Sunset Blvd

There is a street in Los Angeles that exists in two worlds simultaneously — the real and the mythological. A street where the history of American glamour is not merely remembered, but still felt, on any evening when the light falls just right and the city holds its breath.

Sunset Boulevard is that street. And for Laykin et Cie, it is something more: it is where we began.

In the early 1930s, as the great Hollywood studios were transforming American culture and the Sunset Strip was just beginning to attract the most fashionable boutiques of the era, Sol Laykin opened a salon on Sunset Boulevard that would become one of the most celebrated jewelers in California. Among those who helped establish its reputation was Gloria Swanson — at the time perhaps the most famous actress in the world — who, along with Virginia Zanuck, Constance Bennett, and a circle of Hollywood's most luminous figures, helped introduce Laykin et Cie to a clientele that included Clark Gable, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, and Mae West.

The salon stood virtually across the street from the Trocadero — the legendary nightclub on the Strip where the great bandleaders of the era played until dawn, where Hollywood royalty dined and danced and were photographed, and where the boundary between the silver screen and real life dissolved entirely on any given evening. It was the place to be seen in 1930s Los Angeles. And all of this — the salon, the boutiques, the glamour, the electricity of the Strip — was unfolding at the very height of the Great Depression. While the rest of the country struggled, this small, luminous corner of Los Angeles was manufacturing something the nation desperately needed: beauty, escapism, and the intoxicating promise that dreams were still possible. Hollywood understood that its purpose in those years was not merely entertainment. It was hope. And Laykin et Cie was part of that world.

It was Gloria Swanson who gave us our name on Sunset Boulevard. Decades later, she would become forever associated with the street itself, starring in the film that bears its name — one of the great works of American cinema, dark and beautiful and impossible to forget.

That intersection of glamour and shadow, brilliance and depth, is what I wanted to capture in this fragrance.

Sunset Blvd is my homage to all of it — to the street, to the salon, to the golden and noir world that surrounded them.

But the fragrance itself was born somewhere else entirely.

When the time came to create it, I took my two daughters — then nine and thirteen — to France. Just the three of us. We landed in Paris, rented a car, and I told them I wanted to show them the soul of France before its pinnacle — because while Paris may be the summit of French civilization, its foundation is the countryside. The land. The fields and rivers and ancient villages that have sustained French culture for centuries, producing its great cheeses, its wines, its flowers, and the artisanal traditions that make France unlike anywhere else on earth. To truly understand Paris, I believed, you first had to understand what it rests upon. And so we drove — through the Loire Valley, through Burgundy, through Provence — before arriving at last in Grasse.

Grasse is the ancient perfume capital of the world. It is here that one of the great perfume families has been tending fields of flowers and working in their laboratories since the 1700s. It was in those laboratories, guided by their centuries of knowledge, that my daughters and I began to develop what would become Sunset Blvd.

The beauty of that experience — my children's hands and instincts and laughter in that laboratory, surrounded by the raw materials of one of the world's most ancient crafts — has been an inspiration ever since.

And so it is that on every bottle of this limited edition, quietly inscribed at the base of the label, you will find two sets of initials: O.R.L. and L.A.L. They belong to my daughters, who were there at the creation of something I am very proud to bear the Laykin et Cie name.

Erik Laykin