With his unstinting passion and attention to detail, sixth-generation perfumier Olivier Creed is the custodian of a unique brand for an olfactory elite. Once encountered, a Creed fragrance is never forgotten. By Robert Chalmers.
Where I grew up, expressing an interest in any aspect of your appearance – hair, clothes, personal hygiene – was regarded as a sign of deviance. But of all the accessories it was wiser not to own at school in Manchester in the Seventies, perfume was easily the most dangerous.
Wearing Colognes and aftershaves (with the exception of an elite few whose names suggested the wearer relished the manlier forms of hand-to-hand combat – Hai Karate, Cossack, Brut) was not something even the maddest would contemplate. The only time I can remember my contemporaries speaking positively of cologne was in 1979, when Colin Smart, prop forward for Newport and England, drank a bottle of it during the celebration dinner after his country had beaten France. (Before he collapsed Smart was urging his team mates to follow suit. Asked how the player was, his captain – after visiting his colleague in Intensive Care – said: “Not very well. But he smells lovely.”)
It may be due to this upbringing, which led me to think of cologne as either an incitement to GBH or a beverage, that I can remember exactly where I was when I first met someone wearing Creed. He was a friend of a friend, and I’ve not seen him since: he turned out (though Parisian) to be arrogant, opinionated and rude. His aftershave was another matter. It was Zeste Mandarine Pamplemousse, a dizzyingly sensual blend of sicilian mandarin, bergamot and lemon. It was sharp, arresting and exotic and – like many of Creed’s products – once encountered, it was never forgotten.
Zeste Mandarine Pamplemousse wasn’t widely available in Stockport, where I was living. In the end someone sent me to Liberty in London. When I asked for it there, the assistant looked at my clothes and said: “It’s very expensive, you know.”
She was right. And it still is. But I’ve worn it ever since, and when financial ruin comes, this particular potion will be the last thing to go. It’s one of the few things in life that can be depended on, absolutely, to make you feel better.
Since the family firm was founded in London in 1760, Creed’s customers have included King George, Madonna, Winston Churchill, Both Elvises – Presley and Costello – Queen Victoria and Michael Jackson. Control has strictly passed from father to son. The current president, Olivier Creed, is only the sixth man to run the business, now based in Paris, since it was established by his ancestor James Henry Creed.
The night before I went to meet Creed at his favourite London restaurant, Wiltons in St James’, I got an e-mail from a freind who is in the rock business. I’d mentioned, in a previous message, who I was going to see, with no idea that he’d even heard of his products. “I imagine him to be a crashing snob of the old school,” came the reply. “But that will never stop me wearing his Green Irish Tweed. I’ve never had woman coming up to me in the street, saying ‘You smell good’ before.”
Creed, 59, is already there when I arrive, dressed impeccably, though not flamboyantly, in his company’s own line of clothes. The world’s greatest living “nose” has already eaten. He orders me a coffee, and explains apologetically that he has to be at Heathrow in just over an hour, in order to return to his house in Paris. We’ll need to stop at the Ritz on the way, to pick up his luggage. Olivier Creed is indifferent to publicity – he can afford to be. In an industry driven by hype, the House of Creed has thrived on a different strategy: being, and remaining, magnificent. Many regular users report a psychological lift when they wear it; like them, I use Creed not for its effect on others, but on me – even though Creed is quite capable of stopping passers-by in their tracks. How?
“I think it’s because I am the only perfumier in the world who remains committed to the use of natural products,” says Creed. “The infusions I use – whether it’s rose, bergamot or mandarin – are all natural.” As a result, he says, Creed’s raw materials typically cost the producer £3,000 a kilo, whereas a lot of other companies deliver on a budget of £200 a kilo, often using synthetic ingredients. True bergamot alone, he points out, costs £350 a kilo. “So they can’t use much of that. It’s as if you said to Francis Bacon: “Look, red is far too dear – don’t use any red. You can have a bit of yellow. Or green. But not both. And that is very sad. This is a profession which, sadly has fallen into decline.”
Is synthetic necessarily inferior? Creed shrugs “It’s like, someone with three Michelin stars isn’t doing the same sort of cooking as “Burger King.”
If this sounds – and, come to think of it, is – wildly elitist, Olivier Creed has none of the piss-elegant attitudes you might expect. Creed himself is softly spoken, and reticent on subjects that don’t involve perfume. Encouraged by his down-to-earth and approachable manner, I show him a print-out of my “raging snob” e-mail.
“No,” he says. “There is nothing snobbish about what I do. My work is my life’s passion. I try to do it the best I can.”
Money and possessions, Creed argues, have no attraction for him. Easy to say when your cheif worries are maintaining the grounds at your Swiss estate, appreciating your secondary residence at Fontainebleau, and still finding time to spend with your dressage horses.
As a young man, Creed Studied fine art at the prestigious Ecole Nationale Superieure Des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He abandoned painting in his early twenties when he joined the family firm. The ancient Creed brands, like Royal English Leather, have survived largely unchanged, though many of the current range, like the intoxicatingly splendid Royal Water (one of the Millésimes – extra fine quality products, more concentrated than eau de toilette), are Olivier’s own inventions.
Perfumier or painter, he says, “the creative process is essentially the same”. Does that mean that he wakes in the night, enthused by an idea for perfecting a formula? “Yes,” he says. “I have a laboratory near my bedroom, so that I can try out a new formula straight away.”
When he was working on Silver Mountain Water (“hesperide note with tea and blackcurrent”) worn by David Bowie among others, “I knew there was something missing in the formula. And then – this may sound weird to you – I woke up with the realisation that what was missing was a note of alpine wood. I went down to the laboratory. I knew right away that I’d got it.”
I’ve noticed something curious about the Creed range, I tell him. As research for this article I tried a wide range of products from a particular manfacturer. Some I liked, others were, to my taste, grotesque. To own every one of them would be like buying every record on the EMI record label. But with Creed, there is a consistency of house style – you might like some more than others (I’m privately not that wild about Green Irish Tweed, which is generally regarded as the greatest fragrance ever created), but they all share some essential quality.
This, Creed believes, is another consequence of his obession with the quality of his ingredients. “I have one creed,” he says, “and one only: natural products. I travel thousands of miles to find the most delicate fruit or flower. My bergamot is from Calabria. My iris is Florentine. I found a very rare and extraordinary sandalwood at Mysore, in India.” Creed goes to Tibet for his true musk, which costs £25,000 a kilo. He is one of the few producers to use genuine ambergris, which – for all the elegance of its French name – is essentially whale vomit and, surprisingly enough, difficult to come by in bulk.
“I have never wanted to go into mass production,” says Creed, whose current turnover is in the region of £10m, but who has only 50 outlets in the UK. “We could never maintain the quality. Things are better as they are. One glass of vintage Lafitte every evening,” he adds, “is much more enjoyable than two pints of cheap Bordeaux.”
I am about to take him up on this last point, but can’t, as he has to leave for the airport. With his young British distributor Chris Hawksley at the wheel, we carry on talking in the back of the car. I’m interested, I tell him, in his clientele.
When I’d first read about Creed’s famous users, I wasn’t sure. As well as George III (mad, degenerate, and talking to trees in German) and Elvis Presley (face-down on his bathroom floor, full of ice-cream, barbiturates and codeine), there’s the case of Prince Louis Napoleon, who was famously wearing Creed when he died in 1879 in a field in South Africa, perforated by Zulu spears.
But it’s the sheer variety of Creed’s customers, past and present, that is truely amazing. Other names in the list of what Olivier Creed calls “my faithful” include Prince Charles, Hugh Grant and Humphrey Bogart. (Of the woman’s range, “Spring Flower”, created for Audrey Hepburn, is worn by Julia Roberts and Gwyneth Paltrow.)
I’d heard that some people come to him and have a formula tailor-made for them. It happens, he admits, looking cagey. “But there’s a three-year waiting list. I only do that for five clients a year.” He won’t say who the privileged few are, or how much they pay, but Madonna and Gerard Depardieu are believed to be amoung these customers, and the price is rumoured to be around £7,000.
Where does he keep these precious mixtures? In a bottle with the stars name on? “We store the formula on paper,” he says. “In filing cabinets, under a code.” How many are there? Around a thousand, Creed says, if you include the deceased.
If you want this service, you have to meet Olivier in person and disclose your lifestyle and tastes. “If I see they’re not genuinely interested in the art,” he says, “I advise them to buy something ready made.”
Is there anyone he wouldn’t see privately, on principle?” I will deal with anyone,” he says “I’m not going to refuse someone because he is a communist, or on the far right. My business is like a restaurant. If the person behaves and pays the bill, you can’t say, ‘Hey – I don’t like the look of you.’”
You can.
“Yes,” he says, “but it could be that, if you followed that logic, all you’d ever end up with would be Swedes. Because you might consider Swedes to be better looking and more morally pure.”
Olivier’s son Erwin, who is 22, is being groomed to continue the family line. “It takes three years in perfumery,” Creed says, “to master what in musical terms you’d call the basic scales. Then you can start creating.” From time to time, he says, “you have to rest the nose. You have to breathe fresh air – for a week or so.” What is the perfume master’s greatest fear? Glade air freshener? Horse dung? “The common cold,” he says.
We reach the airport terminal, and Olivier Creed heads off, back to his golf and horses. Chris Hawksley, an engaging, articulate man, drives me back to Creed’s London warehouse. I feel a definite quickening of the pulse as he leads me into the small lock-up. Along the walls there are grey metal lockers, each stuffed with boxed Creed products.
Chris fills me in on the exact composition of ambergris (“actually it’s not so much vomit as regurgitated squid beaks”) as he sprays samples of the bottles on special tester cards. I’m very taken with Tabarome, which was originally made for Churchill and worn by Bogart. It’s sweet, heavy and… well, to tell the truth I’ve still not mastered the professional vernacular, with its references to “bombarded top notes” and “leathery tones”. The perfumiers have been wincing every time I’ve said “perfume”, not “fragrance”.
A novice I may be, but I left the Creed store feeling genuinely euphoric, carrying half a dozen complimentary Millésimes. That evening, back in my kitchen with a few friends, I got out the new bottles and the packets of testing cards Hawksley had given me. Trying new Creeds is a physically exhilarating experience, if only because, when you find one you like, you tend to carry on breathing in long after common sense tells you to stop. When we’d completed this fevered orgy of sampling, I still hadn’t found the right single phrase to describe the unique, compelling quality of Creed. The nearest I came to it was when I handed of sample of Royal Water to Jamie, my five-year-old. “What’s it like?” I asked him. “Like air,” he said. “But better.”
From GQ Magazine November 2002