Heritage
A house, in its own words
Rei Kawakubo established the Comme des Garçons fashion house in Tokyo in 1969. When she arrived in Paris in 1981 with her debut collection, the fashion world met her with incomprehension and outright hostility. She wore black, shredded fabric, asymmetry, and deconstruction at a time when fashion demanded structure, polish, and conventional femininity. She was called "Hiroshima chic" by some critics. Her arrival reframed what fashion could say. The fragrance division emerged in 1993 as a collaboration between Kawakubo and perfume veteran Christian Astuguevieille, with the first fragrance, simply titled Eau de Parfum, launching in 1994 at the Ritz Paris. The venue choice and its staging — the pool area decorated with sacks of yellow liquid — signaled the house's intent: commercial perfumery would never be business as usual for Comme des Garçons. Astuguevieille's influence shaped the early direction, working with Kawakubo to build a program based on ideas rather than market research. The fragrance line has operated as a platform for experimentation ever since, expanding into numbered series that each explore a distinct olfactory territory, collaborating with artists, composers, and milliners, and maintaining a deliberately anti-commercial posture that has only deepened its cult status. Kawakubo has described Comme des Garçons perfumes as defined without the notion of beauty. This statement, radical in a luxury market built on aspiration and sensory pleasure, underpins everything the fragrance division does. The house asks what happens when you treat scent as pure concept — when a perfume exists to provoke thought, discomfort, or reflection rather than simply to smell nice. Each fragrance series operates like a research project. Series 3 Incense, launched in 2002, explored ritualistic smoke and spiritual resonance. Series 6 Synthetic engaged with industrial materials and artificial textures — materials perfumery traditionally avoids. The Odeur series pushed into abstract territory where the reference point is not a flower or a forest but an atmosphere, an act, or an emotion. This anti-beauty stance is not nihilism. It is a genuine creative position: that art does not owe the viewer comfort. The house works with a rotating cast of independent perfumers — Anne-Sophie Chapuis, Quentin Bisch, Mark Buxton, Caroline Dumur, among others — rather than assigning a single house perfumer. This structure means each fragrance arrives with a different perspective, and no two series feel alike. The brand refuses to categorize its releases by gender, by season, or by target demographic. The fragrance portfolio is designed to be encountered, not collected comprehensively. This intentional anti-commercialism, combined with limited distribution and deliberate scarcity, has made Comme des Garçons fragrances cult objects with a devoted following.