A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

The duty-free era is over. The EU ended its de minimis exemption July 1, the US did in 2025, and the UK is next. In the US and EU, every parcel now carries duties - and in the EU, liability sits with you, not your customer. Swap's new report breaks down what changed in each market. Inside:

• Why de minimis ended and what it means for your margins

• How customs liability is shifting from customer to merchant

• What DDP vs. DDU means for cart abandonment and returns

• How to recalculate landed costs before the EU's November     data rules

Download the free report

Success in the fragrance world is rarely a matter of a pleasing scent, an appealing bottle, or a name that captures the imagination. For all the Baccarat Rouge 540s and Santal 33s of the world—scents that seemed to come out of nowhere and rise to the top of the sales charts—there are enough flops and well-funded duds to fill all the shelves of TJ Maxx. And then there’s Sauvage.

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

The duty-free era is over. The EU ended its de minimis exemption July 1, the US did in 2025, and the UK is next. In the US and EU, every parcel now carries duties - and in the EU, liability sits with you, not your customer. Swap's new report breaks down what changed in each market. Inside:

• Why de minimis ended and what it means for your margins

• How customs liability is shifting from customer to merchant

• What DDP vs. DDU means for cart abandonment and returns

• How to recalculate landed costs before the EU's November     data rules

Download the free report

The men’s fragrance from Dior has been the bestselling scent for more than a decade. Not just number one in the men’s category or in France or duty-free or some other designation from the sales-and-marketing team to goose the figures. Number one among everything, all genders, worldwide. Lionel Messi level. (That was as true in 2024, when I first published a version of this article, as it is today.)

And yet number one has its perils too. The fragrance business requires a sense of newness, often scheduled in two-year increments, which always carries a degree of risk. Later this month, Dior will launch another Sauvage blend from Francis Kurkdjian, the perfume director at the house, as well as co-founder and creative director at Maison Francis Kurkdjian, which LVMH acquired in 2017. He’s also the nose behind Baccarat Rouge 540.

Kurkdjian’s first iteration was Sauvage Eau Forte in 2024, which in itself was a riddle. Water (or eau) usually suggests dilution and weakness, not strength (forte). And it doesn’t sound particularly sauvage, either. Kurkdjian is clear-eyed about the challenge ahead of him. “When you are number one, everyone chases you,” he said. This isn’t arrogance. Kurkdjian didn’t create Sauvage in 2015; another perfumer, François Demachy, gets credit for that. Instead, he’s the nose who’s accountable for maintaining its position.

And he doesn’t take the obligation lightly. “When you are number one, you have many more enemies,” he continued. “When you’re number one, you feel that you deserve it, you feel that it doesn’t need any extra effort—that you can lay on your bed and relax. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s comfortable. You are in the car, and you may be the driver or you are in the back seat, but the car is tuned. ... And when it’s a high-end brand like Dior, the car is very comfortable. It’s comfortable, but the road can be bumpy.”

The Sauvage of 2015 had its fair share of bumps. I don’t need to tell you that its ads have always featured Johnny Depp, who came under scrutiny during his divorce from Amber Heard and his subsequent defamation suit against her. Surprisingly, the notoriety didn’t seem to diminish Depp or the fragrance. “I was at Macy’s when the controversy about Johnny started,” said Linda G. Levy, who was the merchandise manager of fragrances there before becoming president of the Fragrance Foundation, an industry organization. During the trial, she said, “people rallied around him. Who cares what was really true as long as he wasn’t abusive? But it put him on the map in ways that he never was before.”

Depp also appears in the ads for Sauvage Eau Forte, wearing piles of beaded jewelry and squatting before a backdrop of waterfalls that look very eau forte. Even if you had a head cold, you could identify Sauvage Eau Forte as a scent for men, given the smoldering vision of Depp and the unadorned midnight blue bottle. But the popularity of a fragrance doesn’t come purely from a movie star or an extravagant promotional budget—although that certainly helps. “No matter what else is done, if the juice isn’t good, then there’s no chance of success,” said Levy. Sauvage, both the original and this variation, is a bit of an anomaly: a manly fragrance at a time when gender lines are loosening. The original Sauvage “is about thoughtless masculinity, in a way,” said Kurkdjian. “No-brainer.” He also described it as “clean-cut” and “like a little black dress for men.”

The masculinity of Eau Forte, however, is more sophisticated and less obvious. It aims at freshness, he said, “while maintaining its strength”—a contradiction in a bottle. Kurkdjian achieved that tension by creating an unusual water-based formula with a high concentration of perfume oils and no alcohol. He combined the cleanness of lavender with a burned note, “the smell of the fireplace,” he told me, struggling to explain it exactly. “When you say ‘burnt,’ people think the negative way.” So not that. It has “some burnt facets, but there are good facets.” It’s dark and sensual. “Spiky,” Kurkdjian offered. “It’s a masculine scent that stays out of the clichés of what masculine is about in terms of perfume… It’s musky, it’s woody, and the spices blend a bit in between.”

There was actually a precursor to these Sauvages—a citrusy cologne created in 1966 called Eau Sauvage, which dominated the men’s market for 30 years. Dior promoted it with a series of illustrations of men in various degrees of hairiness and nakedness. (One of them wears an animal skin, caveman-style.) Despite the surging testosterone, all the Sauvages have female fans, too. I used to wear Eau Sauvage in the ’80s when I wanted something light and breezy. “In the olden days, there were women’s fragrances and women wore them, and there were men’s fragrances and men wore them,” says Levy. “That’s not true anymore.” To be a number one scent, it has to have a sizable female audience.

Levy predicts success for Sauvage Eau Forte. Besides the fact that luxury fragrances are doing a killer business, this has the strength and purity that appeals to today’s perfume fan. The wild side of Sauvage may be a draw as well. “I think there is a kind of a dream, an inner dream, of people being wild,” said Kurkdjian. “It comes from our animality. Like when you’re in the middle of a desert and you can scream.” Men, women, nonbinary, trans, pan, fluid, queer, the fragranced and the unscented—we all might be tempted right now to let out a good yell before getting back to the business of smelling like a million bucks, more or less.

A version of this story first appeared in Air Mail in 2024.

I am very into the Loro Piana Fall/Winter advertising campaign, which was shot by Mario Sorrenti in the Charles James–designed former home of the de Menils and the Rothko Chapel in Houston, styled by (rising Line Sheet star) Aleksandra Woroniecka, and conceived by creative director Franck Durand. [Culted]

The women running Chanakya, the 40-year-old Indian atelier used by Dior, Prada, and Fendi, launched a contemporary womenswear brand called Chorus that maps Indian textiles and embroidery onto Western silhouettes, à la Kartik Research in menswear. Chorus even got an exclusive wholesale deal with Moda Operandi. As the global south’s prominence in luxury kicks up, people are paying more attention to brands coming out of those “developing markets.” [Vogue Business]

Netflix has been gobbling up YouTube content at such a clip that it was only a matter of time before it got to the fashiontainment side of things. Next month, it’s going to start streaming YouTube series from a bunch of glossies including Vogue, Glamour, Elle, and Cosmo. It’s only fitting that the deal is publisher agnostic (BuzzFeed, Penske, and People are involved), but oddly enough it doesn’t include GQ. What gives, Adam? [Netflix]

Starface’s former president Kara Brothers—who co-founder Brian Bordainick once told me was “a way more effective manager than I am”—has launched a media company called New Juice Studios, which wants to be the Oprah Winfrey Network meets Ted. [Inbox]

Until tomorrow,
Lauren

P.S.: We use affiliate links because we are a business. We may make a couple bucks off them.

Need help? Review our FAQ page or contact us for assistance. For brand partnerships, email ads@puck.news.

You received this email because you signed up to receive emails from Puck, or as part of your Puck account associated with {{customer.email}}. To stop receiving this newsletter and/or manage all your email preferences, click here.

Puck is published by Heat Media LLC. 107 Greenwich St., New York, NY 10006