The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Black & White draws its pulse from a sculpture in Chicago's Loop. The brand's Chicago chapter is anchored by Jean Dubuffet's Monument with Standing Beast, the raw fiberglass piece positioned opposite the James R. Thompson Center. Dubuffet was a proponent of Art Brut, a form of free and spontaneous art that celebrated the aesthetic potential of primitive and childlike languages. Step Aboard translated that idea into scent: raw aldehyde next to candid musk, openness next to closure, softness next to solidity. Perfumer Luca Maffei shaped the 2023 release around those contrasts, the same way the sculpture stacks four elemental shapes into a single statement. There's something deliberate in the parallel, a refusal to sand down the edges that art or fragrance so often demands.
What makes the composition interesting is what it refuses to soften. Aldehydes are a high-wire note, the kind that can read industrial or soapy depending on dose and company. Here they sit next to neroli, a flower that already smells halfway cleaned, and jasmine, which brings the only real sweetness in the pyramid. The base makes a different argument entirely. Styrax leans into the bitter-dark register, resinous and almost ink-like, while coumarin adds a quiet vanillic warmth and musk does the rounding. The tension between the sparkly top and the resinous floor is the whole point.
The evolution
The first twenty minutes are almost aggressive in their brightness. Bergamot opens with that cold-rind snap, then the aldehydes arrive and lift the whole composition into something closer to ozone or freshly laundered cotton straight from a dry cleaner. It feels weightless, almost soapy in a clinical sense, and you'd be forgiven for thinking this is going to be a simple clean floral. Then the jasmine shows up and the temperature shifts. The heart is where the fragrance becomes itself, the neroli softening the aldehydic edge while the white floral gets denser, creamier, less abstract. After the heart has settled into its full expression, the styrax begins to surface. It creeps in from underneath, resinous and dark, like ink bleeding through wet paper. The musk arrives shortly after, and the whole structure drops into something warmer, denser, more grounded.
Cultural impact
Black & White arrived in 2023 as part of Step Aboard's Chicago collection, a series the independent house uses to translate civic identity into scent. Bergamot, aldehydes, and white florals make up a fairly classical architecture, and the choice to name such a structure Black & White sets up a deliberate visual tension. The Chicago framing gives the release its grounding, a specific urban context that shapes how the notes land. Rather than leaning on nostalgia or a single narrative anchor, the fragrance builds its identity through contrast: cold aldehyde against warm styrax, bright neroli against dark musk.
