Miss Dior(1947)

Created by Paul Vacher for the newly founded house of Christian Dior, Miss Dior opens on galbanum, bergamot, and gardenia, moves through a heart of jasmine, rose, and narcissus, and closes on oakmoss, patchouli, leather, and labdanum. Released alongside Dior's revolutionary New Look fashion collection the same year, the fragrance was conceived as an olfactory extension of that collection's opulent, structured femininity, reportedly named at the suggestion of Dior's close friend Mitzah Bricard, who upon smelling it exclaimed it smelled like a little girl in love. Its green-galbanum-leather-chypre structure, sharp and sophisticated rather than simply sweet, positioned it among the more assertive, modern florals of the immediate postwar period, in the same general chypre lineage as Cellier's contemporaneous Bandit and Vent Vert. Miss Dior became one of the defining fragrances of postwar French perfumery and remains part of Dior's core catalog today, though the modern formulation differs substantially from Vacher's 1947 original.