As a young man, Malle was more interested in the marketing and art direction side of the perfume business and wanted to emulate the career of Jacques Helleu, the Art Director at Chanel. To this end, he attended New York University where he read Art History and Economics. Upon graduating, Malle worked for several photographers before moving into advertising. He was then offered the role of becoming Jean Amic's assistant at Roure Bertrand Dupont, a company that creates the raw materials used in perfumery. He briefly worked in the UK before returning to France with the aim of becoming "a French Ann Gotlieb", an American woman who acted as a go-between for marketing professionals and perfumers. Finding little success in this field, Malle consulted for Hermès under Jean-Louis Dumas, before doing the same for Christian Lacroix at LVMH. During his time with Dumas, Malle was sent to perfumery school for two months where he learned from perfumers such as Françoise Caron, Edouard Flechier & Jean Guichard. Following this, Malle went on to launch his own perfume house Éditions de Parfums Frédéric Malle.
Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle
Malle does not create the perfumes for , instead he acts as an 'Editor' working alongside the perfumer. Initially the creative process started with a mood board or more formal brief, however, it is now started with a conversation between Malle and the perfumer. The level of input Malle has varies for each fragrance; for Dominique Ropion's Carnal Flower, Malle smelled 690 different iterations, whilst for other creations he can be non-interventionist. For Malle, there is only one rule perfumers have to follow when creating a perfume for the house; "Eliminate all that is superfluous or merely decorative". Malle wanted the perfumers to receive credit for their creations, and as such openly advertises the perfumer behind the scent, which includes placing the perfumers name on the bottles and boxes. This acknowledgment of the perfumer was a decision that perfume critic Chandler Burr described as "all-but-revolutionary". The reason Malle gives for crediting the perfumers was that he "thought it was so unjust to always hide perfumers like ghostwriters; I wanted them to be in the limelight", whilst also lamenting that since perfumers rarely received credit, the general public would be under the illusion that "Opium was made by Mr. Saint Laurent himself and that Coco created Chanel No. 5". The house launched in 2000 with nine perfumes, amongst these was Le Parfum de Thérèse by Edmond Roudnitska. Whilst Roudnitska passed away in 1996, Le Parfum de Thérèse was a perfume he had initially created in the 1950s for his wife Thérèse, who was the only person allowed to wear it. Following Roudnitska's death, Thérèse passed it on to Malle to ensure that it would be remembered. As of November 2017, the house has 29 perfumes created by 16 different perfumers. In January 2015 Editions de Parfum Frédéric Malle was sold to Estée Lauder for an undisclosed fee.
