Michel Almairac on Bottega Veneta: "I’d been looking for that leather smell for years."

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Leather seemed like an obvious choice for Bottega Veneta, best known for its luxurious handbags. But Michel Almairac says is that it wasn’t mentioned in the brief. Simply, he’d just found the leather accord he’d been dreaming of. The seasoned Grasse-born perfumer knew that leather was a tricky note to offer up for a mainstream product, as leather scents tend to be quite divisive. But that’s what he wanted to work on, and that’s what Tomas Maier picked. The creative director’s eyes lit up when he smelled Almairac’s submission, the perfumer tells the group of fashion and perfume bloggers (including the delectable Katie Puckrick – hi Katie!) invited by Bottega Veneta.

As we sniff a blotter dipped in the leather accord, Almairac explains it sprang from the combination of a brand-new synthetic with a natural material he knew well. But he won’t say what’s in it.

I’m frowning so hard over my blotter that Almairac interrupts himself to ask me whether I disagree with him whatever he’s saying at that point. The fashion bloggers mainly want to know whether he had a specific type of woman in mind when he composed the scent, and I suspect he’d rather change the subject – he’s not even pretending he had. That’s not how perfumers work. Though I’d love to take the talk into geekier territory, at that point I’m still trying to figure out what’s in that accord. I’m getting a distinct osmanthus effect – apricot jam, violet, suede – along with rather surprising, tingling iodic aspect I associate with oak moss or its derivatives such as Evernyl. Later, over the finger-food lunch, Almairac confirms my impressions, though without telling me whether I’m right about the materials. There is an iodic aspect, he says, because to him, ports smell of leather, and he wanted to bring that out. It’s not the scent’s main story but it does introduce an intriguing twist.

If that soft-as-apricot-skin leather accord is not entirely unfamiliar, it is because Almairac has already worked on a violet-leather note in Armani Privé’s Cuir Améthyste. There’s no reason why a perfumer shouldn’t revisit an idea when he thinks he can do it better. This time, Almairac thinks he’s clinched it, so he won’t reuse it: the leather accord is Bottega Veneta’s alone.

But doing straight-up leather, he explains, would have taken the product too far into niche territory, so Almairac threaded the accord, intrecciato-style (the braided-leather technique for which the house’s craftsmen are justly renowned) into a chypre with a floral heart: the leather's apricot facets, and an added plum note, tug it towards the fruity chypre genre: this is nothing if not a perfectly consistent structure, as tightly-woven and supple as a Bottega Veneta bag. Looks easy, but it's got decades of work behind it.

The chypre family has been making a striking come-back on the market: 25% of the products launched in 2010 come under that category, against 2% in 2000. Nevertheless, it’s a gutsy choice for a nascent line, and a perfect match for Tomas Maier’s confidently adult RTW collections (like Lanvin’s Albert Elbaz, you get the feeling Maier has real women with real lives in mind when he designs.)

Smelled on its own, the chypre accord itself is slightly offbeat, namely because it features a tweaked bergamot – more candied than the usual variety. Almairac explains that Robertet, where he has been working since 1998, produces “fractions”, i.e. “couture” natural products in which certain molecules are removed to perfumers’ specifications. The patchouli was shorn of its moldy, camphoraceous facets; the green facets of the jasmine sambac were toned down.

The scent also features pink pepper, which has become a star ingredient in the last couple of years because of its new extraction method with CO₂: in this form, it gives off almost incense-like facets, and produces an interesting vibrancy in the top notes against the candied bergamot. The pink pepper fizz pulls up a burst of leather glazed in burnt sugar, as though the apricot jam has stuck a bit at the bottom of the pan. The slight bitterness of the leather accord and oakmoss keep the sweetness in firm check. And if you nose-squint a little to catch the scent’s lactonic/floral heart, it’s not entirely unrelated to another reworking of the fruity chypre family, Michel Almeirac’s Gucci Rush, with the aldehydic neon glare switched off.

The result is both facetted and streamlined – Almairac favours short formulas, which he says are actually trickier to pull off because it’s easier to drown technical flaws in longer ones. It’s got impeccable balance and great volume, with plum dominating the sillage, but is sufficiently low-key to wear in professional settings.

Bottega Veneta eau de parfum makes for an elegant, more widely available alternative to niche offerings like Serge Lutens Daim Blond or to Almairac’s own, costlier Armani Privé Cuir Améthyste. Clearly, Coty Prestige, a division that also handles the Chloé and Balenciaga accounts, is showing a deft hand in putting out luxury mainstream fragrances with just enough of an edge to make them interesting for hardcore perfume lovers as well as for civilians.

Now if they could only be convinced of putting out a coffret of François Coty’s classics…

The dark young Diana featured in Bruce Weber’s ad is Nine d’Urso (as in “Nina”, pronounced “Neen”), the daughter of the peerless Inès de la Fressange and the late Luigi d’Urso.