IFF Partners With Schools

International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), in its continuing search for new fragrance ideas and inspirations, has partnered with several eminent fashion design schools around the world to tap into the emerging talent of tomorrow’s designers. In a press luncheon hosted by IFF at New York’s Masa restaurant, a partnership with the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium—overseen by IFF’s Catherine Mitchell and the academy’s director Linda Loppa—was introduced.

Students in the third year of their four-year fashion programs created individual fragrance concepts that will complement their end of year collections, to be then judged and presented to a jury of fashion designers, journalists and IFF’s senior perfumer Sophie Labbe, who also lectured on modern fragrance design and held smelling sessions with the students.

Daria Dazzan’s work was deemed 2007’s top concept by the jury. Dazzan, whose fashion sense and educational focus formed the basis of the project, created a concept that is both sensational and elemental, taking the myriad personalities of women in their physicality and emotional core as her inspiration. The perfume box is composed of materials that encapsulate scent within themselves, so that the box may ultimately be used to store personal items, which will become infused with scent within a few hours.

“As a fashion designer, you have a figure of a woman in your mind; what you see, what you like, who you are,” said Dazzan. “I can pick out this feminine sensibility and how young women change and I can [reflect this through the box].”

“While the project allowed Daria to express her own perspective on sensuality with an application that is not traditional, it also allows us to interpret the sensibility of today’s women and to keep a step ahead and grab emerging trends,” said Veronique Ferval, creative center manager, IFF.

Dazzan noted that today’s women are on the move, very active and even “nomadic,” and this journey shapes the development of a fragrance. She emphasized the importance of collaboration between fashion and fragrance, stating, “Perfumery and fashion can’t be realized otherwise. Everything is very connected.”

She acknowledged Labbe for pointing out the limits of perfumery and encouraged her in what she was creating. The production version of the box will include a soft-closing hydraulic hinge, a silicon cover, a filter to release the essence and a perfume cushion based on a cartridge technology.

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