The Plume et Pallette shop in Disney Epcot is home to designer French fragrances from Chanel, Escada, Givenchy, Lacoste and more. In La Signature, you can choose from over 70 different French cosmetics and fragrances, including Guerlain.  You can get a bottle of my daughter’s favorite, Miss Dior or Bergamote Calabria custom etched by a glass artist there.

Miss Dior has one of the more moving origin stories in perfumery, tightly bound up with WWII and Christian Dior’s relationship with his younger sister.

Miss Dior launched in 1947, the same year as Christian Dior’s debut “New Look” couture collection — Dior wanted to be as much a perfumer as a couturier, and created it alongside his very first fashion line. The name came about almost by accident: during a meeting, his sister Catherine walked into the room and Dior’s muse, Mitzah Bricard, greeted her with “Ah voilà, Miss Dior” — the phrase stuck.

Catherine was more than a namesake. Born in Normandy, her family was financially ruined during the Depression, and by 17 she’d gone into exile with her father in Provence before eventually becoming a French Resistance fighter. Her wartime service came at enormous cost — she endured brutal conditions at Ravensbrück concentration camp, an explosives plant in Torgau, a potassium mine in Prussia, and an aviation factory in Leipzig, emerging emaciated after aging what felt like a decade in under a year. When Christian tried to welcome her home with her favorite dish, a cheese soufflé made with rare wartime-sourced ingredients, she was too weakened to eat it. So the fragrance, born just after the war, was as much a tribute to her survival as to sisterly love.

Dior’s brief to perfumer Paul Vacher was simple: make me a perfume that smells like love. Vacher worked alongside Serge Heftler Louiche and perfumer Jean Carles, who built the fragrance on the structure of the classic 1917 chypre Chypre de Coty, while folding in the green galbanum note popularized by Vent Vert and the bold accord style of Ma Griffe, both contemporary hits of the mid-1940s. The resulting blend combined chypre with rose and jasmine from Grasse, softened by lavender and sage over an oakmoss base.

The perfume debuted alongside Dior’s first couture show on February 12, 1947, at 10:30 a.m. on Avenue Montaigne, right after his groundbreaking collections were unveiled to the fashion world. The first bottle didn’t actually sell until December 1, 1947, after which its popularity spread quickly, and it became a fixture of salons, tea dances, and debutante balls.

The earliest Miss Dior bottles were simple transparent glass amphoras, but as Dior’s couture ambitions grew, he had Baccarat redesign the vessel with a ground-glass stopper, fine gilding, and hand-cut crystal, presented in a padded velvet box — treating the bottle itself as a luxury object. The now-iconic houndstooth-check packaging followed in 1950.

The fragrance has been reformulated and relaunched many times since, with Natalie Portman becoming the face of the brand starting in 2010. It remains one of Dior’s flagship scents, still built around its founding motifs of jasmine, rose, and lily-of-the-valley — the same flowers Christian Dior grew up loving in his family’s garden in Granville.

Bergamote Calabria is a part of Guerlain’s Aqua Allegoria collection, a line built to celebrate the wonders of the world through fragrances composed by traveling perfumer-explorers, searching out exceptional raw materials to turn into allegories of nature. Bergamote Calabria specifically is a sun-drenched journey into floral, fruity, zesty bergamot, inspired by the plantations of Calabria in southern Italy.

  • Created: 2017, by Guerlain in-house perfumers Thierry Wasser and Delphine Jelk
  • Notes: Sunny top notes of bergamot zest, pink peppercorn, and fresh green tones, moving into a heart warmed by spicy cardamom and ginger, settling into a base of white musks, amber, and creamy vanilla.
  • Bottle: Shares the collection’s signature beehive-etched glass, a nod to Guerlain’s long-running bee motif rather than anything equestrian
  • Sustainability angle: Composed of up to 95% natural-origin ingredients, in a refillable bottle made with French beet-root alcohol from responsible farming.

Bergamote Calabria is purely a Mediterranean citrus fantasy — no horses, saddles, or sport anywhere in its DNA.