comme des garcons grace by grace coddington

I just loved the idea that it was pretty much crushed rose petals and that was that.The Louis Vuitton Catogram collection features Grace Coddington's illustrations of her beloved cats Pumpkin and Blanket, as well as Nicolas Ghesquière's dear dog Léon. I went in because I was responding to the visuals as much as a fragrance I found there called Red Rose. I didn’t go in with the intention of buying a perfume. My first picture was a nude for him! I went to all the old arcades with all the old shops, because I loved old, traditional things-I will, always-and Floris was one of those stores. But I met people in the coffee bar who signed me up for the Vogue modeling contest, which I won, and who introduced me to the photographer Norman Parkinson. I was a terrible waitress-and I failed miserably at my modeling course, too, because I’m very clumsy. We had two little beds and a little gas stove with a slot for pennies and an extension to heat up cans of baked beans! In the evening I would do my model course, where they taught you how to do three-point turns and how to do your own makeup and hair-because in those days there were no hair and makeup people on shoots-and during the day, I worked in a coffee bar in Knightsbridge called the Stockpot. We rented a room in Notting Hill Gate, which is an incredibly smart area now, but in those days it wasn’t like that at all.

“It was so gentle-it barely smelled at all,” Coddington recalls of the classic English scent that she liked to liberally apply as a small luxury at a time when she shared a tiny apartment with a girlfriend, subsisted on baked beans, and slung drinks at a local coffee shop.įloris Red Rose “I was probably 19 or 20 when I moved to London with a friend to go to modeling school. Before the legendary Vogue fashion editor became the legendary Vogue fashion editor, she was just a lithe-limbed, porcelain-skinned teenager from North Wales who won a British Vogue modeling contest in 1959 and had a thing for Floris’s classic Red Rose eau de toilette. We’re discussing her lifelong obsession with the floral scent that is at the heart of her first fragrance, Grace by Grace Coddington, which she revealed in our March issue and which will hit counters on April 19.Ī collaboration with Comme des Garçons, the peach blossom, white musk, and amber crystal–spiked Moroccan rose absolute is the latest olfactory touchstone in Coddington’s storied career, which spans nearly six decades. As she sits in her office overlooking the Hudson River in downtown Manhattan, the sweet smell of the fragrant bloom is emanating from her pulse points. “My mother had a rose garden, and it just never occurred to me to smell like any other smell except rose,” Grace Coddington explains on a sunny afternoon a few weeks into the New Year.

Comme des garcons grace by grace coddington