Some seven decades on earth, more than 500 perfumes imagined ... Alberto Morillas is a legend of contemporary perfume. Since 2017, he has been designing Gucci fragrances. After Gucci Guilty Absolute and Gucci Bloom, he drew the contours of Gucci Memory of a Smell, a poetic wonder, emancipated and romantic. A splendor.

<a href="https://www.gucci.com/fr/fr/st/capsule/fragrances/memoire-odeur" target="_blank">Memory of a Smell</a>, Gucci&#39;s new fragrance, is embodied by no less than 21 muses and icons, including Harry Styles, Harris Reed, Stanislas Klossowski of Rola (son of Balthus), Leslie Winer, Ariana Papademetropoulos... These singular characters make up the new family Gucci. For Alessandro Michele, the creative director of the house, it is &quot;the fresco of a mythological life where the family is a private community with its own social settings, where there is complete freedom of expression and where the roles of people and things are not defined.&quot; A trip back in time that also appears on the bottle, inspired by an old Gucci. Fluting, an antique side, all dyed green and gold. For this unisex perfume, Alberto Morillas imagined an aquatic mineral based on the choice of the chamomile flower (rare in perfumery). A jasmine of Indian coral and musks add to the composition. Finally, woody notes with a creamy sandalwood and cedar to give intensity.

L&#39;Officiel Hommes: How do you work with Alessandro Michele? 
Alberto Morillas: We have a really unique relationship. He transmits me his emotions to put me on the trail of a new smell, a new sensation. He indicates me. He has a very rich olfactory culture, he collects perfumes and wears a lot. He also has a precise knowledge of the market, without this data interfering in our exchanges. When I created Gucci Guilty Absolute, he wanted the fragrance to capture the smell of Gucci&#39;s leather shops. He did not mention perfumes already made, but emotions. I offered him four lanes, and he said to me, &quot;That&#39;s exactly what I was feeling when I was working in the shop.&quot; Later, we worked on Bloom, for which he was working with me. He asked to create an imaginary garden, so I worked with French-style, English-style, Italian-style garden fragrances. I had in mind strange flowers, with a slightly venomous, mysterious side. Gucci Bloom provides the feeling of entering a magical, imaginary world. Working with Alessandro goes very fast: once he has regained his emotion, he considers it over. 
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This Gucci Memory of a Smell is particularly singular, how-was it developed? 
The process was much more complicated, because he asked me to build a smell around chamomile, an ingredient that has always been used in perfumery, but with slight traces or small inflections. It took a year and a half, because he always wanted more chamomile, and it&#39;s difficult because, in perfumery, we are very conventional. It&#39;s complicated to impose an odor, an emotion, a memory. So I asked all the teams to do research, because chamomile must have a special quality here to avoid evoking an infusion! We had to make sure there was enough material to compose the perfume. Gucci Memory of a Smell has a marked olfactory presence, but it does not bother Alessandro. In the microcosm of perfumery, everyone is talking about it: finally a product that is off the beaten path! Everyone copies themselves by adding a little bergamot here and there. We were driven by the desire to be different, but never disturbing. The first five minutes, after trying it, people sometimes find it strange, but once the chamomile a little evaporated, they like a lot what is left on the skin and clothes, because there is a mineral dimension and very sensual . And on the skin, this accord of floral, jasmine and musk has a very mysterious connotation. 
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How do you explain its singularity? 
It expresses a great freedom, it is not exclusively for this or that genre. It&#39;s a very Gucci fragrance, which really represents Alessandro. This perfume breaks many codes, I saw that several perfume prices had already rewarded. 
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Were you aware that Harry Styles would be the face of the campaign? 
When I create a perfume, I do not know anything about the communication that will accompany it. I knew more or less who would be the muse, but it was not yet certain. When you see the whole campaign, you understand the perfume better. You find the mineral side embodied by the castle, the primitive aspects expressed by the earth, the fire... Communication is as intriguing as the perfume. There is no precise rule.

Do you follow his collections carefully? 
I follow all the shows. But the world of Alessandro is not limited to his collections, it is also his style, and it is especially his studio in Rome. Each time, he gives me almost an hour of his time, which is a lot for him, and I&#39;m in his galaxy, surrounded by very strange, unusual objects. Because perfume is not like a collection, it is not circumscribed at a specific moment. When you create a perfume, it&#39;s all Alessandro&#39;s universe, his personality, that we capture. 
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How do you work? Alone, in a team? 
I work alone for Gucci. The perfumes are really the fruit of my work with Alessandro. The link must be intense, which is the strength of our creations. When he created Gucci Bloom, everyone thought that the floral, &quot;was very extreme&quot;. But that&#39;s exactly what he wanted. 
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Does it provide you with odor samples? Essences? 
Never. He offers me tracks, associations of flowers, perfumes he has worn when he was younger, or worn by his mother or aunt. He does not say &quot;I would like a man to work like that&quot;, he wants to be surprised. It&#39;s like looking for a stone for jewelery. You are trying to find an emerald different from all the others. 
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What is your favorite moment of creation? 
When he calls me with new ideas. It&#39;s very exciting to see what he wants to do. He never shows me an element, he evokes memories, emotions. He does not give me a subject, with a precise concept, but he already has ideas of colors for the bottle, small details... 
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What is the first smell that struck you? 
I&#39;m Spanish, so maybe the first olfactory emotion is the smell of water. In Seville, in the 1960s, the smell of the patio in the morning, this aquatic smell of cleanliness, renewal, life associated with orange blossom, jasmine. The smell of the well. Water on a lawn, on foliage, water from a fountain. What I always look for in my perfumes, for fifty years, it is this fluidity. Even in scents that are very dense or dark, there must always be a breath inside. 
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What smell do you have in horror? 
That of the neighbor&#39;s barbecue! After that, there is not really a smell that annoys me, except the smell of dirt or the smell of food on a ski slope. But the human being is also able to close his brain, to choose to feel or not.

Decoding a fragrance: Gucci Memory of a Smell

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