Heritage
A house, in its own words
Celine was founded in Paris in 1945 by designer Céline Vipiana, who began her career making children's shoes before expanding into ready-to-wear and eventually haute couture. The house established itself on the Place Vendome, with Vipiana commissioning a distinctive elephant statue that directed traffic around its circumference, becoming a signature of the brand's identity. In 1996, American designer Michael Kors took the creative reins, transforming Celine into a modern luxury powerhouse before Phoebe Philo continued that vision from 2008 to 2018. The house had released only one notable fragrance, Vent Fou, in 1964. When Hedi Slimane arrived as creative director in 2018, he brought with him extensive fragrance experience, having authored the Private Collection for Maison Christian Dior in 2004. His 2019 haute parfumerie collection for Celine marked the house's first serious reengagement with perfumery in over five decades, reviving the couturier parfumeur tradition under LVMH ownership. The Celine haute parfumerie collection operates under the philosophy of the couturier parfumeur, the French tradition of the fashion designer as perfumer. Slimane designed these eleven scents as a cohesive wardrobe rather than a series of seasonal releases, each fragrance conceived as a complete composition to be worn and lived with. The decision to make all scents unisex reflects a contemporary approach that looks beyond traditional gender marketing. Each fragrance carries a distinctly Parisian sensibility, rooted in classical French perfumery while projecting a modern sensibility. The collection avoids the trend-driven language common in contemporary fragrance marketing, instead positioning each scent as an enduring statement within the Celine universe.
