Juliette Has a Gun is 20 years old: audacity as a weapon, the anti-perfume as a signature
There are houses that speak to you long before you work in perfume. Juliette Has a Gun is one of them. On September 25, I was at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, to celebrate the house's twentieth anniversary, and I remembered how, in another life when I taught communication, I was already showing its campaigns to my students. Because if there is one brand that dared to turn perfume advertising on its head, it is this one. Looking back on twenty years of cheekiness, and on what, to my eyes, is the true singularity of this house.
Romano Ricci, the heir who chose his own path
To understand Juliette Has a Gun, you must know its founder. Romano Ricci is no ordinary person: he is the great-grandson of couturier Nina Ricci, and the grandson of Robert Ricci, the creator of L'Air du Temps, one of the best-selling perfumes in history. It is safe to say he was born into perfumery, with a heavy legacy on his shoulders.
He could have followed the well-trodden path of fashion or quietly taken up the family torch. He chose something else. Self-taught, he learned the craft on the job for seven years alongside great names such as Pierre Bourdon and Francis Kurkdjian, before founding his own house at the end of 2006. An atypical figure, also a racing driver and cofounder of the Parisian concept store Nose, Romano Ricci built his project on a simple idea: freeing himself from his inheritance to create something resolutely personal, modern and irreverent.
A Shakespearean heroine armed with a perfume
The very name of the brand is a manifesto. Juliette Has a Gun. The idea is to take Shakespeare's romantic heroine, the Juliet mad with love, and transpose her into the 21st century by giving her a weapon. That weapon is perfume, a metaphor for seduction and self-assertion. A woman who no longer endures, who chooses, who owns herself.
From the start, with Lady Vengeance or Miss Charming, the house displayed a sharp identity, blending romanticism, modernity and humour. The real splash came in 2010 with Not a Perfume, a perfume that became cult, built around a single molecule, Cetalox, which evokes ambergris and skin. A perfume called "not a perfume" and that contains almost nothing: the house's provocative philosophy is already there. Romano Ricci's boldness was rewarded as early as 2011 with a special prize from the Fragrance Foundation France.
Audacity as a guiding principle
This is where I want to linger, because it is what moves me most about this house, and what connects with my own path. Before dedicating myself fully to perfume, I taught communication for a long time. And regularly, to illustrate what a daring, intelligent, memorable advertisement looked like, I showed my students Juliette Has a Gun's campaigns.
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