Somewhere around 2023 Imagination stopped being a Louis Vuitton fragrance and became an internet argument. A Fragrantica reviewer records the phrase that carried it there, "Aventus for zoomers", calls it an absurd combination of words, and admits he first met the thing in the boutiques thinking the price was too high for what is essentially a cologne. Two claims are tangled in that: that Imagination is a new kind of thing, and that it costs a stupid amount of money. Louis Vuitton made neither, and only one survives contact with the evidence.

Jacques Cavallier Belletrud composed it in 2021. He has been the house's in-house perfumer since 2012 and came out of a Grasse family where his father and grandfather were both perfumers. What he built is citrus over ginger and black tea with Ambroxan carrying the base, and reviewers reach for the same shorthand with suspicious speed: expensive hotel soap. That is not the insult it sounds like. Getting a soap accord to read as luxurious rather than cheap is the difficult half of the brief.

The novelty claim came apart in August 2021, before any of the hype, in Persolaise's review. He sprayed it and something long-buried started to stir, bracing aldehydes over a serene tea note supported by cardamom and ginger. He went looking for what he was remembering and found Bvlgari Pour Homme, released in 1995, whose official note list also cites aldehydes, tea and amber, and which Cavallier had also composed. Imagination is that fragrance revisited, the top made more sparkling, the base cleaned up. He raised the obvious objection himself, that an Ambroxan overdose is a lazy way to buy diffusiveness, decided it holds together regardless, and finished by wishing the house had called it Re-Imagination. I have not worn either, so take the lineage as his rather than mine. The structure is twenty-six years old and belongs to the same man.

The money is where the received wisdom gets lazy. Louis Vuitton wants £265 for the 100ml and sells it through its own site and its own stores, nowhere else. No Boots, no Sephora, no discounter, so a listing offering it at half price is by definition not an authorised one, whatever is in the bottle. The bottle on its mirrored step is the pitch in miniature, heavy faceted glass photographed against weather it will never once be exposed to, built to be refilled rather than replaced. Cartier had that idea in 1981 and took it from cigarette lighters.

Now put Dior's Paradise next to it. Another signed release, a perfumer of comparable standing, and it asks £255 for its 100ml in shops you can walk into on a lunch break. Ten pounds between them. Whatever people are angry about when they call Imagination outrageous, the sticker is not really it.

What the extra buys is refusal. No sale, no third party, no sample counter, no way to smell it except by walking into the shop. Arabiyat Prestige's Marwa costs $40 to $55, around a seventh of what Imagination does, and people who have worn both put it near ninety percent of the original, thinning out in the drydown where the Louis Vuitton stays smooth. That gap is the honest one, and it has nothing to do with Dior.

None of which makes Imagination a bad perfume. It makes it a well-made citrus by a man who has made this citrus before, priced like its peers and sold like a handbag.

Sources: