The story behind Dior’s ‘Amphora’ perfume bottle, an icon of mid-century design

This month (August 2024), an exclusive Dior ‘Amphora’ perfume bottle arrived in Harrods. This new edition has been made to celebrate 175 years of the house’s special friendship with the storied London department store. ‘The Harrods Amphora’ (of which only 47 have been made, costing £4,300 each) holds ‘Miss Dior Originale’, an eau de toilette by the house’s perfume director Francis Kurkdjian, to be as close as possible to the original 1947 ‘Miss Dior’ fragrance.

‘Miss Dior’ – and the Dior ‘Amphora’ bottle – was the first ever perfume and piece of design for the maison’s beauty range. Its launch came alongside Christian Dior’s inaugural collection for spring and summer, heralding the ‘New Look’ (a term coined by then editor-in-chief of Harpers Baazar Carmel Snow). For the couturier, perfume was integral to the world of the free-spirited Dior woman, who was set to revolutionise the dress codes of post-war Europe. ‘A woman’s perfume tells more about her than her handwriting,’ he once said.

The story behind Dior’s ‘Amphora’ perfume bottle, an icon of mid-century design

M. Dior had a deep reverence for the women in his life, who were not just muses but friends and confidants with complex lives. ‘Miss Dior’ was a tribute to his sister Catherine, a resistance fighter with Franco-Polish intelligence. She was captured by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Ravensbrück, until her 1945 liberation by the US Army. ‘Miss Dior’ was the nickname bestowed on the youngest Dior sibling by Mitzah Bricard, one of M.Dior’s close advisors.

Naming beauty products and perfumes after the women close to the house is a tradition that continues to this day: there’s the ‘Mitzah’ eyeshadow palette, for example, and fragrances such as 2018’s ‘Lucky’ which pays homage to Lucie ‘Lucky’ Daouphars. (Daouphars was Christian Dior’s favourite ‘mannequin’, who fought for working rights in the modelling industry via a union she started called L'Association Mutuelle des Mannequins de France).

To bring ‘Miss Dior’ to life, the designer worked with the noses Paul Vacher and Jean Carles, succinctly briefing them to ‘make me a perfume that smells like love’. The resulting fragrance was a chypre floral accord with notes of jasmine, Grasse rose absolute, and white patchouli essence. ‘It was born of those Provençal evenings filled with fireflies when green jasmine serves as a counterpoint to the melody of the night and the earth,’ M. Dior said.

For the ‘Amphora’ bottle, Christian Dior looked to artist Fernand Guéry-Colas, who had previously designed surrealist perfume flasks for Elsa Schiaparelli. (This 1937 ‘Shocking’ bottle, made in collaboration with Leonor Fini, and the 1940 packaging for ‘Snuff Pipe’, which referenced René Magritte’s oil painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe, are two examples). Guéry-Colas took the curves of the ‘New Look’ silhouette as the starting point for the Amphora. He also drew upon the lines of ancient Greek vases, rendering the final design in clear, Baccarat crystal.

Dior’s next perfume – the gourmand ‘Diorama’ by nose Edmond Roudnitska – went on sale in 1949, and with it, a second crystal ‘Amphora’ in the shape of an obelisk. The oblong bottle for ‘Miss Dior’, which is embossed with a houndstooth pattern and topped with a bow, came along two years later, reflecting M. Dior’s latest and more angular silhouette, the ‘Vertical Line’. By then, the symbiotic relationship between the house’s clothing and fragrance was solidified, thanks to the meticulous vision of its namesake. ‘The public has little idea of the care and concern that go into researching a new perfume, the design of the bottle, even the packaging,’ he remarked. ‘These occupations are so absorbing that today I feel as much a parfumier as a couturier.’

It was a miniature obelisk-shaped ‘Amphora’, however, that became the cap of Dior’s first lipstick, ‘Rouge Dior’, which went on sale alongside existing fragrances in 1953, exclusively at the 30 Avenue Montaigne boutique. This date coincides with the brand’s retail expansion when Harrods would become the first location to sell Dior outside of France. This new London home was chosen due to M. Dior’s Anglophilia. His lifelong love affair with all things British began before his career as a couturier; he first travelled to the city as a young man in the mid-1920s, spending months getting acquainted with English culture. ‘That year in London was more beautiful than ever,’ he wrote in his diaries whilst reflecting on his trip. ‘I adore the English, dressed not only in the tweeds which suit them so well but also in those flowing dresses in subtle colours.’

It’s a sentiment captured in ‘The Harrods Amphora’. Hand blown using a complex crystal ‘overlay’ technique, two layers of transparent and coloured crystal come together before they are finely polished to ‘re-reveal’ the bottle’s ‘crystalline element’: a rich emerald sheen in keeping with Harrods’ signature shade. Finally, the base of the bottle has been engraved with an eight-pointed star, one of Christian Dior’s lucky symbols.

A similar method was also used to make the recent reissues of mid-century Dior perfume bottles: the patriotic blue, white and red ‘Les Amphores Tricolores’ (1949), and a reproduction of the ‘Diorissmo Amphora’ (1956). The latter – Baccarat crystal adorned with gilt flowers nodding to the floral notes of ‘Diorissmo’ – went on sale for £13,000. Currently, it has a waiting list.

dior.com

harrods.com