Message in a bottle; The scent inside is only half the story.

Byline: John Brodie

Some designers are egomaniacs, but Paul Poiret and Elizabeth Arden were two of the worst," says Christie Mayer Lefkowith by way of explaining why a bottle of perfume is never just a bottle of perfume. The red-haired Frenchwoman leads me into the bedroom of her Park Avenue apartment. Seven-foot-high display cases line the walls, housing some of her 10,000 pieces. In one corner couturiers Elsa Schiaparelli, Christian Dior, and Coco Chanel look down on the hatmaker Lilly Dache. On a nearby shelf, the handiwork of the sculptors Rene Lalique and Andre Jollivet jostles for attention.

Lefkowith hands me a bottle of Arden's Blue Grass from 1934 to illustrate her point. "Her perfumes are always about her. Her passion was breeding racehorses at her stable in Kentucky, so she created a fragrance named after the Bluegrass state. Then her life changes." With a cocked eyebrow, Lefkowith gestures toward a frosted-glass bottle depicting a society matron cupping her hand over her mouth and whispering into the ear of another. It could be a scene from The Women.

"Arden gets divorced and starts dating a lot, so she creates On Dit, which means 'they say,' because she becomes the subject of gossip." Sensing my concern for the long-dead cosmetics mogul's reputation, Lefkowith redirects my gaze to the happy ending-a Baccarat-crystal fan with a costume jewel hanging around its neck. "But look what happens: she gets remarried and launches Cyclamen. The package comes with a detachable replica of the ruby brooch she received from her husband on their wedding day."

To the outsider, this glass menagerie might appear to be the escapist preserve of some damaged Tennessee Williams heroine, but Lefkowith is far from tragic. The former art dealer (and author of The Art of Perfume and Masterpieces of the Perfume Industry) is a major catalyst in the transformation of what was once a flea-market pastime for a handful of scruffy eccentrics into the chic obsession of well-connected swans like jewelry designer Peggy Guinness and Tiffany Dubin, a vintage hound and the stepdaughter of Sotheby's ex-chairman Alfred Taubman. At an auction Lefkowith organized in Geneva in 2000, a bidding war erupted over a rare Lalique bottle that ended up selling for more than $275,000. In 2004, the Fashion Institute of Technology lent bottle collectors further cachet with the exhibit "Temptation, Joy, and Scandal: Fragrance and Fashion, 1900-1950."

"Sometimes I feel a bit like a drug dealer," says Roja Dove of the way his clients pester him to find obscure bottles for their collections. The perfume historian and former Guerlain executive recently opened his own Haute Parfumerie at Harrods in London, where he does a vigorous business in vintage bottles and exclusive reissues like Balenciaga Le Dix.

Bottle designers, too, are enjoying the attention. These artisans who once labored in obscurity are garnering the sort of accolades more familiar to authors and filmmakers. During New York fashion week last February, Lauren Bush raced from Calvin Klein's fall show to attend a "bottle signing" at Bloomingdale's for Marc Rosen, who has created packaging for Karl Lagerfeld, Fendi, and Nina Ricci, and was launching his own fragrance, Shanghai.