After almost a decade without a new leading women’s scent, Jean Paul Gaultier is finally crowning a new favorite. La Favorite, the house’s first major feminine fragrance pillar since Scandal, is not just another flanker. It is being used to define what a new Gaultier beauty era looks like, from the bottle to the casting.
The timing is deliberate. Since Puig integrated Gaultier fragrances in 2016, the business has grown fivefold and now ranks ninth among perfume brands worldwide, powered by a ten‑million strong digital community. Le Male’s resurgence, boosted by Le Male Elixir and a return to the global top three in men’s fragrance, created pressure for a women’s scent at the same level. La Favorite is that answer and a signal of who gets to be a Gaultier muse in 2026.
A court favorite for the Duran Lantink chapter
La Favorite arrives just as Dutch designer Duran Lantink takes the creative reins at Gaultier. His recent couture outing in Paris sent out colossal gowns with tubular protrusions, a distorted echo of Marie Antoinette and the 18th‑century French court. The name “La Favorite” taps that same world, where “the favorite” was the king’s official mistress, the woman placed visibly at the center of attention.
That storyline suits a house that has celebrated extroverted femininity since the 1970s, whether through sharp tailoring, sailor stripes or visible corsetry. Frédéric Appaire, vice president for Jean Paul Gaultier Beauty at Puig, calls Gaultier “a jewel of the French patrimony in couture, in fashion and in fragrances”, and stresses that the brand should not be rushed or over commercialized. La Favorite is positioned to skew younger than existing women’s scents like Gaultier Divine, La Belle and Scandal, but it still leans on the historic codes that make the brand instantly recognisable.
The concept, Appaire explains, started from the idea of “being the one everyone adores and being, of course, the favorite of all people, the crowd around her”. It is a neat bridge between royal court politics and the social media era, where the “favorite” is as much an algorithmic darling as a salon fixture.
A not‑so‑well‑behaved floral under glass
Perfumers Amélie Jacquin and Quentin Bisch have built La Favorite around contrast rather than polish. The scent pivots on Queen of the Night, a heady nocturnal flower, paired with jasmine sambac absolute and rose essence. That luminous white‑floral heart clashes purposefully with an enveloping base built from benzoin, ylang‑ylang and Virginia cedar, rounded by tonka bean, vanilla bean and white musk.
Appaire describes it as “a beautiful floral without being that well‑behaved”. For Gaultier, a fragrance has to stand out and cannot feel elitist, which explains why the formula blends couture‑grade florals with a warm, crowd‑pleasing trail. The pricing follows that logic. In Europe, La Favorite will retail at 157 euros for 100 ml of eau de parfum, 116 euros for 50 ml, 80 euros for 30 ml and 30 euros for a 10 ml spray, with a full line of ancillaries designed to push visibility at retail counters and in travel retail.
The bottle turns the idea of “the favorite” into an object. Inside a glass dome, a miniature woman in a black strapless gown and chic sunglasses stands on a podium, literally on a pedestal. It nods to Gaultier’s 1999 fragrance Fragile, which also placed a figurine under glass, but the new flacon is more technically ambitious. The effigy is produced entirely in France using three different molds, and the glass required two precise cuts, a first for the glassmaker. Conceptually, it syncs with Lantink’s Marie Antoinette scale silhouettes, treating the body as something engineered to occupy space.
The global launch begins in early August, starting in Europe, with industry estimates pointing to around 75 million euros in first‑year retail sales if all goes to plan.
Ella McCutcheon and a new Gaultier community on camera
Fragrance is where fashion houses tend to anoint their true muses, and Gaultier has made a pointed choice. Model Ella McCutcheon, already familiar to the house from its runway shows, fronts the La Favorite campaign. In the visuals, she reprises the bottle effigy in real life, standing tall in a black strapless gown and sunglasses in a surreal, hyper‑Gaultier Paris.
Crucially, she is not alone. The film and images place McCutcheon inside a chosen community that includes drag performer Gigi Goode and talent Lyas, described internally as friends of the house. Rather than a single anonymous face, the casting reads like a court assembled around its favorite, with each character bringing a distinct point of view. For a brand that once shocked by putting men in skirts and playing with gender, this openly queer, mixed casting feels like a natural extension rather than a stunt.
For models and creatives orbiting the Gaultier universe, La Favorite marks a shift. The house is clearly favoring personalities already embedded in its world, elevating a runway regular to fragrance face and surrounding her with scene‑defining performers. A major fragrance pillar typically means multi‑year visibility, from airport lightboxes to department store animations and an ongoing stream of digital content. In other words, becoming a “favorite” in this moment is less about perfection and more about having the character, community and on‑camera ease to carry an entire era of Gaultier beauty on your shoulders.
