A holey sweater artfully made utilizing sabotaged knitting machines. Protecting bulges layered on to a girl’s physique. The mushy scents of cardamom, musk and rose rising from a concrete container in a wonderful mist. Perfumes launched as ‘odeurs’ that aren’t Pour Homme or Pour Femme. An enormous horny world division retailer named after a Mayfair avenue. Boutiques that pop up and vanish. Japanese vogue home Comme des Garçons is a component dazzling exactitude, half sucker punch. One immense, perplexing, juicy murals.
In 1994, designer Rei Kawakubo’s creative modus operandi didn’t recommend a transfer into the extra industrial realm of perfume. Since 1973, she had pushed on the traces of the physique, tearing up notions of style, consolation and standing along with her garments. How would these values be translated right into a much less tangible medium? ‘By telling a narrative round what was distinctive and unconventional, by transgressing business norms about promoting and packaging,’ says Comme des Garçons president Adrian Joffe within the foreword to a brand new guide by Dino Simonett, celebrating 30 years of Comme des Garçons Parfums.
Comme des Garçons fragrance: 30 years of disruptive perfume
Reverse, CDG Dot, £90 for 100ml; CDG, £90 for 100ml, each by Comme des Garçons Parfums
(Picture credit score: Pictures by Neil Gladstone at Future Studios; artwork route by Sophie Gladstone)
The model’s first perfume, Eau de Parfum, was launched across the pool on the Ritz Paris, the room embellished with sacks of yellow liquid. Its raison d’être, penned by Kawakubo, was offered in daring Helvetica kind throughout two double pages: ‘A fragrance that works like a drugs and behaves like a drug. To excite the sentiments, to stir the feelings, to boost the spirit and to make one really feel optimistic. The pleasure of a fragrance for oneself.’ With these phrases, Kawakubo crashed via the perfume business’s sedate notions of gender, design and performance. She provided a brand new sense of style.
She is occupied with smells, slightly than the enterprise of fragrance, a distinction pressed by Comme des Garçons Parfums’ artistic director Christian Astuguevieille, who says he doesn’t like issues which are ‘too stunning’ or ‘extreme’ of their magnificence. ‘Very stunning issues are, to us, suspicious, boring and unsettling. The idea of Comme des Garçons Parfums is outlined with out the notion of magnificence.’
Astuguevieille – an artist, sculptor, furnishings designer, maker of jewelry and objects – can be most definitely not a ‘nostril’ but has overseen the event of some 94 fragrances starting from the polluted grassiness of London’s Serpentine Gallery location to the traditional English rose for Grace Coddington.
When he first met Kawakubo in 1991, they didn’t speak about fragrance. She invited him to create rope sculptures painted black to sit down in concord along with her newest assortment. ‘And I created an imaginary forest,’ he says. Across the similar time, he had been making objects impressed by wabi-sabi and furoshiki in his Paris studio. He’s an interlocutor of odour, working between numerous perfumers and Kawakubo herself to translate ideas to elicit probably the most summary scents. How would a fragrance be if it have been offcentre is a query by no means removed from his thoughts.
Reverse, Eau de Parfum, £70 for 50ml, by Comme des Garçons Parfums
(Picture credit score: Pictures by Neil Gladstone at Future Studios; artwork route by Sophie Gladstone)
As a collaborator on the debut perfume – performing as co-author and poetic emissary – Astuguevieille described the construction of the unique eau de parfum as ‘a journey alongside which home windows open and shut in succession’. A precursor to the beauty-product-as-home-sculpture we see a lot of as we speak, the bottle was designed to lie horizontally like a stone on the backside of a stream. Kawakubo created the now-recognisable pebble bottle and the vacuum-packed inside whereas Franco-American designer Marc Atlan conceptualised the graphic vocabulary for the field and the bottle – all of which nonetheless confidently sit out of the mainstream. It embodies Kawakubo’s follow in probably the most direct method; it’s a bottle that can’t rise up but suits comfortably within the palm of the hand.
At Dover Avenue Market in London, a tree-like iron construction on the bottom ground accommodates the model’s fragrances. The bottles appear small, humble, no matter their dimension. Even when they’re 200ml, they’re vast not tall; the attention is saved low, you peer at them from above and hover. The pebbles lie face down, seemingly discarded, unassuming and unpretentious – the alternative of the shiny, erect, metallic bottles which are commonplace elsewhere.
The entire vessels for Comme des Garçons Parfums are provocations, starting from thick glass rectangles, wider than they’re tall, to spherical cylinders and ones that seem to have flat bases however is not going to rise up. Their bins seem as utilitarian as Apple merchandise and are free from the embossed logos, skinny cellophane, and polyester ribbon that also dominate the broader perfume business.
Up to now, the Comme des Garçons perfume portfolio consists of scents made with a musician, a milliner, a gallery, a muse, an artist, {a magazine} and a furnishings design firm. For the final three a long time, the notion of ‘guerrilla’ has been key to the output of each Kawakubo and Astuguevieille. ‘Our olfactory analysis has advanced over time, however the precept has remained our loyalty to arrogance and freedom,’ says Astuguevieille. That idea is the liberty to make use of supplies like tar, the scent of garments drying within the wind or of a storage, whereas figuring out use traditional substances like vetiver and patchouli. ‘We want to not be caught in a class, however to be free and totally different.
Odeur 53; Odeur 10; Odeur 71, all £110 for 200ml, by Comme des Garçons Parfums
(Picture credit score: Pictures by Neil Gladstone at Future Studios; artwork route by Sophie Gladstone)
Comme des Garçons Parfums 1994-2025, a brand new guide by Dino Simonett celebrating three a long time of Comme des Garçons disruptive fragrances, is out there now at store.doverstreetmarket.com.
comme-des-garcons-parfum.com
A model of this text seems within the March 2025 concern of Wallpaper*, out there in print on worldwide newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple Information +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* as we speak.
Supply: Wallpaper
