Celine

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History of the house

The Celine house, originally Céline, was founded in Paris in 1945 by Céline Vipiana and her husband Richard. The company began as a made-to-measure children’s shoe house, before moving over the following decades towards women’s ready-to-wear, accessories and luxury leather goods. The house name takes the first name of its founder, who died in 1997.

Over time, Celine established itself as a reference of restrained Parisian chic. The house came under the control of the LVMH group in 1996. It then went through several notable creative directorships, including that of Michael Kors at the turn of the 2000s, and that of Phoebe Philo between 2008 and 2018. Philo set out a highly influential minimalist aesthetic, often cited as a template of contemporary quiet luxury. Through these decades, Celine’s identity was built around leather goods and a pared-back wardrobe, with no structured fragrance activity, which makes its 2019 choice to return to perfume through the high end rather than a license all the more striking.

In 2018, LVMH appointed Hedi Slimane as artistic, creative and image director of the house. Slimane removed the accent from the logo, which became Celine, and considerably broadened the brand’s scope by launching menswear, couture and fragrance. He left the house in October 2024, and Michael Rider succeeded him as creative director in 2025.

Perfume holds a particular place in this project. After Vent Fou in 1964, the house had no sustained perfumery, only a few one-off launches. In returning to this activity, Slimane chose not a mainstream licensed perfume but a haute parfumerie collection conceived as an extension of his own aesthetic, in the couturier-parfumeur tradition.

It is in this context that the Celine Haute Parfumerie was created in 2019, and it is now the house’s anchor in niche perfumery and the heart of what makes it of interest to enthusiasts.

Celine Haute Parfumerie, the niche collection of the house

Created in 2019 by Hedi Slimane, Celine Haute Parfumerie is the house’s niche collection and marks its return to fragrance. Announced with eleven unisex eaux de parfum, it launched nine of them in autumn 2019, presented in a dedicated Haute Parfumerie boutique opened on rue Saint-Honoré in Paris. The collection explicitly claims the couturier-parfumeur tradition and the craft of French high perfumery.

Most of the compositions draw on Paris and its imagination. Saint-Germain-des-Prés evokes the youth of the Left Bank, Dans Paris and Cologne Française extend that anchoring, while Eau de Californie stands apart by drawing on the light of Los Angeles. Other perfumes translate Slimane’s personal world: Black Tie transposes his sharp, androgynous wardrobe, and Nightclubbing recalls the Parisian nights of his youth as a club-goer.

The collection is unisex, mostly concentrated as eau de parfum, and distributed exclusively by the house, outside the selective perfumery channel. The bottles share a common pared-back identity, faithful to Slimane’s minimalist graphic direction. The opening of a dedicated Haute Parfumerie boutique, separate from the fashion stores, signals a wish to treat fragrance as a world of its own rather than a by-product of couture.

One trait clearly sets Celine Haute Parfumerie apart: the house does not disclose the identity of its perfumers. Hedi Slimane conceived the collection as a personal diary of Paris, in dialogue with three perfumers the house does not name. For this reason the perfumer attributions remain undisclosed, and Osmetheca repeats none of the speculative attributions that circulate.

It is through this collection, rather than a licensed fragrance, that Celine holds its place in niche perfumery: an author-led, Parisian and confidential haute parfumerie, anchored in the identity of a couture house.

The 2019 launch and the perfumes that followed

The boutique at 390 rue Saint-Honoré opened on a Saturday in early November 2019. The perfumes were first sold there, in Celine’s three Paris boutiques and at the Madison Avenue flagship in New York (United States).

They reached Celine boutiques in Europe and Japan by mid-November, then the house’s website at the end of November 2019. Hedi Slimane called the launch “very exclusive but not confidential.”

The nine perfumes split into six day scents and three evening scents. Day: Parade, Cologne Française (neroli, fig and musk), La Peau Nue, Eau de Californie, Dans Paris and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Evening: Reptile, Black Tie and Nightclubbing.

La Peau Nue draws on Nouvelle Vague actresses such as Catherine Deneuve and Jane Birkin. Eau de Californie contains palo santo, a Latin American wood. Dans Paris recalls a bateau-mouche on the Seine, and Nightclubbing the red velvet banquettes of Le Palace.

Black Tie takes the name of Slimane’s final collection at Yves Saint Laurent. The clear glass bottles, with fluted sides, echo the columns of the Palais-Royal; the boxes are wrapped in grain de poudre paper and tied with an ottoman ribbon.

Two scents announced for 2020, Bois Dormant and Rimbaud, are dated 2022 by the Parfumo database. Cologne Céleste (2023), Zouzou (2024), Un Été Français (2025) and hair mists followed. In November 2026, Parfumo lists 29 Celine perfumes across all periods.

Before 2019, one-off launches included Magic (1996), Céline pour Homme (2001) and Fever (2005). The Parfumo database dates the house’s first perfumes to 1964, the year of Vent Fou. For these pre-2019 perfumes, it credits among others Annick Ménardo, Sophia Grojsman and Jean Guichard.

Notable perfumes

This page is about Celine as a whole house. Its perfumery today is Celine Haute Parfumerie and nothing else, and the table below is drawn from it.

Here are the nine Celine Haute Parfumerie compositions from the 2019 launch. As the house does not disclose the identity of its perfumers, that column is marked as undisclosed. The olfactory register is given only where documented by the house; otherwise the stated inspiration is noted.

Olfactory signature

Celine’s perfumery stands out for its coherence and its rarity. Unlike most couture houses, which run a mass-market line alongside a confidential collection, Celine relaunched its perfumery only through a single haute parfumerie collection, with no licensed pillar. The house signature therefore merges with that of the Haute Parfumerie.

The writing is firmly Parisian and literary. It favours classic registers of French perfumery, from cologne to chypre and woody accords, treated with precision rather than display. Several compositions sit within the tradition of the great French structures, such as the cologne of Cologne Française or the moss and iris of Black Tie, while Nightclubbing takes on a darker green chypre.

The direction of the collection was that of a single author, Hedi Slimane, who conceived the whole as a coherent project until his departure in 2024. On the map of olfactory schools, Celine belongs to a contemporary author-led French perfumery, at the crossroads of couture and high perfumery.

What makes the collection legible is this unity of tone: a sober, Parisian and concentrated perfumery whose deliberate rarity and silence on the perfumers are fully part of the image. That unusual opacity is itself an editorial trait of the house.

Key characteristics

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