PrinceOfCats
Naturellement pulpeuse
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2003
- Messages
- 10,124
- Reaction score
- 2
Notice how the exec of marketing wants Ford on board.
botoxmolecula said:Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against those fabulous fragrances. I myself wear NU but a fragrance needs more than the basenotes members's love to be successful and NU, KINGDOM, etc...are sadly unsuccessful .
Afterall, AQUA DI GIO for men is N°1 in the whole world and the entire basenotes community hates it.
.
taz said:new on this:
WWD.com revealed a little more... ."
aya_k said:taz - what date is that article from? thanks
rive gauche said:Can't wait to see what Tom ford is doing with the brand Estée Lauder !
I hope he will add a touch of modernisme,as he has done with the fabulous fragrance "Nu by Yves Saint Laurent",
a perfume that the Gucci Group will actually stop producing...
Tom Ford has summoned the glamour and daring spirit of Estée Lauder, the woman who put American fragrance and herself on the map when she launched Youth Dew in 1953.
And it's the naked truth that "it's the time for the reinstitution of glamour and exclusivity," Ford told WWD during an exclusive phone interview from his London home on Thursday. "I want to go back to real luxury, the highest quality products. Luxury has gone mass," Ford said, admitting that he played a major part in that movement at Gucci. "It's time to change that."
And he's prepared to lead the charge with Amber Nude, his first cosmetics and fragrance collection for the Estée Lauder brand, coming in early November. Branded under the Tom Ford Estée Lauder name, the 14-stockkeeping-unit collection is relatively pricy: lipsticks retail for $35; an impressively sized bronzer is $60. The eye-catcher of the collection is a $550 gold minaudière, containing a lip polish and a face powder.
The 2.5-oz. Youth Dew Amber Nude eau de parfum spray retails for $65, compared with $28 for a 2.25-oz. bottle of the 52-year-old Youth Dew original, which is still being sold. There's a solid perfume in a gold-toned compact for $150 and an atomizer parfum purse spray with refill for $225. One practical touch is a $35 lip transformer called Lip Polish, which allows a consumer to adjust the tones of the other lipsticks by layering. Face and eye glosses, designed to be layered over other products and even applied by hand, are $40 each. Nail enamel retails for $25 and face powder is priced at $50. And there's 24-karat gold in the lip polish and the face gloss: The usual cost-of-goods worries apparently didn't apply. All of the products in this collection are limited editions, with the exception of the Amber Nude eau de parfum.
"[Amber Nude] is being launched only in specialty stores," Ford said. "The price points are high because the quality is great; we didn't want to play the price game. Price shouldn't be the main component. It's time for authenticity." He'll continue that commitment with a second color collection for the Estée Lauder brand this spring and a freestanding fragrance and color collection under his own name in fall 2006.
The magazine advertising, which will appear in Vogue and W, begins in December.
And with Tom Ford being, well, Tom Ford, nudity did enter into the equation — both with the first collection's name and its advertising visual, which features Carolyn Murphy wearing the cosmetics collection and little else.
"People may look at this ad and say, ‘Oh, Tom Ford — all he does is take people's clothes off,'" Ford said with a laugh. "[Carolyn] doesn't have a lot clothes on [in the ad, in fact] she's not wearing anything."
"The original Youth Dew was very concentrated because it was conceived as a bath oil," said Ford, referring to the 30 percent oil concentration. "[For Amber Nude] we cut the concentration of the fragrance in half, then went back in and added magnolia and ginger to give the top notes more sparkle. We retained the vetiver and sandalwood [in the drydown]. We wanted people to smell it and say, ‘Wow, Youth Dew — that smells amazing,' not like a different fragrance."
Amber Nude's top notes also include fresh tea, grapefruit and a bare skin accord; while the heart adds textured black rose to the original creation's red carnations, jasmine and ylang-ylang. The drydown retains Youth Dew's patchouli notes, and adds amber, vetiver and a dark chocolate note that replaces the original vanilla in the finish.
Ford noted that some ingredients in the original mix have themselves changed over the years. "For instance, the patchouli — which is a major part of this fragrance — that is used today is much lighter than what was used in the Fifties. But it was important to keep it in the fragrance because it's part of the [Lauder] heritage."
Ford also looked to the brand's heritage for the compacts and fragrance bottle packaging. "I took the original bottle and streamlined it," he said, adding that the original bottle was inspired by a woman's silhouette. "Women's silhouettes in the Fifties were different from today's, so it made sense to streamline [the bottle]. The color of the bow on the bottle and the way it is tied also changed, and we added an amber topaz cabochon on the cap.
"We went back into the [Estée Lauder] archives and looked at all of the great Sixties and Seventies compacts and solid perfumes," Ford continued. "They had metal compacts, not metallized plastic. They were very glamorous, as was the life that Estée Lauder herself aspired to and led. I wanted to put that level of quality into this collection."
gosh me too ....including his menswear...ads...everything....hes awsomeJRSlims said:he should develop a womenswear EL collection and re.design their cosmetic crappy image..
I miss his gucci & ysl girls so much...
I believe that the original 1953 ad campaign for Youth-Dew actually featured a naked woman.......one for the reasons why the fragrance was so controversial (for the time)fashionista-ta said:My mother, aunt, and one of my favorite teachers wore Youth Dew ... putting Tom Ford and his nude promotional crap into the mix really strikes me as obscene. That's what you do to update your grandmother's fragrance??
I have always thought the Lauder heirs knew what they were doing, but I'm starting to wonder ...
Estée Lauder Makes a Play for Youth
By NATASHA SINGER
Published: November 5, 2005
Harpriya Sidhu, 26, a recent dental school graduate from Weehawken, N.J., is a faithful luxury consumer. Ms. Sidhu buys only Gucci or Burberry purses, Tiffany jewelry and cosmetics from Chanel or Kiehl's. Estée Lauder was never a name that got her attention, because it is one of those brands "that are so mainstream," she said.
But on Wednesday, Ms. Sidhu's opinion of the 59-year-old label changed when she was at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York and discovered a line of gold-cased bronzers and lipsticks called the Tom Ford Estée Lauder Collection. Ms. Sidhu bought four products. "Tom Ford is a world-renowned designer," she said. "These are collectors' items."
John Lei for The New York Times
An ad and a display of the new Tom Ford Estée Lauder Collection on Thursday at an unveiling at Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Young, fashion-driven women like Ms. Sidhu are the customers the Estée Lauder Companies had in mind when it signed up Mr. Ford to create cosmetics and a fragrance, which were introduced at 288 department stores last weekend. The Lauder company, a $6.4-billion-a-year cosmetics giant, hopes Mr. Ford, the designer who transformed Gucci in the 1990's, will bring a much-needed infusion of youth, excitement and sex appeal to its flagship label. Like the Buick products of General Motors, the Lauder line is widely perceived as appealing to an older, more conservative customer.
For Mr. Ford, who has been out of the spotlight since leaving Gucci in 2004, the collaboration represents a chance to return to the retail stage. After he oversees a second cosmetics collection for Estée Lauder in the spring, the company will back him in a beauty brand that bears his name.
Hundreds of customers lined up at the Saks store in Manhattan on Thursday night to meet Mr. Ford, who autographed gold cosmetics packages with a gold metallic pen. The limited-edition, 14-item collection, including a $40 shiny black eye gloss and a $35 lipstick tinged with gold flecks, was selling well, Saks executives said.
"The launch of the Tom Ford collection has transformed Estée Lauder into the hottest brand on the beauty floor," said Deborah Walters, Saks Fifth Avenue's senior vice president and general merchandise manager for cosmetics, fragrance and intimate apparel.
Although the Lauder brand, created in 1946, was once synonymous with the glamour of Estée Lauder, a prominent social figure in New York and Palm Beach, lately the cosmetics have come to seem old and lackluster, even fuddy-duddy, analysts said, compared with other more trend-setting lines like MAC and Bobbi Brown.
Although the Lauder brand has not lost market share and remains among the top three best sellers in department stores, the company is apprehensive about gains by niche products like N.V. Perricone M.D. and Philosophy, according to Karen Grant, an analyst with NPD Beauty, a division of the market research firm NPD Group.
Leonard A. Lauder, the president of the Estée Lauder Companies, said the Tom Ford collaboration was crucial to the brand's strategy of reinforcing its classic image with its core customers while increasing appeal with trend-conscious women.
"New generations want to buy their own brands," Mr. Lauder said. "They don't necessarily want to buy a brand that's been around for a long time."
For Mr. Ford, cosmetics may be a way of testing the waters for a return to the fashion business, which has been the subject of much speculation in the industry. At Saks, Domenico De Sole, who was chief executive of Gucci when Mr. Ford was its creative director, and is once again working with him, said, "It is the beginning of the new Tom Ford brand."
For now, the cosmetics are a way of buying a piece of him. Sara Webb, a 31-year-old mother of two from Philadelphia, waited 90 minutes for Mr. Ford to sign the bronzer she had bought, her first Estée Lauder purchase. Ms. Webb's tastes normally run to cosmetics designed by makeup artists like François Nars and Laura Mercier, she said.
"I couldn't afford the clothes Tom Ford designed for Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, but I'm a big fan and I've been waiting to see what he would do next," said Ms. Webb, who also bought a face powder compact and several lipsticks. "I think anything he touches turns to gold."
Other customers in line belonged to an older generation who had once bought Estée Lauder products and later drifted to other brands. These women seemed particularly interested in the collection's fragrance, Youth Dew Amber Nude, a modern incarnation of the popular perfume introduced in 1953.
"I don't want to date myself, but I've been wearing the original Youth Dew on and off for 25 years," said Jacqueline Webb, Sara Webb's mother, who said she was in her 50's. "I love the new fragrance. It's lighter and has more vanilla."
While acknowledging that Mr. Ford might attract younger customers, some cosmetics industry analysts suggested that his name might also create short-term buzz without providing long-term growth.
"Everybody wants to go after the mythic 25- to 30-year-old customer with endless disposable income and impeccable taste," said Karen Young, president of the Young Group, a market research firm that tracks beauty trends. "But Estée Lauder traditionally has always been an aspirational brand for middle America, not a brand for cutting-edge consumers.
"I think trying to hook the fashion consumer with Tom Ford might alienate or at least confuse the traditional Lauder consumer base."
Some beauty analysts said the new collection might enliven the department store sector of the cosmetics business, which has been struggling to compete against specialty retailers like Sephora and the QVC shopping network.
"When was the last time a beauty launch created this much buzz at a retail level? When Elizabeth Taylor first launched her own perfume?" said Jenny B. Fine, editor of the cosmetics industry trade magazine WWD Beauty Biz. "Tom Ford is a rock star. Now the challenge is for other brands to create this level of excitement."