A Comme des Garçons perfume is not ‘beautiful’

A holey sweater artfully made using sabotaged knitting machines. Protective bulges layered on to a woman’s body. The soft scents of cardamom, musk and rose emerging from a concrete container in a fine mist. Perfumes introduced as ‘odeurs’ that are not Pour Homme or Pour Femme. A big sexy global department store named after a Mayfair street. Boutiques that pop up and vanish. Japanese fashion house Comme des Garçons is part dazzling exactitude, part sucker punch. One immense, perplexing, juicy work of art.

In 1994, designer Rei Kawakubo’s inventive modus operandi didn’t suggest a move into the more industrial realm of fragrance. Since 1973, she had pushed at the lines of the body, tearing up notions of taste, comfort and status with her clothes. How would these values be translated into a less tangible medium? ‘By telling a story around what was unique and unconventional, by transgressing industry norms about advertising and packaging,’ says Comme des Garçons president Adrian Joffe in the foreword to a new book by Dino Simonett, celebrating 30 years of Comme des Garçons Parfums.

Comme des Garçons perfume: 30 years of disruptive fragrance

The brand’s first fragrance, Eau de Parfum, was launched around the pool at the Ritz Paris, the room decorated with sacks of yellow liquid. Its raison d’être, penned by Kawakubo, was presented in bold Helvetica type across two double pages: ‘A perfume that works like a medicine and behaves like a drug. To excite the feelings, to stir the emotions, to raise the spirit and to make one feel positive. The pleasure of a perfume for oneself.’ With those words, Kawakubo crashed through the fragrance industry’s sedate notions of gender, design and function. She offered a new sense of taste.

She is interested in smells, rather than the business of perfume, a distinction pressed by Comme des Garçons Parfums’ creative director Christian Astuguevieille, who says he doesn’t like things that are ‘too beautiful’ or ‘excessive’ in their beauty. ‘Very beautiful things are, to us, suspicious, boring and unsettling. The concept of Comme des Garçons Parfums is defined without the notion of beauty.’

Astuguevieille – an artist, sculptor, furniture designer, maker of jewellery and objects – is also most certainly not a ‘nose’ yet has overseen the development of some 94 fragrances ranging from the polluted grassiness of London’s Serpentine Gallery location to the classic English rose for Grace Coddington.

When he first met Kawakubo in 1991, they did not talk about perfume. She invited him to create rope sculptures painted black to sit in harmony with her latest collection. ‘And I created an imaginary forest,’ he says. Around the same time, he had been making objects inspired by wabi-sabi and furoshiki in his Paris studio. He is an interlocutor of odour, working between a number of perfumers and Kawakubo herself to translate concepts to elicit the most abstract scents. How would a perfume be if it were offcentre is a question never far from his mind.

As a collaborator on the debut fragrance – acting as co-author and poetic emissary – Astuguevieille described the structure of the original eau de parfum as ‘a journey along which windows open and close in succession’. A precursor to the beauty-product-as-home-sculpture we see so much of today, the bottle was designed to lie horizontally like a stone at the bottom of a stream. Kawakubo created the now-recognisable pebble bottle and the vacuum-packed interior while Franco-American designer Marc Atlan conceptualised the graphic vocabulary for the box and the bottle – all of which still confidently sit out of the mainstream. It embodies Kawakubo’s practice in the most direct way; it is a bottle that cannot stand up yet fits comfortably in the palm of the hand.

At Dover Street Market in London, a tree-like iron structure on the ground floor accommodates the brand’s fragrances. The bottles seem small, humble, regardless of their size. Even when they are 200ml, they are wide not tall; the eye is kept low, you peer at them from above and hover. The pebbles lie face down, seemingly discarded, unassuming and unpretentious – the opposite of the shiny, erect, metallic bottles that are commonplace elsewhere.

All of the vessels for Comme des Garçons Parfums are provocations, ranging from thick glass rectangles, wider than they are tall, to round cylinders and ones that appear to have flat bases but will not stand up. Their boxes appear as utilitarian as Apple products and are free from the embossed logos, thin cellophane, and polyester ribbon that still dominate the wider fragrance industry.

To date, the Comme des Garçons fragrance portfolio includes scents made with a musician, a milliner, a gallery, a muse, an artist, a magazine and a furniture design company. For the last three decades, the notion of ‘guerrilla’ has been key to the output of both Kawakubo and Astuguevieille. ‘Our olfactory research has evolved over time, but the principle has remained our loyalty to audacity and freedom,’ says Astuguevieille. That concept is the freedom to use materials like tar, the smell of clothes drying in the wind or of a garage, while knowing how to use classic substances like vetiver and patchouli. ‘We prefer not to be stuck in a category, but to be free and different.

Comme des Garçons Parfums 1994-2025, a new book by Dino Simonett celebrating three decades of Comme des Garçons disruptive fragrances, is available now at shop.doverstreetmarket.com.

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A version of this article appears in the March 2025 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on international newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.