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The sweet smell of success Emilio Pucci at work in 1959.

In 1964, a 3-year-old girl named Laudomia was unhappily confined to her sickbed. It was, as these things go, not a bad place to be confined; her bedroom was on the third floor of the Palazzo Pucci, a massive 14th-century villa in Florence, just behind the Duomo’s pearl-gray immensity. But she was bored and restless, and so, to cheer her up, her father, an Italian aristocrat, brought her some perfume.
Emilio Pucci
Marisa Berenson models an assortment of bags in 1965.

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A 1966 ad for Vivara perfume.
A friend of his in Switzerland named Coco Chanel had suggested that he put his creativity into a scent, and he’d been working with the legendary perfumer Jean Amic.

“My father brought up some variations for me to smell,” says Laudomia, today an elegant married woman with three children of her own. “I smelled them and told him one was good, and so he launched it.” She laughs. “Which is typical of my father, a complete nutcase.

Who launches a perfume because a 3-year-old likes it?”

The nutcase was Emilio Pucci, and the perfume he launched was Vivara in 1966. Laudomia, now the image director of the house her father built, is relaunching Vivara to considerable fanfare, though this is not your mother’s perfume, as Laudomia is the first to tell you. Graced with a catlike litheness (her frame wears her father’s prints perfectly) and a lilting, British-inflected Italian accent, Laudomia is the custodian of Pucci’s past and future, which Vivara embodies perfectly. To understand that past and future, you need to understand the father and the house, and those are not simple matters.

Laudomia has called her father’s story a kind of fairy tale in reverse. In reality it was enchanted from start to finish, though in wildly different ways at different times. Here was a marchese — the Puccis had been one of the leading families in Renaissance Florence, and Emilio’s title dates from 1662 — who became a World War II air force pilot flying torpedo missions out of North Africa.

His wife would later describe his service to the Axis as simply an obligation: “He was Italian; he had to fight.”

It is a credible claim. Pucci loved America and enrolled in 1936 at Reed College in Oregon. Skiing was an obsession for him, and he designed the team’s red-and-white uniform. In 1939, he began an affair with Mussolini’s (married) daughter, Edda Ciano. The affair turned complicated in 1943 when Edda’s husband, Galeazzo Ciano, helped overthrow and briefly imprison Il Duce. Mussolini was rescued by German paratroopers and restored to power; he then had Ciano executed. When Edda tried to help him, Mussolini turned on her, placing a million-lira price on her head, in part because she possessed her husband’s diaries, which incriminated Mussolini and the Germans.

A 1966 ad for Vivara perfume.

Edda asked Pucci for assistance. In 1944, with the diaries hidden in her clothes, he smuggled her into Switzerland. She made it; he didn’t. Pucci was captured and tortured by the Nazis. When they finally turned him loose, he fled to Switzerland, where he waited out the war.

But by then he was ruined financially. The family had been quite well off, Laudomia has said, “but after the war they had nothing.” In 1946, Pucci rejoined the post-Mussolini Italian air force and was living on his military salary. The next year, he took a brief leave to ski in Zermatt. There he found himself dissatisfied with postwar ski apparel. So he simply designed some more ski clothing, this time for himself.

The clothes were stretch pants in novel synthetic fabrics and bright colors, all done in light, streamlined forms for speed and comfort. It happened that a photographer for Harper’s Bazaar was in Zermatt, and she asked Pucci if she could photograph the outfits.

She sent the photos to Diana Vreeland, who alerted a Lord & Taylor buyer, who ordered a collection. Pucci produced the clothes, and they started to sell.

Then, in 1949, in another exotic playground for the rich (this time Capri), Emilio had another moment of revelation: women, he saw, were trapped in heavy, outmoded garments.

So he started designing light, vibrant, clean-lined shantung separates, opening a store on the island. (Pucci is credited with the original capri pants.) The store, which for modesty’s sake didn’t originally use his name — “I’m the first member of my family to work in a thousand years,” he famously explained to Life magazine — was mobbed, and within a few years Pucci became a designer worn by Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Jacqueline Kennedy.

It is virtually impossible to exaggerate the degree to which the 1960s defined Pucci — and Pucci the ’60s. Emilio created a silk jersey knit dress, soon the jet-set uniform, whose signature print took the brightest colors from nature and scattered them like semaphores.

In 1947, he had $120 in his pocket; by 1952, he had become a millionaire. The launch of Vivara 14 years later, heralded with a film starring Catherine Deneuve, was, like everything else, a huge success.

Then the enchantment took a turn. In the 1970s, Emilio couldn’t — or, according to some, wouldn’t — reinterpret Pucci for a changing world. He had a vision, but he also had a fatal flaw: inflexibility. Stores began to close. In the late ’70s, Saks dropped the line. This was the Pucci — brilliant, lost — in which Bernard Arnault, the C.E.O. of LVMH, bought a majority share in 2000. Arnault wanted to bring the house back to glorious life as much as Laudomia did, and a new Vivara was central to the endeavor.

They began by smelling the 1966 original; it was “a green chypre,” says Francois Demachy, the senior vice president of all LVMH’s perfume brands, who remembered Vivara from his early days as a perfumer. (A chypre perfume is usually built with oak moss, patchouli and labdanum, an absolute of a dark, thick-smelling Mediterranean bush.) But, Laudomia adds, “while it felt very special, it wasn’t what I thought younger people would want to wear. And given that we were changing our fashion, our stores, our approach, we wanted to put that into our perfume as well.”

Demachy was guided by the brand universe: “Mediterranean, color, positive vibrations, radiance, with a clear elegance,” he says. One day Pucci mentioned that she loved the smell of a place in Turkey where the coast fell into the sea and the trees almost had their roots in the seawater, a mix of wood, sea breeze and fresh air, so Demachy specified patchouli and vetiver for the woody signature and certain synthetic molecules for the scent of the ocean. He kept its chypre heritage but twisted it in a modern way, finally adding galbanum to the top of the scent’s structure to make it less “tender.”

The galbanum is the key. Here is a miraculous material that is at once retro — the perfume of a woman having her hair done in a 1958 beauty salon — and, in its oddly elegant green abstractness, futuristic. Laudomia made sure of it. She had gone through draft after draft. And just as she had at age 3, Emilio’s daughter finally said, “This is the one.” (Source: By CHANDLER BURR, Published: August 26, 2007, www.nytimes.com)