After living in France for a year and ending up in Paris for work every fashion season (I know, I know, what is a fashion season anymore anyway), my love and knowledge of French music is only expanding. When I heard that DJ producer and house music pioneer Etienne De Crecy had teamed up with Martell Cognac to design a bottle and host a night in London to celebrate the partnerships, I was super keen to see the result.
It’s always interesting with bottle design collaborations, because they are so textbook, but can also go so wildly wrong where you feel that you’ve ended up with a super inauthentic product. This isn’t the case here. The design features intricate neon lights, the iconic rotating blue cube and 3D vibrating lines against the iconic Martell blue which embody the 1980s French Touch nights of Paris, the ‘City of Lights’. It even glows in the dark.
Monsieur De Crécy told me that the canvas of the bottle of the oldest of the great cognac houses (founded by Jean Martell in 1715 at the height of the French Art de Vivre movement) was a pleasure to work with in part to the existing deep blue iconic tone which symbolises night time and the idea of bringing the night to life with the neon detail.
The ideologies of the design were brought to life immersively last night via dinner at the Mondrian followed by Etienne’s phenomenal DJ set at Wellington Members Club. Definitely check my Snapchat and Instagram for more, and try your hand at creating La French Touch cocktail with Martell here, and learn more about the Art of Martell and cognac craftsmanship here.
Photos by Alex Lord