In this documentary, we explore the September 1978 launch of Yves Saint Laurent's perfume Opium aboard the four-masted tall ship Peking in New York Harbor — the most expensive, most photographed, and most controversial fragrance debut in the history of luxury, attended by Cher, Halston, Truman Capote, Diana Vreeland, and Grace Jones, condemned within weeks by Chinese-American organizations as an insult to a century of suffering, and the night a designer who had named his perfume after a narcotic became the figure that polite society could neither absorb nor ignore.

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On the evening of September 20, 1978, a four-masted ironbark tall ship sat anchored in New York Harbor, its masts strung with banners of red, gold, and purple silk. The decks were perfumed with a fragrance that had not yet been sold on American soil. Two thousand white cattleya orchids, flown in from Hawaii, hung from the railings.

A one-thousand-pound bronze Buddha sat at the center of the main deck. At midnight, thirty thousand dollars of fireworks erupted above the water, spelling two words in burning light: the name of the designer and the name of the perfume.

The designer was Yves Saint Laurent. The perfume was called Opium.

He had been born in 1936 in Oran, Algeria, the son of a French pied-noir lawyer. He was painfully shy, bookish, and bullied so relentlessly that drawing dresses for his sisters became the only safe country.

In 1953, at seventeen, he won the International Wool Secretariat competition. Among the designers he defeated was a young Karl Lagerfeld. Christian Dior hired him on the spot. Four years later, Dior died. The twenty-one-year-old boy from Algeria became the head designer of the most famous fashion house in the world.

In 1960 the French army conscripted him into the Algerian War. The hazing was so brutal that within three weeks he suffered a complete mental breakdown. While he was committed to the Val-de-Grâce Military Hospital, the House of Dior fired him.

He sued for breach of contract, won, and used the settlement to launch his own house with Pierre Bergé in 1961. Le Smoking, the Mondrian dress, and Rive Gauche followed. By 1978 he was worth an estimated six hundred million dollars.

Squibb, his American licensee, quietly suggested a name change for the new fragrance. Saint Laurent's response was five words long: Opium or no perfume.

The eight hundred guests aboard the Peking that night were not attending a product launch. They were attending the coronation of a man who had decided that provocation was a legitimate business strategy. Cher, Halston, Truman Capote, Diana Vreeland, Grace Jones, Donna Karan, Nan Kempner, and Loulou de la Falaise drank champagne above decks while cocaine circulated below.

Within weeks, a coalition of Chinese-American organizations called the name an insult to a century of suffering. Saint Laurent refused to apologize. Opium outsold Chanel No. 5 across Europe in its first year.

He spent the rest of his life consumed by the substances he had glamorized. He died in 2008. The art collection he and Bergé had assembled — Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, Mondrian, Eileen Gray furniture, Chinese bronzes — sold at auction in 2009 for $484 million, then the most valuable single private collection ever sold. The Jardin Majorelle in Marrakech, where his ashes were scattered, remains open to the public.