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Jean Paul Gaultier confirmed this week that it will launch La Favorite, its first major feminine fragrance pillar in ten years, with the scent arriving from Paris as the house settles into a new creative era under Dutch designer Duran Lantink. Puig, the Spanish beauty group that owns the Gaultier licence, is treating it as a flagship moment for the house, backing it with a full campaign, four bottle sizes and a launch calendar timed to Lantink’s debut season.
Lantink’s debut couture collection in Paris earlier this month leaned into ginormous gowns with drainpipe protrusions that referenced Marie Antoinette. La Favorite picks up that thread. The name is French for the favorite, historically the term for a king’s official mistress, and its arrival lands within weeks of Lantink’s own royal-court staging on the runway. The founding designer’s own history offers a second layer. Beyond fashion, Gaultier left a distinctive mark on cinema by designing costumes for films including The Fifth Element, City of Lost Children and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Actress Catherine Deneuve was also among his longstanding collaborators and friends. A fragrance rooted in theatrical femininity draws directly on that archive.
The composition sits in oriental floral territory, centred on Queen of the Night flower against a base of tonka bean and benzoin, giving the scent a nocturnal floral opening that settles into something warmer and more resinous. The bottle borrows a stylised female silhouette from Fragile, Gaultier’s 1999 snow globe perfume, one of several women’s scents the house has anchored to a distinctive figural bottle since Classique’s corseted torso shape debuted in 1993.
The launch includes four eau de parfum sizes: 100 ml (€157), 50 ml (€116), 30 ml (€80) and a 10 ml travel spray (€30), with matching ancillary products completing the range. That pricing sits close to where Gaultier has always positioned its flagship scents. Classique launched in 1993 at a similar tier and has held that ground through three decades of reformulations and flanker after flanker. La Favorite enters familiar shelf territory at a price point Gaultier customers already know.
Model Ella McCutcheon, who has walked Gaultier’s runway shows, fronts the campaign, shot in a surreal, humor-laced version of Paris the brand has leaned on before. Gigi Goode and Lyas appear alongside her as friends of the house, a casting choice Frédéric Appaire, vice president of Jean Paul Gaultier Parfums at Puig, framed as intentional. “It’s recreating that community spirit and not just having faces,” he said of the approach, describing McCutcheon herself as someone with strong character.
Goode built a following through drag and reality television as a runner-up on RuPaul’s Drag Race, while Lyas has made his name as a French fashion commentator whose runway critiques on TikTok and Instagram reach a young, style-literate audience. The brand is pitching La Favorite’s core audience as somewhat younger than the women who buy Gaultier Divine, La Belle or Scandal, its existing feminine fragrances.
Puig folded Gaultier fragrances into its portfolio in 2016 and has since multiplied sales by five times, with the brand ranking ninth among perfume houses globally last year and counted among Puig’s fastest-growing labels. Gaultier now sits inside a Puig fragrance and beauty roster that also includes Carolina Herrera, Rabanne, Nina Ricci, Byredo and Dries Van Noten. Puig itself, founded in Barcelona in 1914, reported 4.3 billion euros in revenue in 2023, and Gaultier’s climb to ninth globally last year happened inside that wider portfolio, not as an isolated niche result.
Much of Gaultier’s recent growth has come from the men’s side. Le Male, launched in 1995, has seen a resurgence since 2024 that Appaire attributed to a deliberate effort to spotlight the brand’s creative codes and history, work he credited with bringing large numbers of lapsed customers back to the brand. Appaire also pointed to Gaultier’s community of 10 million people, gathered online, as evidence that interest in the house extends well past its existing customer base. Getting a feminine pillar to match that momentum has been the harder task. La Favorite gives Puig a second growth engine to run alongside Le Male instead of one fragrance carrying the brand’s numbers.
La Favorite goes on the counter this year backed by the archive references, the four-tier pricing and a campaign fronted by McCutcheon, Goode and Lyas. Puig has the sales data from Le Male’s turnaround to justify the spend, and the house is betting that a younger shopper who has never bought a Gaultier fragrance before will respond to a scent drawn from court history and a borrowed snow globe silhouette the same way an older customer responded to Le Male’s revival.
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