Louis Vuitton's First Perfume: The Lost Heures d'Absence of 1927

By Louis Vuitton's own account, nobody knows how the 1927 perfume smelled. What survives is a name, some old bottles whose scent has evaporated and a period photograph. Each is traced below to the house's texts, an archive record or the press that covered the name's return.

What was Louis Vuitton's first perfume?

Heures d'Absence, launched in 1927. Louis Vuitton's article on Heures d'Absence says the house launched its first perfume "at the height of the Roaring Twenties" and gives the year as 1927. The house's 2020 press text, published by Tagwalk, opens with the same year.

An archive record agrees on the decade. Smithsonian Libraries and Archives holds a photograph of the bottle and its packaging, dated Paris, 1925 to 1930. Its caption names the Heures d'Absence scent by Louis Vuitton. It sits in the Thérèse Bonney collection: over 4,000 photographs of 1920s and 1930s architecture and design, mostly in Paris, the library says.

LVMH's 2016 account is looser. Its announcement of the house's perfumes in August 2016 dates the first travel flasks and fragrances signed Louis Vuitton to the early 20th century. The 2020 texts are exact: Heures d'Absence was the first perfume. How other houses began is compared in our guide to the first perfumes of the fashion houses.

What does Heures d'Absence mean?

It means "hours of absence". The Cambridge Dictionary's French-English entry for heure gives "hour". Its entry for absence gives "absence", and also "lapse of memory", as in avoir une absence. Cambridge transcribes the two words as /œʀ/ and /apsɑ̃s/, so the name sounds roughly like "urr dap-sahns".

The name honors a place. Louis Vuitton says the perfume was "named after the country home the Vuitton family acquired in the Seine-et-Marne region of France". The press text dates that purchase to the 1920s. It says the name evokes "great escapes, suspended moments of grace in which one plunges into daydreams".

What did the 1927 bottle look like?

A glass bottle engraved with an airplane, in a box shaped like a kilometer marker. Louis Vuitton's press text puts it in one line: "a triumphant airplane was engraved on the bottle, whose box was shaped like a kilometer marker." The house's article adds that the design "celebrated the new modes of transport that were then emerging".

The Smithsonian photograph shows both pieces on a table, beside a vase of flowers. A box with a rounded top, lettered Heures d'Absence and Louis Vuitton Paris, sits beside a small rectangular bottle with a ball stopper. The bottle stands in an open case with arched sides, and a tiny airplane shows near its top, above the name set in an arc. The library's caption calls the bottle etched crystal.

Two more details rest on the press alone. The Glass Magazine wrote in February 2020 of "an embossed airplane", which would stand out from the glass rather than be cut into it. The house says engraved and the library says etched, so we follow them.

Harper's Bazaar reported in 2020 that "there were just 300 bottles made". None of the Louis Vuitton texts we read gives a number, so the figure stays the magazine's. Another early meeting of glass and perfume is told in our story of René Lalique's bottles for François Coty.

Why was the original formula lost?

No source we read says how it was lost. Louis Vuitton's article states only that "the original formula has long since been lost", and the press text spells out what that means:

On the other hand, no one knows what the original perfume smelled like ...

Louis Vuitton, press text for Heures d'Absence, February 2020

The surviving bottles do not help. LVMH's 2016 announcement says the early bottles are engraved with names such as Heures d'Absence, Réminiscences and Eau de Voyage, "but the scents have evaporated". The National reported in June 2016 that the house's early perfumes had been "lost to time, and only the bottles remain".

A faithful remake needs the formula. The Osmothèque, a perfume archive whose collection counts 4,000 perfumes, says it remakes long-lost perfumes "rigorously respecting original formulas". It does not reconstitute a perfume when any of its raw materials is unavailable. Its published collection list, dated June 2015, has no Louis Vuitton entry.

Which perfumes did Louis Vuitton make before 2016?

At least four, though the sources differ on dates. LVMH's 2016 text names three on old bottles and dates a fourth, Je, Tu, Il, to 1928, calling it "no longer in existence". The other years come from two news reports of June 2016, in The National and Premium Beauty News.

None of these reports cites a dated document. The house's texts give no year for Réminiscences or Eau de Voyage, so those two dates stay the press's. Premium Beauty News headlined the 2016 launch as the house's "first fragrance since 1946".

The return took more than four years (our arithmetic from the dates that follow). FashionNetwork reported that Louis Vuitton confirmed on 5 January 2012 that it was preparing a perfume. The house had entrusted it to Jacques Cavallier Belletrud, a Grasse-born perfumer whose father and grandfather were perfumers.

Premium Beauty News wrote that the launch, first planned for 2013, was moved to 2016. LVMH announced seven eaux de parfum on 17 August 2016, to go on sale in Louis Vuitton stores that September.

Is today's Heures d'Absence the same perfume?

No: it is a new composition under the old name. Louis Vuitton says its Master Perfumer, Jacques Cavallier Belletrud, "has reinvented Heures d'Absence". The press text calls the lost formula "an ideal occasion to reinvent it according to a very personal vision, with complete freedom". It gives 27 February 2020 as the first day on sale, 93 years after the original (our arithmetic from the two years).

The press text calls the result "a floral apotheosis", and its jasmine and rose are two of the defining notes of the floral family. Louis Vuitton's US product page, as archived in June 2026, lists three key notes, mimosa, jasmine and centifolia rose, each "from Grasse". It files the perfume under Perfumes and Beauty with no gender label.

The perfumer's workshop is in Grasse too. LVMH's release of September 2016 presents Les Fontaines Parfumées, in the heart of the town, as his creative workshop. His place among other noses is traced in our guide to famous perfumers. Two other houses' first steps in perfume have their own stories: Miss Dior and the name behind it, and the first Hermès perfume.