Hedi Slimane Breaks Ranks Around Black Opium {Fragrance News}

Yves Saint Laurent artistic director Hedi Slimane took to the soap box last week on Tuesday September 30, 2014 to make the point that the latest fragrance release by the house, Black Opium, had not seen his creative stamp imprinted on it...

WWD report that not content to factually set the record straight on Twitter - in both English and French we may add - Slimane's PR sent out the same annoucement around to the media to stress the fact that,

Hedi Slimane has been mentioned several times in the press in connection with the introduction in the market of Black Opium with Edie Campbell by Yves Saint Laurent Beauté (L'Oréal Group). It is appropriate to [specify] that no creative direction has been given by Hedi Slimane on the market launches and on the choices of artistic elements, or definition of image, related to the product lines or the advertising campaigns of Yves Saint Laurent Beauté, including the ones of Black Opium.

Managing a brand image can be tricky and in this case, Yves Saint Laurent Beauté is a different entity from the renamed Saint Laurent Paris, and apparently it does not communicate well with the fashion branch. As an artistic director is supposed to be the curator of a whole brand image, this can lead to confusion.

Having said that, Slimane could have easily inserted a compliment on the beauty and appropriateness of the Black Opium launch while underlining the fact that, alas, he had nothing to do with the marvellous release, which would have been appropriare - again, to reprise his vocabulary - in press relations terms.

Apparently again however, Slimane thinks Black Opium is not interesting enough to warrant a polite compliment in passing - and we can only agree. This fragrance launch is super-formatted and predictably made to generate sales figures in some of the laziest ways possible, as we already pointed out in our review of it.

Where you can see that symptomatically speaking, it's not easy to parse what's beauty and what's fashion is when we happened on a flock of Yves Saint Laurent Beauté fragrance models in the streets of Paris wearing the big black floppy hat that's Slimane's touch and which takes pride of place on the banner of their Twitter account.