L’Wren Scott: Fashion, Mick Jagger and Now a Fragrance

 BEFORE she was a fashion designer whose clothes can be found in the closets of Nicole Kidman and Michelle Obama, and before she was famous for a decade-plus romance with Mick Jagger, L’Wren Scott was one of the most successful stylists working in Los Angeles. One of her assignments, in the early 1990s, was an advertising campaign for Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds, which would become the best-selling celebrity fragrance in the world.

“I don’t remember ever smelling it,” Ms. Scott said the other day in the back seat of a black BMW 750i sedan, which smelled of hand sanitizer and breath mints. Each of the seat-back pouches in her car is stocked with a matching selection of Mentos, cinnamon-flavored Altoids and a miniature bottle of Purell, so that they are easily accessible no matter where she sits.

“It was all about Miss Taylor and her diamonds, which she said always brought her luck,” Ms. Scott said. “But I think that perfume brought her luck.”

Fame, fortune, fragrances, diamonds or men — however they come, and in what order, has little to do with luck.

You think Ms. Scott, adopted and raised by a Mormon family in Roy, Utah, got here by being lucky? As she recalled, it was her mother who told her: Luann (as she was once known), if you really want something, no one is going to knock on your door and just give it to you.

At 44 or so, with her own money and a sense of discipline that would rival a headmistress, Ms. Scott, who will not confirm her age, has created a small, but high-profile, fashion business that she believes is now ripe for outside investment.

She is convincing on this point. After six years in business, her clothes are sold in nearly 100 stores, she has designed a licensed collection of eyewear, and this week, she introduced a fragrance of her own, a limited-edition scent that is a collaboration with Barneys New York.

It is a big week for Ms. Scott, who is also coordinating an enormous wardrobe of clothes for Mr. Jagger to wear during the Rolling Stones “50 & Counting” tour.

At 6-foot-3, a onetime model who got her big break with a Pretty Polly legwear campaign, with a mane of black hair and a mannerist’s sense of movement, she is unmistakable — you might even say famous — though no one appeared to recognize her during an afternoon of scent shopping in Manhattan. When we met earlier at the Carlyle Hotel, just before Thanksgiving, Ms. Scott had mentioned that discovering fragrances was one of her passions.

“This is something I have been obsessed with from a very young age, when I was mixing potions in my mother’s kitchen,” Ms. Scott said. Following her mother’s advice (though not exactly as intended), she left for Paris to pursue her dreams when she was just 17, changed her name and began a life of travel that was defined by scents — “like in Paris, where the smell is buttery and sugary, almost confectionary,” or in India, “where I remember my eyes watering from the spice smell.”

We stopped at Enfleurage, a small store on West 13th Street that specializes in high-end aromatics. Sitting in the low-lighted shop, before a display of hundreds of oils lined up in rows, Ms. Scott dipped her nose into vials labeled vetiver, moss, frankincense, Japanese mint (high in menthol and good for the sinuses), eucalyptus (even better), rosemary oil, rosewood, oregano, bergamots from Calabria in Italy and the Ivory Coast, sandalwoods from Indonesia and Australia, and, finally, one bottle marked “Sex,” which, we were told, was a house blend of ylang-ylang, patchouli and lime.

Then we trotted over to Starbucks, where Ms. Scott, who can be very droll, took surreptitious cellphone photos of Chelsea boys and professed to have never before heard of a gingerbread latte.

“I’ve always been very into smells, and I can pretty much pinpoint them from very far away,” she said.

While creating hers, with the perfumer Ralf Schwieger, Ms. Scott, by her own admission, drove everyone around her “absolutely insane.” At her design studio on King’s Road in London, she dabbed samples on her interns at every opportunity. She invited Mr. Schwieger to stop by to smell the garden at one of her and Mr. Jagger’s homes, about an hour outside Paris in the Loire Valley. (He accidentally boarded an express train and ended up in Bordeaux, three hours away.)