The Anti-Perfume Perfumes: How Comme des Garçons Rewrote the Rules of Scent

The first Comme des Garçons fragrance I ever encountered smelled like a electrical fire in a flower shop. This was 1998, I was standing in Liberty's perfume hall, and the scent in question was Comme des Garçons 2—a bewildering amalgamation of ink, magnolia, and something metallic that made my synapses short-circuit. I bought it immediately.

This is the Comme des Garçons effect: fragrances that challenge before they seduce, that make you question what perfume should be before revealing what it could be. In an industry built on the promise of attraction, Rei Kawakubo's olfactory output offers something far more radical: the possibility of transformation.

The Philosophy of Contradiction

"I want to create a kind of market where it doesn't exist," Kawakubo once stated, a philosophy that extends seamlessly from her revolutionary clothing designs to her approach to fragrance. Since launching the house's first perfume in 1994, Comme des Garçons has treated scent not as an accessory to fashion but as an equally valid medium for conceptual exploration.

The result is a perfume portfolio that reads like a doctoral thesis on the nature of beauty. There's the Incense Series, which transforms the sacred into the wearable. The Synthetic Series, which celebrates artificiality in an era obsessed with the natural. The Play line, which somehow makes mainstream accessibility feel subversive. Each collection poses questions that most perfume houses wouldn't dare ask.

"Rei doesn't think about what will sell," explains Adrian Joffe, Kawakubo's husband and CEO of Comme des Garçons International, when we speak at Dover Street Market. "She thinks about what doesn't exist."

The Semiotics of Scent

To understand Comme des Garçons fragrances, one must first abandon traditional perfume vocabulary. These aren't scents that whisper of romance or promise seduction. Instead, they smell like concepts: Odeur 71 captures the precise scent of modern life—hot metal, dust on a light bulb, photocopier toner. Wonderwood smells exactly like its name suggests, but wood pushed to an almost hallucinogenic extreme.

The brand's collaborations read like a who's who of olfactory outsiders. The partnership with Monocle created fragrances that smell like specific places—Hinoki evokes a Japanese wooden bath, Scent One: Hinoki captures the designer's favourite tree. The ongoing series with perfumer Antoine Lie has produced some of the house's most challenging work, including Blackpepper, which manages to be both hostile and addictive.

"Working with Comme des Garçons is like being given permission to forget everything you know about perfumery," notes Mark Buxton, who created several fragrances for the house. "They want the mistake, the accident, the thing that shouldn't work."

The Aesthetic of Absence

The bottles themselves deserve examination. Early Comme des Garçons fragrances came in pebble-smooth vessels that looked like they'd been worn down by centuries of tide. Recent releases favour industrial glass and cryptic typography. The Pocket Series arrives in aluminium tubes that could house anything from medicine to motor oil. This is anti-luxury that somehow feels more luxurious than gold-capped flacons.

In Dover Street Market—Kawakubo and Joffe's retail laboratory—the fragrances occupy their own universe, displayed alongside concrete planters and sheets of raw metal. It's here that the Comme des Garçons approach to retail becomes clear: shopping as intellectual exercise rather than simple transaction.

The Cult of Difficulty

There's something perversely British about Comme des Garçons' success in the UK market. Perhaps it's our national appreciation for things that require effort, our suspicion of the too-easily beautiful. The brand's devotees—found haunting the perfume floors of Selfridges and Harvey Nichols—tend to be people for whom mainstream holds no appeal.

"CDG customers know exactly what they want," observes a buyer at Liberty. "They're not interested in compliments. They're interested in feeling."

This extends to the brand's more accessible lines. Even Play, with its bug-eyed heart logo and relatively friendly compositions, maintains an edge of weirdness. It's designer fragrance for people who view designer fragrance with suspicion.

The Innovation Imperative

What's most remarkable about Comme des Garçons' perfume journey is its consistent innovation across three decades. While other houses rest on successful formulas, each new CDG release feels like a genuine experiment. Recent launches have included Copper, which smells like blood and electricity, and Concrete, which captures the scent of freshly poured cement with disturbing accuracy.

The brand's approach to flankers—those profitable variations on successful scents—is telling. Where others might create "Intense" or "Sport" versions, Comme des Garçons releases entirely new interpretations. The various iterations of Wonderwood each explore different facets of the wood theme, like a cubist painting rendered in scent.

The Market Paradox

In an era when niche perfumery has gone mainstream and every influencer seems to be launching a fragrance, Comme des Garçons occupies an increasingly singular position. Too weird for the mass market, too established to be truly niche, the brand exists in its own category.

"They've never compromised," states Chandler Burr, former New York Times perfume critic. "In thirty years, they've never made a boring fragrance. Do you know how rare that is?"

This refusal to pander has, paradoxically, ensured the brand's relevance. Young consumers, raised on a diet of algorithmic recommendations and focus-grouped products, find CDG's uncompromising vision refreshing. The brand's Instagram presence—minimal to the point of absence—only adds to its mystique.

The Gender Question

Long before the current conversation around gendered fragrance, Comme des Garçons was creating scents that defied classification. Not unisex so much as anti-sex, these are fragrances that exist beyond the traditional masculine/feminine divide.

"Gender in fragrance is a marketing construct," Kawakubo has stated. "I'm interested in the person, not the category."

This philosophy has proven prescient. In our current moment of gender fluidity and category collapse, Comme des Garçons' approach feels less radical than inevitable.

The British Connection

The UK has always understood Comme des Garçons in a way that other markets struggle with. Perhaps it's our punk heritage, our appreciation for the deliberately difficult. The brand's presence at Dover Street Market's various outposts—from Haymarket to Ginza—creates a global network of like-minded obsessives.

Perfume enthusiasts have particularly embraced the brand's more challenging offerings. Tar, which smells exactly as advertised, has a cult following among London's creative class. Garage, with its antiseptic aldehydes and rubber notes, sells surprisingly well in Manchester.

The Eternal Avant-Garde

As Comme des Garçons approaches its fourth decade in fragrance, the question becomes: how does one remain avant-garde when the rest of the world has caught up? The answer, it seems, is to keep pushing into territories others fear to explore.

Recent collaborations with artists and musicians suggest new directions. There's talk of fragrances that change based on the wearer's body chemistry, of scents designed to be worn in specific architectural spaces. Whatever comes next, one suspects it will challenge our preconceptions about what perfume can be.

The Beautiful Strange

Standing in Dover Street Market's perfume section, testing my way through the latest Comme des Garçons releases, I'm struck by how these fragrances have trained a generation to appreciate difficulty. In teaching us that beauty and strangeness are not opposites but allies, Kawakubo has expanded our olfactory vocabulary immeasurably.

As I leave, wearing a combination of Blackpepper and Rouge (because why choose?), I reflect on how Comme des Garçons has achieved the impossible: making intellectual rigour feel rebellious, turning difficulty into desire.

In a world increasingly dominated by algorithms and focus groups, Comme des Garçons remains gloriously, uncompromisingly human. These are fragrances that could only be created by someone with a vision, for people who understand that the best things in life require effort.

And in our age of instant gratification, that might be the most radical statement of all.