[Francis] Kurkdjian believes that there’s been a certain muddling of the stories behind Dior perfumes as they’ve been reformulated to keep up with regulatory changes—a game of olfactory telephone. “There are too many gossips, too much marketing over the years,” he told me. When pitching himself for the job at Dior, he submitted a memo outlining his vision for making over the house’s major scents one by one, and quoted a line attributed to Christian Dior: “Respect tradition and dare to be insolent because one cannot go without the other.”

— Read more in The French Perfumer Behind the Internet’s Favorite Fragrance at The New Yorker.