Viktor&Rolf sells one of Britain's best-known men's fragrances in a bottle shaped like a hand grenade.
The house is Dutch and it is art-school avant-garde. Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren met at the art academy in Arnhem, graduated in 1992, and founded Viktor&Rolf in 1993. They made their name on theatrical, conceptual runway shows, the kind where the clothes sit closer to sculpture than to anything you would wear to the office. Their first couture collection showed in 1998, their first ready-to-wear in 2000.
The perfume is a separate machine. Viktor&Rolf do not make their own. L'Oreal has held the fragrance licence from the start. Flowerbomb, a sweet pink floral gourmand, launched in 2005 and became one of the biggest women's scents of its era. Spicebomb, the men's answer, followed in 2012, composed by the perfumer Olivier Polge, in that grenade bottle.
The two are built as opposites. Flowerbomb is flowers and sugar. Spicebomb is warm spice, tobacco and leather, pepper over a smoky base. Spicebomb Extreme took the same idea and pushed the tobacco and vanilla harder. All of them are easy to like, which is the point.
Here is the gap worth knowing. On the runway Viktor&Rolf is difficult, clever, expensive art. In the perfume aisle it is the opposite, a mainstream crowd-pleaser made by L'Oreal and sold by the million. That is not a contradiction. Designer fragrance is the cash register that funds the couture. The grenade is brilliant packaging. What is inside is an accessible sweet-spice scent, priced for the name on the front.
Spice Ember rebuilds Spicebomb Extreme, warm tobacco and pepper, in a UK-made 35% spray. Flower Bomber does the same for Flowerbomb. Browse the full Viktor&Rolf collection.
