Frédéric Malle was born in Paris in 1962 into a perfume family: his grandfather Serge Heftler-Louiche created Parfums Christian Dior in 1947, and his mother worked on Dior perfumes. His uncle was the film director Louis Malle. He joined the fragrance supplier Roure at 26 as assistant to Jean Amic, spent some fifteen years there, and consulted for Christian Lacroix and Hermès. He opened Editions de Parfums in 2000, sold it to Estée Lauder in 2015 and left at the end of June 2024.

Malle drew the bottle himself, plain and uniform, to put the liquid and the author's name first, and styled the boxes after the covers of French literary publishers such as Gallimard. The first boutique opened in June 2000 at 37 rue de Grenelle in Paris, designed by Andrée Putman, with portraits of the perfumers beside their bottles. It introduced his patented smelling columns, built to let a customer take in a whole perfume at once, the way perfumers judge a scent in the lab.