Montana Perfumes & Colognes

A French designer of enormous 1980s shoulders, and a perfume that is still argued about forty years later.

Claude Montana

Montana opened in Paris in 1979 and became one of the defining designers of the decade — leather, exaggerated shoulders, a silhouette closer to architecture than to dressmaking. He briefly took over haute couture at Lanvin, and his commercial collapse in the 1990s was as dramatic as his rise. He died in 2024.

Parfum de Peau, 1986

His first fragrance is one of the great difficult perfumes: a leather chypre with an animalic heart — castoreum, civet notes, a genuine sense of skin — that was overwhelming when it launched and remains so.

Reformulation has softened later versions considerably, which is why collectors chase the early bottles and why two people can describe this perfume completely differently.

Approaching a fragrance like this

One spray, on fabric, in cold weather, and expect it to change over several hours. Animalic compositions are the opposite of modern transparent perfumery: they are meant to be lived with rather than liked immediately.

For the same intensity from houses we carry, Quorum and Aramis are the closest relatives.