Photo: KILIAN PARIS
French Montana has an exciting new drop!
Kilian Paris founder Kilian Hennessy called the project “unique and fun.”
“French is so authentic, and so pure. We could have [collaborated on] many scents, but Angels' Share was the one that he and I decided it would be perfect,” Hennessy says of the fragrance, which originally launched in 2020 and took Hennessy 14 years to create.
Of the years-long process, he explains, “This scent is the perfect bridge between my family heritage, the Hennessy heritage, and the perfume heritage that I’m hoping to build. The bar was so high, that I feel like I could only disappoint. So that’s why it took me so much time.”
It’s a work ethic French Montana can respect: “He put his heart in it, same way I put my heart in my music.”
Adds Hennessy: “I believe that a great perfume has a great story, long before being a beautiful olfactive harmony. There’s never a great creation, without a great story that led you to that creation. You need to have a theme in mind, a goal in mind, a story you want to tell, an emotion you want to express.”
Ahead, the French Montana shares the story of their unique bond and the importance of fragrance in his world.
KILIAN PARIS
PEOPLE: What is your first memory of fragrance?
French Montana: “Hugging family: your mother, your aunts and uncles. When you’re young, you remember their scent.”
PEOPLE: Do you have a favorite smell?
French Montana: “I love the ocean. And I like the scent of brand new clothes.”
PEOPLE: Have you always worn fragrance?
French Montana:“Always. I believe in scent, because that’s something that people remember about you. I mean, there’s your appearance and your character. Then there is your scent. There is your energy. Everything goes hand-in-hand I think. Your smell is one of top three things you have to worry about when you enter some place.
PEOPLE: Worry?
French Montana: “The last thing you want is a beautiful lady saying she don’t like your scent. Then you know you don’t have a chance at all. You ain’t never going to have a chance.”
PEOPLE: What was your first meeting with Kilian Hennessy like?
French Montana: “We had a Zoom call, and he was talking, but I knew that he got me when Kilian showed me the disc [on top of the cap] with the Cuban chains. That’s when I said, ‘Oh, they’re really paying attention.’ So they incorporated the hip hop into this. I said, ‘We’re going to win big.’ And I fell in love with the story.
Kilian Hennessy: “So cognac is a blend of eau de vie, and it ages in oak barrels. Those oak barrels are not fully sealed, in the sense that there is an evaporation that is coming out. So every year, we have to refill those oak barrels with more eau de vie, so it always stays full. At the House of Hennessy, we call this natural evaporation of alcohol share for the angels. And that’s how the name Angels' Share came up.”
French Montana: “When I first started making music, it was, you go to the studio, you bring your bottle of Hennessy, you sit there and you just start talking crazy on the mic. So when I heard this story, I was like, ‘You know what? Let’s do this.’
PEOPLE: What was it like to collaborate?
French Montana: “It’s like, I know the music I want to make. At first, I start making music, but then I narrow it down, I mold it around the sound that I like. It’s the same thing [here]. Once know you, it’s like, ‘Whoop there it is!’ with your own vibe, your own flavor.”
PEOPLE: Did you all bond over your creative processes?
French Montana: “I was telling Kilian earlier, coming from Morocco to the Bronx when I was 13, not knowing English, and trying to rap when there were a million and one rappers, I had to go against the grain.
I feel it’s the same story with him. He had to go against the grain with this product. He put his heart in it, same way I put my heart in my music. So we’re not coming to you with no flimflam. We’re coming to you with something that we believe in.”
PEOPLE: When you started wearing Angels' Share, what was the reaction?
French Montana: “I’m going to tell you a true story. The first bottle got stolen from me. I had to go buy more. Then number two got stolen from me. That’s when I called Kilian and I said, ‘We onto something.'”
PEOPLE: How do you apply fragrance?
French Montana: “Kilian taught me something: that when you spray fragrance on, you cannot rub it together. I’ll bet you, 99.9% of the people reading this are not going to know that.”
Kilian Hennessy: “And then he said, ‘Where do you put perfume? And I said, ‘Put it wherever you want to be kissed!’
source: people.com
