The first thing you'll notice about Renaud Salmon—as documented countless times in prior interviews—is how tall the Belgian-born chief creative officer of Amouage stands. But his towering stature, however imposing it appears, hardly reflects his spirit. Gentle, with a thoughtful lilt to his voice, Salmon speaks to us of his work at Amouage and his fascination with the olfactive world with infectious passion.
"I wanted to be a fashion designer. I was born in Belgium and back at the time when I was growing up, the Antwerp Six were rising. They really influenced me; they made me dream," Salmon says. "When I told my parents about my plans to be a fashion designer, they said no: 'You have a brain, you're not going to get into this kind of superficial world.'" To please his parents, Salmon studied business engineering but his passion for the creative arts never wavered. On the side, he continued honing his artistic muscles by studying photography, which led him to shooting the graduate collections of art school students.
He may be the creative force behind an Omani perfume house today, but you can still spot Salmon walking around with his camera at the ready. He considers the act of the pointing and shooting as a way of being intentionally aware of the things that the eyes naturally witness on the daily—a parallel that's shared with our sense of smell. "The act of smelling is very passive. We go through life smelling every day, but none of it was conscious. Think about it. Yes, you've probably smelt many things throughout the day, but unless you went to a perfume event or something like that, everything was passive," Salmon explains.
As chief creative officer at Amouage, Salmon is equally, if not more, intentional about every facet of the perfume house. His product-centric background in fashion—from Delvaux to Louis Vuitton—eventually led him to Procter & Gamble and then Coty post-merger where he worked on fragrances for Dolce&Gabbana, Alexander McQueen and Marc Jacobs. No doubt, the experience has prepared him for his role at Amouage, but as with every new undertaking, it wasn't without its own unique set of challenges. For one, Salmon is a foreigner at the creative helm of a perfume house founded in Oman. "I did not want to be a creative director based in a mega city and directing from abroad. I wanted to be in the manufacture. So that is why, I decided to locate my creative studio inside the manufacture. For me, it's the way to create constant exchanges with the craftsmen and my teams. I wanted to make sure that my teams are diverse in terms of profile and where they come from. And by doing so, I have confidence that we are able to do something that is sensitive enough to be considered genuine because that's what I want to do," explains Salmon.
While he believes there is no specific gender assigned to fragrances, Amouage's bottle designs are inherently gendered. Women's fragrances feature a dome-shaped cap inspired by the domes of mosques in Oman, while men's fragrances are topped with a cap referencing the shape of the khanjar, a traditional ceremonial dagger. There's history linked to the designs that Salmon would rather not tamper with at the risk of oversimplifying and losing sight of the House's heritage. Instead, he removed any overt mentions of gender from the bottles and packaging, and introduced a new bottle design for the Essences collection. "I felt that it was actually blocking people from enjoying beautiful fragrances," Salmon reasons.
It is a constant balance of respecting Amouage's Omani roots while also pushing the House towards a more contemporary and international evolution. Middle Eastern fragrances have tended to be robustly woody and oud-heavy, yet Amouages focus is, according to Salmon, "the philosophy of generosity". Every Amouage fragrance carries with it a deep love and understanding of its key ingredient and how best to showcase it. You'd notice this with the House's extensive offerings. Certainly, there are a number of classically Middle Eastern scents, but like its latest additions to the Odyssey collection—Decision and Existence—there is depth in character that makes Amouage a cult favourite among fragrance connoisseurs.
"My idea is to move people and to create strong emotions through perfumery. And in order for me to do that, I need all of the sensitivities to align so that everything resonates together in harmony and create this kind of amplification of emotions," Salmon tells me. "A fragrance is like a puzzle and sometimes you have a missing piece. When you eventually find this piece, it unlocks everything else. The beauty is that I don't have any time pressure at Amouage. I work on many ideas and projects at the same time. And when they come together, then it's the right time to launch."
If you're wondering how many projects he works on at the same time, the answer is around 20. While that may seem like an insane number to work on at any given time for the average sane person, Salmon reasons that the development of a fragrance takes time to be fully realised. From research to creating moodboards to testing (he says that he often travels with new fragrances for wear tests), the development process isn't quite as linear as say, fashion.
Salmon didn't divulge on what those new fragrances are, understandably. But perhaps, one of them may be a fragrance that speaks to the afterlife—an evolution of the Odyssey collection—and one that he says he's been working on for a good five years.
"The idea of afterlife, for me, is an element that is extremely long-lasting, like borderline archeological in a way. Centuries afterwards, what remains? And what does the future look like?" he proposes.
Intrigued? Guess, we will all just have to wait to smell the future then.
