Guerlain honors 400 years of Japanese porcelain via Mitsouko bottle

Guerlain x Arita Porcelain Labs Mitsouko bottle

French perfumery Guerlain is celebrating nearly 100 years of the Mitsouko fragrance with a limited-edition porcelain bottle created by Japan’s Arita Porcelain Lab.

The Mitsouko scent was developed by Jacques Guerlain in 1919, and was named after the heroine of Claude Farrere’s “La Bataille,” a novel where a British naval officer has a love affair with the wife of a Japanese admiral during the Russo-Japanese War. Furthering Mitsouko’s Japanese connection, Guerlain aligned the limited-edition bottle design with Arita Porcelain Lab’s 400th anniversary.

Ties to Japan 
Guerlain’s limited-edition Mitsouko bottle combines Japan’s Rising Sun flag with the culture’s symbols of good fortune. The use of the Rising Sun also links the fragrance’s backstory to the Japanese navy and the flag’s use in the early 20th century.

The Guerlain bottle was fired in Arita Porcelain Lab’s Yazaemon oven, used by the brand for the last 200 years. Decorated on all four sides, the design places Mitsouko and Guerlain Paris at the center of the Rising Sun Flag with codes of good luck serving as the sunbeams radiating out from the center.

Mitsouko’s Arita Porcelain Lab bottle comes empty and is accompanied by a vile of eau de toilette juice on the side. The limited-edition bottle will first be available in Tokyo on May 1, with following debuts over the summer in Hong Kong and Paris. The bottle will retail for about $430 at current exchange rates.

Front and back of Guerlain x Arita Porcelain Lab’s Mitsouko bottle 

Satoru Matsumoto, a seventh generation porcelain maker using the Yazaemon oven, stressed during a press conference last month that expertise is needed to create such a bottle, but Arita Porcelain Labs is facing difficulties in securing talent for the next generation, a struggle many luxury brands currently face.

Education solutions have been embraced by nearly all sectors of the luxury industry to cultivate young talent.

For example, the Condé Nast College of Fashion & Design expanded its offerings with a new BA (Hons) Fashion Communication degree validated by the University of Buckingham.

Starting this October, students can attend a two-year intensive that covers fashion history, media, PR and marketing, journalism, styling and branding. This is designed to give students a broad understanding of careers besides fashion design that exist within the industry, preparing them for roles after graduation (see story).

from
http://www.luxurydaily.com/guerlain-honors-400-years-of-japanese-porcelain-via-mitsouko-bottle/