This year, Brioni celebrates its 80th anniversary with an extraordinary collaboration – Dualité, Crystal Edition perfume – a limited-edition fragrance housed in a handcrafted Lalique crystal flacon. This limited collector’s edition features just 18 signed crystal flacons, each meticulously crafted using ancient techniques, demonstrating both brands’ commitment to excellence.
Four years in the making, the project brings together Brioni’s Design director, Norbert Stumpfl, and Lalique’s Artistic director, Marc Larminaux. The result fuses haute perfumery with fine crystal artistry in a way rarely seen today.
“We really wanted to create something very special, because we are celebrating our 80th anniversary, and this is really a symbol of our craftsmanship,” Stumpfl explained. Lalique, Brioni’s fragrance licensee since 2019, was the natural partner. Stumpfl admired the creative possibilities of working with Lalique, noting how closely their design styles align. Both brands strive for purity and high-end luxury in their work. The clarity of the crystal reveals every detail of the craftsmanship inside, and Stumpfl appreciates rare materials and handmade techniques. He also compares the shape of the bottle to the silhouette of a well-tailored suit – narrow at the base, then gracefully widening like the shoulder of a perfect jacket.
At the heart of what makes Dualité, Crystal Edition so remarkable is its manufacturing process. Each bottle features an octagonal prismatic design – a tribute to Brioni’s eight decades – whose smooth, angular lines contrast dramatically with an internal eruption of crystal shards.
These intricate internal sculptures can only be achieved through the ancient lost-wax technique (cire perdue) first explored by René Lalique around 1893. This method has been faithfully preserved by Lalique’s master glassmakers at their workshop in Wingen-sur-Moder, Alsace, France. The process involves modeling wax, encasing it in plaster, melting away the wax and filling the mold with molten crystal. After the plaster mold is filled with crystal, it spends more than a week in an enclosed furnace at precisely controlled temperatures to avoid thermal shock. Even then, success isn’t guaranteed. “You break the mold, and you just cross fingers, hoping that everything went the way it should, and that you don’t have fragilities like bubbles or what we call calcine, which means kind of tiny, little broken parts that you wouldn’t even notice, and that would break later on,” Larminaux explained. The stopper is also made this way for continuity.
This exacting technique explains both the limited production run and the €40,000 EUR price tag. Each empty flacon weighs nearly 6 kilos when paired with its alabaster case-a white stone box that transforms into a pedestal reminiscent of a Roman column.
The fragrance housed in this extraordinary vessel is equally impressive. Perfumer Michel Almairac composed the Extrait de Parfum, blending rare ingredients with precision. It opens with an ozonic freshness sharpened by green apple, then softens into violet and ambroxan. The rarest element? Iris butter, an ingredient that takes seven years to produce. The fragrance closes with notes of cedarwood, moss and dry amber that linger beautifully on the skin.
Brioni chose Milan Design Week for the debut of Dualité Crystal Edition, and its launch was deliberate. “This is really more of an artistic sculpture,” said Stumpfl.
For those who value heritage and artistry, Dualité, Crystal Edition perfume is a rare intersection of fragrance and fine craftsmanship. It’s not just a scent, it’s a legacy captured in crystal.
