Behind the MDCI name is an art lover with a passion for perfume and a certain idea of what fine fragrance should be: an art more than an industry, a source of pleasure, pride and beauty more than a commodity.
The independent House of Parfums MDCI (“MDCI” stands for Marchal Dessins et Créations Indépendantes“) founded in 2003, is reviving the French tradition of the Art of Perfume and creating rare and original perfumes, presented in bottles of unique and unequalled aesthetic taste, in collaboration with perfumers chosen for their talent.
Its work has been followed since the very beginning by discerning collectors and connoisseurs; its flacons are in many private collections and several museums.
Its fragrances are recognized in their own right for their beauty, originality and elegance, and are now worn worldwide.
This was a totally original vision, both classic and innovative at the same time.
Classic, for it was the Classical Age, the Italian Renaissance, seventeenth-century France, the great voyages of discovery, which were the points of reference guiding the brand creator’s work.
Innovative, for the idea of offering something so contrary to the mass-produced minimalism prevailing today: small sculptures inspired by the Renaissance or the Ancient World, posed elegantly on a very refined cylindrical plinth that doubles as a bottle.
Nothing coarse here, no modish clichés. On the contrary the aesthetic principle is the total reverse of today’s general minimalism, which too often merely serves to hide a deep creative poverty.
Luxurious: individually made, every bottle of MDCI perfume crosses the desk, or rather the workbench of the brand creator himself, deliberately limiting production to a few thousand pieces per year.
Each bottle is therefore entirely the product of craftsmanship, particularly with regard to the sculpted busts used as stoppers.
The sculpted stoppers draw inspiration from a fascinating period of history, a pivotal time that has guided his work: the Renaissance, the admirable traces of which — old buildings, sculptures, fountains, gardens — are so many stages in his preferred walks through Paris, from the old Marais district to the Louvre and the Luxembourg Gardens, the beautiful palace built for Catherine de’ Medici in the 1600s…
Inspiration also came from the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre Museum, in Florence at the Gallerie degli Uffizi, in the fabulous Schatzkammer in Vienna (the Treasure Room), at the sight of the extraordinary gold and rock-crystal vases, the Greek and Roman antiques in the collections of the Medici, Cardinal Mazarin’s and Louis XIV’s, the Sun King.
Why not draw from these incredible objects, of an unmatched luxury, passionately collected by the kings and princes of the French and Italian Renaissance, and create a modern evocation of these pieces of ultimate beauty and preciousness?
This is how the MDCI flacons were born…
