Le Male by Jean Paul Gaultier, from 1995

From a graduation party to a brief for Gaultier

A few weeks before the launch of Le Male, Francis Kurkdjian saw its bottle for the first time. The bottle showed a blue male torso in a striped sailor's top, and it came in an aluminium can rather than a box. He had wanted a big, crafted couture box with embossed gold, and a can, he felt, was not luxury. "Oh my god, it's not going to work at all," he remembers thinking. The story had begun in July 1994, at a graduation party.

Kurkdjian was 24, a young perfumer at Quest International, a fragrance company, and he had just finished at Sup de Luxe, a Paris school of luxury marketing. At the party, he recalls, he met Chantal Roos, an executive at Beauté Prestige International, the Shiseido group company that held the licence for Gaultier's perfumes. Roos gave him the brief for Jean Paul Gaultier's first men's perfume, a challenge set for a young man nobody knew. He was to come back with samples in three weeks. The brief itself ran to a few pages, setting out Gaultier's universe and his olfactory memories of childhood. The commission came from a designer then considered an enfant terrible of fashion.

A barber's shop, clean skin and vanilla

The idea, Kurkdjian says, came from a men's barber's shop of the 1950s, which was full of the smell of lavender, and that is where the perfume's main lavender accord comes from. He also pictured clean skin and sensuality: in his words, musk and "clean sweat", a man who has just come out of the sea. To the lavender he added white musk and vanilla, and the finished perfume rests on fresh mint, lavender and warm vanilla.

Le Male was presented in January 1995, about six months after the brief, with Kurkdjian, then 25, as its creator. The men's perfumes of the time were mostly heavier and more muscular, and a bold but sweet, vanilla-based scent was unlike anything else on the market. It was not unusual for women to wear it.

A sailor from Querelle, and Mondino's films

Gaultier was known for the conical bras he made for Madonna's 1990 Blond Ambition tour. The striped sailor's top on the bottle, the marinière, comes from Querelle, Fassbinder's 1982 film, whose sensual, rebellious sailor he took as inspiration. Gaultier has described the film's main character as a "hypersexualised gay symbol".

Horizontal stripes are the signature of Gaultier's style, and they return in his collections as they do on the bottle. Le Male arrived in 1995 as the male companion to Classique, his first perfume, which had come out in 1993 in a bottle shaped like a corseted female bust. The advertising for Le Male was directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, who also made videos for Madonna and David Bowie. In these films, made for both perfumes, a tattooed sailor in a marinière embraces the model in the corset of Classique, to the strains of "Casta Diva", the aria from Bellini's Norma.

Puig, and a black and gold can

On 1 January 2016 the licence for Gaultier's perfumes passed from Beauté Prestige International to Puig. Puig says Le Male remains one of the world's three best-selling men's fragrances, and it chose to concentrate on Classique and Le Male. The line today includes collector's editions and special Pride editions.

Le Male Le Parfum arrived in December 2020, composed by Quentin Bisch and Nathalie Gracia-Cetto. Its notes are cardamom, lavender and vanilla. On this version the torso wears a black and gold officer's jacket, and the bottle comes in a black and gold can.