Lila Moss on Fronting Her First Fragrance Campaign and Growing Up Moss

There was Marc Jacobs Daisy, the fresh, bright one; there was Decadence, the vampy, sultry one; now there's Perfect, the everyone. "[The idea is] I'm perfect as I am," explains Jacobs. "I don't aspire to be this; I am this."

"Being a gay man, you know, there are certain kinds of gay men in the community that find a certain male type to be their idea of perfection," he says, in an interview conducted via Zoom. He takes a swig of a bulky vape pen, and the plumes of resulting smoke cloud over his meticulously groomed facial hair like mist descending over forested hills. 

     I had tried to achieve that look at some point. I went to the gym and butched it up a little bit, and it didn't work for me. I could get into it as a part, but it wasn't my life. My 'perfect' is about fluidity and celebrating all of it. Stop labeling everything and just call it beauty."

The scent — an offbeat veil of rhubarb, daffodil, and cedarwood, the fumes of artisanal dessert wafting through an oak dining room — premieres with a kaleidoscopic cast of 43. At its center: Lila Moss, 17, and wearing her mother's cheekbones, fulfilling her ancestral covenant to become a Marc Jacobs muse on the cusp of adulthood.

What was it like growing up with a fashion icon as your mom? We ask. "I visited her on shoots sometimes," Moss says. Was it glamorous and thrilling and every little girl's dream? "I didn't really pay attention." Moss is not being flip; to her, Kate was just Mom. That is until Lila saw her parents putting together a Rizzoli coffee-table book filled with photos of the woman who gave birth to her. (This touching family album is available via Amazon.) "I just remember seeing so many images of her in one place, by so many incredible photographers, and it made me realize how amazing her career has been and continues to be," Moss says.

When this mother and daughter appear in public together, they seem tethered by a now-imaginary umbilical cord: shoulder-to-shoulder in the front row at London Fashion Week; holding hands on the streets of Paris; arm-in-arm at Jacobs's wedding in New York last year. And that connection is there even when they are apart. 

                  A couple of years ago, when Lila smelled a scent of rose and ylang-ylang, "I was like, 'that smells really familiar,'" she says. Turns out, "my mom used it when she was pregnant with me!" This emotional strength of scent is undeniable. But the stories that we hear in new-fragrance-launch interviews tend to illuminate some unseen power of jasmine or musk, like a superhero discovering she can suddenly shoot lasers out of her eyes. The reality is, the power of scent can be experienced in the smallest, most intimate ways.

Jacobs admits it took him time to appreciate his husband's signature scent, but now it's a meaningful part of their bond. "He really believes in his ritual, and he's always very clean. His fragrance is really strong," he says. "But on him it just all works. I guess because he's the love of my life... Everything that reminds me of him, I adore." Love is intense. Scent might be stronger.