Heritage
A house, in its own words
The house emerged from Beau Rhee's established career as an artist and designer working across multiple media. Rhee founded Atelier de Geste as a New York-based art and design studio, initially focused on movement-based performances and sculptural work before expanding into fragrance. The transition from visual and performance art to perfumery reflects a conceptual approach: the studio treats scent as another medium through which to explore gesture, physicality, and ephemeral experience. Atelier de Geste does not present itself as a heritage perfume house in the classical sense. There is no multi-generational family tradition or historical connection to traditional perfumery centers like Grasse. Instead, the brand's heritage lies in contemporary art practice, with Beau Rhee's background informing a distinctly conceptual approach to fragrance creation. The house first gained recognition within art and design circles before attracting attention from fragrance enthusiasts seeking alternatives to mainstream perfumery.
Atelier de Geste operates from the premise that fragrance exists in dialogue with the body and its movements through space. The studio's name itself references gesture, suggesting an emphasis on action, process, and embodied experience over static representation. Beau Rhee has described creating movement-based performances and sculptures before turning attention to scent as another dimension of physical presence. The philosophical underpinning of the brand rejects the notion of perfume as mere luxury product or status marker. Instead, each fragrance functions as a record of gesture, an olfactory trace of movement and sensation. The house maintains that scent operates in time, shifting and evolving as the wearer moves through different contexts. This temporal quality connects perfumery to performance art, where both mediums unfold sequentially and cannot be fully captured in a single moment. Atelier de Geste fragrances are designed to interact with individual body chemistry, creating unique combinations that acknowledge the wearer's own physical specificity.