Dior: The Perfume of Dreams

Marking eight decades of fragrance at Dior, this volume celebrates the perfume history and iconic scents of the haute couture house.

Christian Dior once remarked, “Perfume is the indispensable complement to a woman’s personality, the finishing touch of a dress.” He understood that a woman’s presence did not end with the cut of a fabric. Clothes give line and movement to the body; perfume gives it atmosphere, entering a room before she does and lingering after she has gone.

In 1947, alongside his first couture collection, Dior created Miss Dior, named for his sister Catherine. Designed for a new generation of women, it set in motion eighty years of olfactory creation, from Poison and Dune to J’adore and Sauvage.

This handsome gift volume—with luxury embossing and multiple paper stocks presented in a clamshell case with an embossed inset vignette— celebrates this history, revealing the places, memories, and materials that have shaped the house’s fragrances from 1947 to the present. In text by renowned perfumer Francis Kurkdjian and journalist Pauline Castellani, this exquisite volume explores the complete Dior universe of perfume, fashion, lifestyle, and decoration, and is illustrated with unpublished archival photographs, sketches, and newly commissioned images. Enclosed in a luxury clamshell case and printed on papers of varying textures, it is conceived as an object to be handled, read, and continually rediscovered.