Alexandrine of Paris

Alexandrine de Paris was a prestigious Parisian glove and accessories house listed at 10 rue Albert, Paris, associated with Mme. Alexandrine, a fashionable glover who supplied custom gloves, hats, and handbags to couturiers and elite clients. Like several luxury glove houses of the period, Alexandrine appears to have crossed into perfumery, with Société Alexandrine credited with the fragrance Un Soir de Mai, introduced in the early 1920s.

Prior to the First World War, perfumes were generally associated with specialized perfumers such as Guerlain, Houbigant, Coty, Lubin, Roger & Gallet, and others. During the 1910s and 1920s, however, fashion houses began to realize that perfume could serve as both an additional revenue stream and a powerful form of advertising. The pioneer was Paul Poiret, who launched Parfums de Rosine in 1911, one of the first couture-linked perfume ventures. His success demonstrated that clients who admired a designer's style might also wish to purchase a fragrance expressing the same aesthetic. Soon afterward, houses such as Coco Chanel, House of Worth, Revillon Frères, Edward Molyneux, Patou, Lanvin, Lucien Lelong, and many others followed suit.

A luxury glove house such as Alexandrine occupied much the same market space as a couture salon. Its clientele consisted primarily of fashionable, affluent women already accustomed to purchasing high-end accessories. Gloves, handbags, hats, and perfume all belonged to the same world of feminine elegance and personal adornment. If a customer trusted Alexandrine's taste in gloves, she might reasonably trust the firm's judgment in selecting a fragrance as well.

There was also a practical connection between gloves and perfume. Since the nineteenth century, fine gloves were frequently scented. The famous gantiers-parfumeurs (glove-makers-perfumers) of France had a long tradition of perfuming leather gloves with floral and aromatic essences. Even though modern glove manufacture had become a separate industry by the 1920s, consumers still associated gloves with fragrance and refinement. A glove house launching a perfume would not have seemed unusual to contemporary shoppers.

The retail environment further encouraged such diversification. A woman entering the Alexandrine boutique to purchase gloves might also browse handbags, scarves, cosmetics, powder compacts, and perfume. Selling perfume allowed the firm to increase the value of each sale while strengthening its brand identity. Perfume also had the advantage of being far less expensive than couture clothing, enabling customers of more modest means to buy a piece of the Alexandrine image and prestige.

For Alexandrine specifically, the introduction of a perfume such as Un Soir de Mai can be viewed as part of a broader trend in which luxury fashion and accessory firms sought to create a complete lifestyle brand. The fragrance was not merely a separate product; it functioned as an olfactory extension of the elegance, sophistication, and femininity that Alexandrine's gloves represented. A woman might wear an Alexandrine glove on her hands and an Alexandrine perfume on her skin, both serving as expressions of the same fashionable identity.

Today, examples of Alexandrine's perfumery are virtually non-existent, making it one of the more elusive chapters in the history of fashion-house fragrances. While advertisements and trademark records confirm that the firm marketed perfume during the 1920s, surviving bottles, boxes, and related ephemera are extraordinarily rare. Unlike the perfumes of Chanel, Worth, Patou, Lanvin, or even smaller couture houses whose products were produced in substantial quantities and preserved by collectors, Alexandrine's fragrances appear to have been issued on a much more limited scale. As a result, few tangible examples have survived to document their appearance or composition.

Several factors likely contributed to this scarcity. Alexandrine's principal business was glove-making rather than perfumery, meaning fragrance was probably a supplementary luxury offering intended for existing clientele rather than a major commercial venture. Production runs were likely small, distribution was probably confined to the firm's boutiques and select retailers, and the perfumes may have remained on the market for only a short period. Unlike the major couture houses that invested heavily in advertising and international distribution, Alexandrine seems never to have developed a large-scale perfume division.

The fragile nature of perfume packaging also plays a role. Empty bottles and presentation boxes were often discarded once the contents were used, particularly when they lacked the artistic bottle designs associated with houses such as Lalique, Baccarat, or Julien Viard. Collectors therefore had little reason to preserve them. If Alexandrine's fragrances were sold in relatively conventional bottles bearing paper labels, their survival rate would have been especially low.

The rarity of Alexandrine perfume artifacts stands in sharp contrast to the firm's prominence in the glove trade. Contemporary advertisements depict Alexandrine as a fashionable Parisian house catering to elegant women, and the decision to introduce perfume was entirely in keeping with the luxury branding strategies of the 1920s. Yet while the gloves themselves occasionally appear in museum collections and vintage fashion archives, the perfumes have all but vanished from the historical record. Today, knowledge of Alexandrine's perfumery survives largely through scattered trademark registrations, trade notices, advertisements, and a handful of references in period publications, making any surviving bottle or packaging an important and potentially unique discovery for collectors and perfume historians.