Pour Un Homme Gitana
Pour Un Homme Gitana
On the occasion of Gitana’s 150th anniversary, a family lineage of racing yachts initiated in 1876, Olivia de Rothschild, Artistic Director of Caron, chose to celebrate a saga unlike any other, driven by values with which she deeply identifies: A determination and a drive to go beyond, shaped by deliberate sidesteps and innovation placed in the service of progress. This spirit finds a particular resonance in Caron’s history, and more specifically in Pour Un Homme.
A Foundational Tension
In 1876, on Lake Geneva, Julie de Rothschild inaugurated a racing yacht she named La Gitana. At a time when sailing remained largely a male dominated field, she chose speed, rigor, and competition. Her gesture asserted both audacity and intellectual independence, shifting established boundaries. From the outset, driven by the imperative to go beyond limits, this momentum carried forward across generations. Each new vessel reexamines the previous one, innovating further, refining its line, recalibrating its course.
In 1934, Ernest Daltroff, perfumer and founder of the House, composed Pour Un Homme, one of the very first men’s fragrances, in an olfactory landscape then feminine. In this creation, born from a radical gesture that at odds with the conventions of its time, he united the vivid freshness of lavender with the enveloping warmth of vanilla, a note then largely associated with the feminine olfactory imagination. This encounter established the fragrance’s singularity, giving it its inherent tension and its disruptive force.
The dialogue between Gitana 18 and Pour Un Homme offers a particularly striking expression of this. A new-generation transoceanic trimaran, Gitana 18 is designed to transcend its own weight and take flight offshore. Between sea and air, between the vessel’s mass and its lift, its unfolds at sea, sustained by constant tension. Pour Un Homme similarly derives its uniqueness from a balance of contrasts, between freshness and warmth, between masculine and feminine. Once again, everything resides in this tension brought to its point of equilibrium.
“At the origins of both Gitana and Pour Un Homme, there is the same conscious deviation from norms: a woman asserting herself in a man’s territory; a man asserting a masculine fragrance within an overwhelmingly feminine universe, constructed around a note until then associated with the feminine olfactory imagination. Gitana expresses a constant tension between man and machine, between sea and air. Pour Un Homme finds its equilibrium between the freshness of lavender and the warmth of vanilla. These founding gestures, contrasting to their time, open a path,” explains Olivia de Rothschild. “Everything then lies in momentum and balance, driven by a will that places innovation at the service of progress.”
The Body Confronting the Machine
To embody this tension, Olivia de Rothschild has chosen Bastien Dausse, a dancer and acrobat whose work is shaped by his engagement with apparatus designed to alter our perception of gravity. In his work, movement arises from a close dialogue between the fluidity of gesture and the tension of the machinery, between a sense of weightlessness and extreme technical precision. Suspended from the sails of this trimaran designed to take flight on the open sea, Bastien’s body translates this interplay of tensions into movement, extending its momentum and embodying its demands. Through him, the rigour of the gesture responds to the precision of the machine, in a relationship of mastery reminiscent of that between a skipper and the boat he steers out to sea. In this dialogue with the trimaran, a hard-won lightness is revealed, born of mastery pushed to its highest degree.
At the heart of these resonances lies a shared determination: to transcend established boundaries, to make innovation a force for progress, until a space of liberation is opened up.
Pour Un Homme de Caron presents a limited edition of the brand’s iconic bottle, adorned with the motif created for the hulls and sails of the Gitana 18.
On the glass, the pad printing reproduces the original artwork conceived by artists Florian and Michaël Quistrebert for the Gitana 18’s new artistic signature: a grid of dots forming vibrating lines. Within this graphic design appear the profiles of Olivia and her three sisters. The design unfolds 360 degrees with extreme precision.
It is in this spirit that
the collaboration with BYKARBON was conceived, a Brittany-based company in
Quimper, specializing in the upcycling of
high-technology materials from elite sport and thier partnering
with the Gitana Team in its CSR approach. The label of the bottle is
produced from recycled carbon, selected
from production scraps of the trimaran. Each piece
is crafted according to a precise template, manually polished, then
calibrated within one-tenth of a millimeter before being applied by hand onto
the glass.
