoring The Crown To The Perfumer

Ropion was a master perfumer of some renown even before he created blockbuster scents for Editions. Yet, Une Fleur de Cassie, his debut creation for the brand, was the first time he saw his own name on a product he had created. “It was part of Frederic's creative approach and I was quite flattered. His brand was launched at the dawn of niche perfumery and it was quite audacious at that time to highlight perfumers in such a way,” says Ropion.

“Frédéric Malle was the first brand to give the perfumers headline space. He made them part of the story and the magic. Nobody had ever done that before. Before Editions de Parfums, the brand was the source. The brand was the reputation. The brand was the essence. The perfumer was somebody minor. Frédéric, for the first time, elevated the perfumers center stage” says Edwards.

A Decade Later, Niche Fragrance Explodes

Lady was born in 2010, when Editions was already a decade deep in business. At that time, niche perfumery had come of age. Edwards also operates the world’s largest perfume database, Fragrances of the World, and has tracked the growth of indie perfumery over the decades. There were just 150 niche fragrances released in the 1980s, and around 330 in the 1990s. Then, with the advent of social media, niche perfumery exploded from the 2000s onward, with almost 1,900 fragrances launched in that decade, ballooning to 10,700 in the next. By 2010, Editions was at the forefront of that boom, having delivered several blockbusters like Carnal Flower, Vetiver Extraordinaire and Noir Épices, which was said to be Deneuve’s gateway drug into the Malle universe. She’s worn many Editions scents since.

“You can imagine the impact of a house with its innovation like Editions. It was so interesting, so different a story with such a history behind it, with people who had a history behind them. It's not surprising that it was treated so seriously,” says Edwards.

For Editions’ 10th anniversary, “We wanted to celebrate by creating a fragrance that was particularly sumptuous and deep, a new kind of oriental perfume,” Malle says in Perfume Legends II.

Malle goes on to reveal that “the image that inspired him was Richard Avedon’s celebrated photograph Dovima With Elephants. It depicts the American model Dovima in a Dior dress by Yves Saint Laurent, posing in front of four elephants at the Cirque d’hiver. “I was trying to picture that type of total elegance while updating it for today.”

A Lady Emerges — From A Masculine Silhouette

Portrait of a Lady has origins that seem almost Biblical — just as Eve was created from Adam’s rib, Lady, similarly, was built on the already-existing scaffolding of a male fragrance. Ropion had created Géranium pour Monsieur for Editions in 2009, and it was released as a scented shower gel as well. Malle loved the base of the shower gel, notes which are second skin to any lover of Lady — patchouli, incense, sandalwood, musk, and benzoin. He decided to use that foundation for a female fragrance, and he and Ropion toiled for months to find opening notes that would make it memorable.

Then, Malle recalled the syrupy opening notes of Nahema, the legendary Guerlain scent. Ropion knew that was achieved by using damascones, materials isolated from pure rose oil, as well as great quantities of rose oil itself, but worried about it getting too expensive. The oil he liked, a Turkish rose distilled in old-style alembic copper stills, cost $20,000 per kilo back then. It was guaranteed to triple the price of an already expensive formula. Malle’s maverick tendencies surfaced, and he gave the go-ahead. “At least, no one will be able to copy us.”

Ropion has a fondness for exquisite raw materials that are eye-wateringly expensive — and tends to use hefty doses of them. “Dominic is renowned for using materials at an optimal high level. He's looking to create a statement,” says Edwards. Carnal Flower, for instance, contains a record amount of natural tuberose. In Malle, he found a partner who was a willing enabler. “This is the magic of working with Frédéric: there are no limits. I can allow myself to go further, to overdose on ingredients such as rose, tuberose, cassia, vetiver or even oud. This is how we can create fragrances with unique olfactive shapes,” says Ropion.

After seemingly endless iterations, Malle knew it was ready when he asked his wife to wear it out to dinner one night in New York, and four different people asked her what she was wearing. After that, Lady was bottled and unleashed on the public; she became a monster hit and passed into legend.

15 Years Later…

A lot has happened since Lady made her debut. In 2015, Malle sold Editions to the Estée Lauder Group for an undisclosed amount. In June 2024, he left the brand. As for Ropion, he continues to create wondrous olfactory melodies for fragrance brands, including Editions. In 2019, he won The Fragrance Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, a fitting tribute. But his biggest achievement, when he looks back at his Lady 15 years later is this: “To recognize your creation’s sillage [while] passing people by in the street. I feel blessed so many people made this fragrance their own.”

Today, Ropion demures when asked what part of Lady’s lifespan is his personal favorite: Is it the bombastic rose opening, maybe the patchouli and incense that emerge, or possibly the musky-amber inflected sandalwood dry down? Surely, he will reveal at what stage he finds her most beguiling? No luck. “Its whole evolution is captivating: from the first drop to the trail it is leaving behind. I love its whole olfactive personality that has incredible elegance and lots of character,” he says.

“When I look at Portrait of a Lady, I'm still fascinated by its texture, by its depth, by the way in which Dominique managed to convey these powerful notes and yet make them intimate,” says Edwards.

I was friends with a girl who wore Lady only because it drove the boys crazy. Lady has that effect: on Edwards, on juries comprised of fragrance insiders, on unsuspecting New Yorkers in the path of Mme Malle’s sillage on that fateful night, and on men like those my friend dates, who don’t know anything about the backstory or the legendary names behind what they’re smelling. All they know is that it smells good.

On her 15th anniversary, the brand released a red lacquered limited-edition bottle. It’s guaranteed to be catnip to her admirers, but a rose by any other name — or in any other bottle, in this case — would smell as sweet.