Frank Gehry created dynamic floral perfume bottle caps for Louis Vuitton

Frank Gehry, winner of the Pritzker Prize for Architecture, designed his first perfume bottle for French luxury brand Louis Vuitton. Designed for the five fragrances in Louis Vuitton’s Les Extraits perfume range, this perfume bottle aims to be “free” and “absolutely dynamic”.

Gehry took a sheet of aluminum, carved a twisted, blooming flower, and placed it on top of the flask. For hennessy X.O’s 150th birthday, the architect used a similar technique to create a gold bottle with a wrinkled surface.

This is Gehry’s first perfume bottle design, and he believes that perfume bottles are similar to buildings in that they are expressions of human emotion, while the two differ in scale, place and time. “But whether it’s a perfume bottle or a building, the idea and the rules are the same.”

“My day job has very little to do with fragrance culture, it’s completely foreign to me. I wanted to be involved in carving the bottle and making it different, rather than just shaping a container. The idea of using the sharp edges of the glass creates a certain uncertainty about the design of the bottle, which I think is not completely finished. It’s just a beat, a movement, a fleeting visual beat.”

“The bottle is like a visual perfume, an understanding and exploration of the ephemeral nature of perfume. Its geometry is not the end, the bottle shape is only temporary. I think that’s what I’ve been thinking about in the design process.”

“The work is static, but it interprets movement. This is exactly what I have been working towards and what I have been trying to show in architectural design for many years. The same is true for Les Extraits, “says Gehry. He was also puzzled by the conformism of architectural design after the end of the modernist period, because the rapidly changing world represented a strong movement.