A name that means starting over
In August 2016, Loewe released its first fragrance under creative director Jonathan Anderson, who had joined the house in 2014 and had already reworked its ready-to-wear, accessories and visual identity before turning to perfume. He named the launch simply 001, explaining the choice as a deliberate signal that the fragrance marked a new beginning for the house's scent business rather than a continuation of what had come before.
The name carried a specific institutional meaning. Loewe had produced perfumes since 1947, but Parfums Loewe had operated for decades as a separate company with its own website, largely disconnected from the fashion side of the business. Anderson's 001 launch was the first time perfume and fashion were brought together under a single creative direction, and starting the naming sequence at 001 made that institutional reset explicit rather than treating the new fragrance as simply another entry in an existing product line.
Two scents built to blur a line
The launch comprised two complementary fragrances, 001 Woman and 001 Man, developed with Parfums Loewe's in-house perfumer, Emilio Valeros. Anderson deliberately worked against the unisex-fragrance trend already visible elsewhere in the industry at the time, keeping two distinct, gendered names while designing the scents to function together. He described wanting the pair to sit on "the tipping point between masculinity and femininity," specifically so a customer could wear a partner's fragrance rather than only their own, blurring gender lines without erasing the two-name structure altogether.
The packaging carried as much of the concept as the fragrances themselves. Anderson brought in his regular design collaborators M/M (Paris), the graphic design duo he had worked with since before joining Loewe, to create boxes that opened like books rather than like conventional perfume packaging. The boxes were built using paper supplied by the British paper manufacturer James Cropper, decorated with botanical photographs by the early-twentieth-century German photographer Karl Blossfeldt, and topped with simple ash-wood caps on the bottles themselves, a deliberately restrained material choice for a debut fragrance line.
A packaging brief carried by an outside collaborator
Choosing a longstanding design partner rather than an in-house Loewe studio, or a specialist perfume packaging agency, for the 001 boxes reflected how Anderson worked across the house more broadly during his tenure: bringing trusted outside collaborators into categories, in this case fragrance, that had previously operated at arm's length from the main creative direction. James Cropper's own account of the project frames it explicitly as part of Loewe's wider rebranding exercise under Anderson rather than as an isolated packaging commission.
The 001 line's restrained, editorial packaging, muted colours, book-like structure, archival botanical imagery, set a visual language for Loewe fragrance that outlasted Anderson's own departure from the house in 2025, with later fragrance packaging continuing to draw on the same understated, paper-forward approach rather than reverting to more conventional perfume-industry gloss and colour.
The 001 launch also illustrates how a naming decision can carry more strategic weight than the product it labels. Anderson could have named the fragrance after a scent note, a place or his own creative vision, in line with typical perfume-industry convention, but 001 instead described the house's internal reorganisation, merging a previously separate fragrance business into the main creative structure, more clearly than any evocative name could have. The number told trade press and customers what had structurally changed at Loewe before either group had smelled the perfume itself.
Design press response at the time was strongly positive, with coverage in outlets such as Wallpaper describing the launch as a lesson in restrained, perceptive design rather than typical perfume-industry showmanship, and trade outlets covering the launch framed it explicitly as Anderson's fragrance debut at the house rather than as a routine Parfums Loewe release. That framing mattered commercially: fragrance launches rarely receive design-press attention on the scale a runway show does, and the 001 packaging concept helped the launch cross over into design and fashion coverage that a typical perfume release would not have reached.
The 2016 launch also arrived at a moment when several fashion houses were experimenting with niche, design-led fragrance lines positioned against mass-market department-store perfume marketing, heavy on celebrity fronting and saturation advertising. Loewe's decision to lean on a book-like box, muted botanical imagery and a numerical rather than evocative name placed 001 closer to that niche, editorial register than to the glossy, celebrity-fronted perfume advertising still dominant elsewhere in the category at the time.
Written with AI assistance, edited by a human. Find out more about our Use of AI.
