The Muse: Annick Goutal

On becoming many things, finding your way later, and what we carry forward

Annick Goutal’s story has stayed with me.

She was not one thing.

Before perfume, there was music.

She studied piano. She moved to London. She worked as an au pair, then became a model. Later, back in Paris, she opened an antique shop called Folavril. She became a mother. Only after all of that did perfume enter the picture.

I love that.

Her life feels made up of many moving parts.

One thing leading to another. Skills gathered in one chapter resurfacing somewhere completely different years later.

Even the ribbons Annick had tied around bags of chocolate in her father’s shop as a girl would later influence the way she thought about packaging. Her eye for objects and presentation had already been shaped through antiques. Music, fashion, motherhood, beauty, design. Looking back, it all seems to have accumulated.

That feels particularly relevant to me now.

We are often encouraged to think of a career as though it should reveal itself early.

Choose the path. Build expertise. Stay on it.

I’m not sure that is how many women actually live.

Careers bend around motherhood. Interests get pushed aside because there simply isn’t room for them. Years are spent becoming useful, capable, responsible versions of ourselves.

Then sometimes, later, something opens again.

By then, we have collected enough life to see connections we could never have seen earlier.

Annick did not begin her perfume house at twenty.

Her first Annick Goutal boutique opened in Paris in 1980, after several other careers and after becoming a mother. Eau d’Hadrien, the fragrance that would become one of the house’s signatures, followed in 1981.

Starting again later takes courage.

When we are young, changing direction can feel almost expected.

Later, the stakes are different.

A reputation. An identity. A salary. Experience. Expectations. The version of you other people have come to understand.

I am beginning another chapter myself now.

After close to two decades working in the drinks industry, I have moved into something smaller, more personal and much less certain.

Tea.

A business built around ideas I have probably been collecting for years without knowing they belonged together.

Taste. Hospitality. Beautiful objects. Morning rituals. Home. The small ways we make people feel welcome.

I did not arrive here through a perfectly designed plan.

I arrived here through all the things that came before it.

That is probably why Annick’s story stays with me.

Becoming is rarely neat.

Sometimes it happens slowly.

Sometimes motherhood sits right in the middle of it.

Sometimes the work that eventually feels most like yours comes after you have already been several other people.

Those earlier selves do not disappear.

They come with you.

 

Annick’s story has another layer I find just as compelling.

What happens to something you make when you are no longer there?

Annick died in 1999. Her daughter Camille had been pursuing photography and had not intended to become a perfumer. After her mother’s death, she began learning the craft from Isabelle Doyen, Annick’s long-time collaborator. Together, Camille and Isabelle continued creating perfumes for the house.

A phrase from that period has always stayed with me.

Camille “continued the story”.

That says so much.

A business can be inherited on paper. A sensibility takes longer.

A way of seeing. A standard. A set of instincts. Knowledge passed quietly between people over time.

That is the kind of inheritance I find most interesting.

The things we absorb from the people before us without quite realising we are learning them.

How a table is set.

How guests are welcomed.

How a particular dish is made.

How quality is recognised.

How a house should feel.

How work should be done.

How an idea can pass into someone else’s hands and keep moving.

I think this is why I am increasingly interested in women who have lived several lives.

Women whose stories include changes of direction, motherhood, false starts, different careers, and later chapters that somehow gather everything before them.

I find that reassuring.

Especially standing at the beginning of another chapter myself.

Maybe we do not need to become entirely new people.

Maybe, eventually, all the moving parts begin to make sense.

The Muse is a series from The Keep about people whose lives, work and ideas are worth carrying forward.