Maison IRFĒ: A Century of Memories in Dresses and Fragrance

“Simply retelling a story from the past is not enough for the present day.”

— Olga Sorokina (owner and creative director)

A silver-colored head and shoulders, a round body of red or black glass. Maison IRFĒ’s perfume bottles resemble dolls wearing little dresses. Beyond their appearance lies the story of a founding couple who traveled from Russia to Paris, and a woman who stepped from the pages of a book into the work of reviving the house.

To understand this brand, it is worth looking both at its hundred-year history and at the perspective behind its perfumes today. From the perfumes of the 1920s, which divided women by hair color and age, to the current collection based on moods and personalities, let us trace how the relationship between choosing clothes and choosing a fragrance has changed across the years.

Essential Information

Founded: 1924 (revived in 2008; the current fragrance collection was introduced in 2024)
Founders: Irina Romanova Youssoupoff and Felix Youssoupoff
Current owner and creative director: Olga Sorokina
Place of origin: Paris, France
Current base: New York, USA
Official website: Maison IRFĒ

The name IRFĒ combines the first names of its founders, Irina and Félix. Though the house was born in France, its name carries the lives of two people who had left their homeland.

The Founders and the Brand’s Beginnings

A House Opened in Paris by a Couple Who Had Left Their Homeland

Irina was a niece of Russia’s Emperor Nicholas II. Her husband Felix was a prince of the Youssoupoff family, who grew up surrounded by palace interiors and the clothes and jewels his mother wore. The sensibility cultivated in that environment later informed his interior decoration and the aesthetics of the house.

Married in 1914, the couple moved to Europe after the Russian Revolution and made their home in Paris. In 1924, they unveiled Maison IRFĒ at the Ritz on Place Vendôme. Irina herself appeared in its clothes at the late-night presentation.

The founding family’s status was not the clothing’s only distinguishing feature. The garments of the time had a modern, androgynous silhouette associated with boyish hairstyles. Irina embodied the brand, while relatives and friends joined the work. In time, branches opened in Normandy, London, and Berlin.

Carrying memories of the imperial court while creating new clothes for the 1920s: this relationship of translating an inherited aesthetic into a present-day form also offers a clue to the later revival.

In 1926, an Attempt to Express Differences among Women through Perfume

Following clothing, perfumes were introduced in 1926. The four scents, produced at Molinard in Grasse, were Blonde, Brunette, Titiane, and Gray Silver. They envisaged different types of women according to hair color and age. Gray Silver was dedicated to Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna.

Seen from today, these categories rely heavily on appearance. Even so, they show that the house was bringing differences among wearers into the conception of perfume, rather than offering just one fragrance to everyone. When considering the current perfumes, it is more useful to look at how the idea of “what kind of person to express through scent” has changed than to assume the old formulas have continued unchanged.

Financial difficulties brought the couture house to a close in 1931. According to the official history, perfume production continued afterward into the 1940s. Clothing and fragrance activities did not end at the same time, nor did they continue uninterrupted from then until today.

A Book Opens a Path beyond Modeling

Olga Sorokina, who undertook the revival, was born in Vitebsk, Belarus, and entered fashion as a model. In a 2015 interview, she recalled that working in cities including London, New York, and Berlin had helped her meet different people and develop her own ideas.

The turning point was Alexandre Vassiliev’s book Beauty in Exile. Reading about people who had left their homeland after the revolution and about fashion history, she became fascinated by IRFĒ’s story. According to a 2010 interview, she met the founders’ granddaughter, Xenia, in 2006.

That encounter in Paris became more than a procedure for using a dormant name. Sorokina was entrusted with preserving the founding family’s spirit while creating an entirely contemporary aesthetic. IRFĒ became her first role as a creative director.

Revival as a Question of How to Set the Past in Motion

In 2008, Sorokina’s relaunch of the house was unveiled at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. In 2013, she staged a show at Paris Fashion Week. Vogue’s interview ahead of that presentation also reported that the revival had the approval of the founders’ granddaughter. It was a process of bringing a name with a long history back into contemporary clothing design.

In the 2013 Vogue interview, she said that she had created the first collection as though the house had never stopped working. Bridging a gap of nearly eighty years did not mean making more old clothes, but imagining what the house would be creating now if it had continued to evolve throughout that time.

“I don’t want to fix IRFĒ in retro chic.”

— Olga Sorokina

These words from 2010 capture her approach. At the time, very few authentic old garments could be found, so a revival based on extensive archives was not possible. Rather than copying every detail of the clothes, Sorokina retained clues such as the Youssoupoff family’s crown motif and the purple associated with Irina’s favorite violets.

Meanwhile, the clothing of people living today changes with their mood. On some days they choose structured shapes; on others, soft and voluminous ones. Sorokina said that she observed the attitudes, tastes, and wishes of those around her and developed collections from materials. Not only masterpieces of the past, but changes in people today became subjects for creation.

Returning in New York to the Dresses She Wanted to Make

In 2016, the headquarters and design studio moved to New York. In her official personal account, Sorokina recalls feeling that, while her early contemporary collections were expanding, she had drifted from her original aim of making joyful, beautiful dresses. She therefore reconsidered the house’s direction, focusing on cocktail and evening dresses.

The move from Paris to New York was not simply a change of address. It was a time to choose anew what clothes to make and what people to imagine. This relationship between dresses and personalities would also become a starting point for creating perfume.

Five Fragrant Characters Born for the Centenary

In 2024, the house’s hundredth anniversary, Sorokina introduced a new collection of five fragrances. She developed a perfume project she had wanted to pursue since her time in Paris, starting from dresses and the emotions and personalities of the people who wear them.

She worked with perfumers from dsm-firmenich, allowing each character to run through both scent and bottle. It was a process of passing the perspective she had developed in clothing design to the perfumers’ selection of materials and the shaping of the containers.

What Matters to the Brand

Expressing Dresses and Personalities through Scent and Bottle

“For me, age, skin color, and nationality do not matter.”

— Olga Sorokina

What Sorokina sought to portray in fragrance was a person’s mood and preferred style, rather than age or appearance. The characters she had imagined while making clothes would appear in perfume too. The doll-shaped collection can be understood as five portraits born from that idea.

These personalities appear in the bottles before the scents are even smelled. FranceLab gave form to Sorokina’s sketches, creating small dressed figures with silver-colored heads and shoulders and bodies of colored glass. Louis Claverie also worked on the box design. In the red glass of Centifolia Rose, the “person in red” who inspired it remains present in the container.

Looking at the person, the dress, the bottle, and the scent together makes the house’s creative thinking easier to understand. How, then, did the perfumers translate the visual impression of clothing into materials?

A Red Dress Expressed through More than the Name of a Flower

Honorine Blanc (in Japanese), who created Centifolia Rose, imagined a bold personality and flowers to give that person when she saw Sorokina’s red dress. Her choice of rose began with the image of the person wearing those clothes.

In Blanc’s account of the creation, rose is combined with bergamot and pink pepper to give it boldness, while neroli, iris, and white musk add softness. Cedar and sandalwood then bring a woody astringency. The design layers both strength and softness into one personality.

What is interesting here is that she does not try to express the impression of a red dress through flowers alone. The materials placed around the rose give the person their outline. The perfumer’s work extends beyond associating a dress color with a scent to imagining someone who can carry off that dress.

One Perfumer Distinguishes Anticipation from the Heat of the Night

The subject of Alexis Grugeon’s Marshmallow Musk is a romantic personality. What he sought to express in its creation was the swelling sense of anticipation while waiting for something. To do so, he combined a sweet, marshmallow-like texture with iris and jasmine, layering it with floral and tea elements.

Smoldering Pepper, also by Grugeon, takes as its subject the heat of the city at night and a magnetic presence. Here he combined black pepper, the resin olibanum, and smoky leather with bourbon vanilla. Sweetness is placed among materials different from flowers and tea.

Reading the two works side by side reveals how one perfumer portrays different emotions within the same house. A fragrance that links sweetness with flowers and tea coexists in one collection with another that layers it with pepper and leather. What they share is the creative idea of turning a person’s mood into a combination of materials.

Translating a Person Who Seeks Change into a Combination of Materials

“Olga wanted this fragrance to bring together incompatible materials, the unusual and the familiar.”

— Frank Voelkl (perfumer)

Frank Voelkl (in Japanese)’s response to this brief was Patchouli Forever Worn. Its subject is someone who breaks out of everyday routine and keeps seeking something new. Voelkl explains that he combined three types of patchouli-related materials with honey and tobacco.

Here, a character’s desire for change leads to a brief that brings the unusual and the familiar together. Rather than simply noticing patchouli in the fragrance’s name, it is worth looking at the combination Sorokina wanted and how the perfumer responded. The personality is not merely a decorative description of the work, but a concrete condition for choosing its materials.

From People to Places: Turning the House’s Memories into Fragrance

In contrast to the doll-shaped fragrances portraying people, Heritage takes places connected with the house’s story as its subjects. It shows that today’s dresses are not the only things IRFĒ seeks to preserve in scent.

Ma France Folie Parisienne is inspired by the history of Parisian couture and Rue Duphot, where the house’s early boutique stood. Created by Rodrigo Flores-Roux (in Japanese), it layers jasmine, rose, and iris with oakmoss, patchouli, and leather. It explores memories of Paris through the chypre fragrance family, centered on flowers, moss, and woods.

The doll-shaped works translate the impression of a person wearing clothes into materials. Heritage takes the places where the house has spent its life as the subjects of fragrance. Though their subjects differ, the two projects can be read together through a perspective that brings people and memories back into present-day expression.

The name inherited from the founding family and the dresses she creates herself: connecting them through scent is what makes today’s IRFĒ interesting to discover. Whether one enters through the figures of the dolls or the combinations of flowers and woods, beyond them lies Sorokina’s work of setting a past story in motion as an expression of today.

An Aside…

In 2015, Sorokina’s Paris studio stood next to the hotel Le Burgundy. In fact, she had already stayed at the hotel before opening her studio. She had first been a guest right beside the place that would later become her workplace.

Rue Duphot in that neighborhood was also the location of the early house. Sorokina looked at old photographs of the street and took an interest in how the city had changed. In the Paris where she traced the founding family’s history, her own small memories had come to overlap.

References

1. CRASH Magazine, “OLGA SOROKINA ON HERITAGE” (April 20, 2015) — Her approach to revival, reading, and meeting the founding family — https://www.crash.fr/olga-sorokina-interview/
2. Maison IRFĒ, “Heritage” — The founders, the 1924 debut, early perfumes, interruption, and revival — https://irfe.com/heritage/
3. Maison IRFĒ, “ABOUT FRAGRANCE” — The 1926 perfumes, the move to New York, and inspiration for the current collection — https://irfe.com/about/
4. Modem, “Olga Sorokina” (October 19, 2010) — The 2006 meeting, archives, and clothing design after the revival — https://www.modemonline.com/modem-mag/article/964-olga-sorokina
5. Maison IRFĒ, “Olga Sorokina” — Her upbringing, the encounter with the book, and the 2008 revival — https://irfe.com/olga-sorokina/
6. British Vogue, “Couture House Maison Irfé Relaunched” (September 19, 2013) — The 2013 show and the founding family’s cooperation — https://www.vogue.co.uk/gallery/maison-irfe-couture-house-relaunched-olga-sorokina
7. Maison IRFĒ / Newsfile, “Maison IRFE Creates Captivating Fragrances and Gowns in NYC” (May 6, 2024) — Five centenary fragrances and collaboration with perfumers — https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/207508/Maison-IRFE-Creates-Captivating-Fragrances-and-Gowns-in-NYC
8. Maison IRFĒ, “FRAGRANCE” — Dresses, doll-shaped bottles, and FranceLab — https://irfe.com/fragrance/
9. Maison IRFĒ, “FRAGRANCE ARTISANSHIP” — Perfumers’ accounts of creation, and the design of the bottles and boxes — https://irfe.com/artisanship/
10. Maison IRFĒ, “CENTIFOLIA ROSE” — Inspiration, notes, and perfumer — https://irfe.com/product/centifolia-rose/
11. Maison IRFĒ, “MARSHMALLOW MUSK” — Inspiration, notes, and perfumer — https://irfe.com/product/marshmallow-musk/
12. Maison IRFĒ, “SMOLDERING PEPPER” — Notes, perfumer, and its description as a scent for women and men — https://irfe.com/product/smoldering-pepper/
13. Maison IRFĒ, “PATCHOULI FOREVER WORN” — Inspiration, notes, and perfumer — https://irfe.com/product/patchouli-forever/
14. Maison IRFĒ, “MA FRANCE FOLIE PARISIENNE” — Inspiration, notes, and perfumer — https://irfe.com/product/irfe-ma-france-folie-parisienne-eau-de-parfum-spray-100ml/