With the help of FKA Twigs, the fashion house present a spiritual hymn to a new age of prosperous femininity with their new fragrance.
All photography ©Sean+Seng for Viktor & Rolf Fragrances
With creativity and transgression pulsing through its DNA, Viktor & Rolf have established a sizeable weight within the world of avant-garde luxury. Having only gained momentum since its inception in 1993, the fashion house has remained at the forefront of innovation — expanding its boundaries of creation into the fragrance sphere. Dropping Flowerbomb all the way back in 2005, designers Viktor Horsting & Rolf Snoerenhave become the spearheads of fearless transformation: approaching their specialised scents with meticulous technical refinement that catapult traditional aromas to new and unparalleled heights.
While the stature of Flowerbomb is still potent today, Viktor & Rolf prove that self-enhancement is at the helm of true progression, presenting a brand new fragrance titled Good Fortune. Filtered as a spiritual hymn to a new age of prosperous femininity, Good Fortune aims to delight the senses while embracing a compelling narrative that inspires a new perspective of feminine power.
There are few that embolden this train of thought quite like artist FKA Twigs. Known for her non-withholding attitude towards female artistry and her natural penchant for sparkling yet biting tunes, the Grammy-nominated artist is a true embodiment of a new era of female empowerment. With a confluence of ethos and attitude, the visual artist, singer and dancer endorses Good Fortune — becoming the ultimate ethereal figurehead of Viktor & Rolf’s campaign.
Surrounded by the delicate petals and frilly trimmings often associated with the divine feminine, FKA Twigs poses with the new perfume bottle, housed in a spherical silhouette that emulates a fortune-tellers ball — topped with an asymmetric crystal. Linking freedom and spirituality with luxury, Viktor&Rolf continue to build a glamorous yet harmonious universe.
To celebrate the launch of their new perfume, Wonderland sat with the designers to discuss their motivation behind the new scent, their partnership with FKA Twigs and how they keep the Viktor & Rolf spirit alive.
Viktor & Rolf’s Good Fortune retails from £59 for 30ml to £114 for 90ml, and can be purchased directly from boots.com. To read the full interview with the label, scroll below now…
Spirituality and transformation lie at the heart of Good Fortune, I was wondering what made you want to focus on translating these magical notions into a fragrance?
We always say that spiritual glamour is a key element of our work. We always strive to show a beautiful idea in a glamorous way. So, I would say all of our work in a way is about spiritual glamour. But where Flowerbomb is about contradiction or the transformation of something very feminine and something very aggressive into something new, this is more about a different approach to another key element of our work.
What importance does spirituality play in your own life?
I think spirituality, to me, means an inner-search towards finding meaning.
How is this sense of otherworldliness reflected in the fragrance’s notes?
Well, there’s three main elements that the fragrance consists of. One of these is a combination of Fennel and Gentian flower. We said to the perfumers that we would like to work on spirituality and ingredients that refer to alchemy and white magic. So for instance, Fennel has been used for purification since forever and the Gentian flower is used as a love potion, so these kind of references are really interesting to us.
How do you want people to feel when wearing your perfume, is there a specific emotion or state-of-mind you hope it invokes?
We want it to be uplifting and energetic! The bottle is a reference to a crystal ball so the advertisement is FKA Twigs as a fortune teller. What we want to say is that you create your own good fortune. It’s not something that just happens, you can effectively [conjure] it yourself. The bottle closes with an Amethyst crystal, it’s a crystal that is associated with ‘protection’ so this all plays into the idea of energy.
And what makes FKA Twigs the perfect embodiment of Good Fortune and what it stands for?
She’s a very original, true artist who tries out different things. We went to a concert of hers and it was so mind-blowing that afterwards, we said to ourselves, it can’t get any better [than her]. Any interviews with her, she [ shows herself as] a very spiritual person and she talks a lot about alchemy. So, we thought she would be our ideal woman for this fragrance.
Talk us through your journey in creating Good Fortune. Did you come across any difficulties when creating it?
When we brought this idea of spirituality and alchemy to the perfumers, a lot of people brought this idea of incense or wood forward, but those were exactly the ingredients we did not like because we wanted to capture spirituality in an uplifting and sunny way. So, that was a bit of a search, and then this idea of connecting magic to Fennel came and we thought it was beautiful.
I know the fragrance itself contains no ingredients of animal origin which is amazing. How important are vegan formulas to Viktor & Rolf and the future of the fragrance industry?
We think we should strive for it to become a new standard, and this is a step in that direction. It shouldn’t be a new standard, but perfumes [with vegan formulas] are still rare within the perfume industry.
What would you consider more generally to be the signature aspects of a Viktor & Rolf perfume?
Well, what we love in perfumes is complexity, so we don’t appreciate perfumes that are very one note oriented. It’s very important that [each fragrance] is a journey, from the top note all the way through.
I’d love to know, when you first sit down and start brainstorming about a new fragrance, do you have any rituals that you often go through during your creative process?
We hear from the perfumers that our way of working is a bit different because we always start with a name. So for us, whenever we start smelling perfumes, we already know what the name is otherwise we cannot smell. The name is the perfume’s story. Flowerbomb is a strange combination of words, while Good Fortune’s name is a story also. Each name should be evocative.
Finally, has your approach to perfume changed since first creating Flowerbomb and now Good Fortune?
I don’t think our approach has changed, we’re still just as critical!
