By his own admission, Marc-Antoine Barrois, couturier and all-round creative force, knows nothing – or at least very little – about fragrance ingredients. But that hasn’t stopped his name from becoming synonymous with some of most interesting fragrances of recent years. In part, this is because he clearly has an acute appreciation of fragrance, knows what he loves and is willing to push boundaries in what he offers. “There’s one thing that I don’t want and that’s to do flowers the same way as other people. So, the challenge is always to create something new in a world that is full of 1000s of perfumes and new versions every year.”
But his fragrant success is also because he has found in the nose Quentin Bisch, a perfect perfume partner. “Truthfully, it’s a fantastic two-way relationship that’s intuitive and has trust,” says Barrois. And though working together began as a happy accident, he adds, “now I would not work with anybody else”.
Their latest collaboration, Aldebaran, launched last week in Milan during Design Week. It was inspired by the idea of finding a luminous white light in forest at night, a bright beacon of hope in the darkness. As an olfactory vision this meant tuberose – but not necessarily as you might expect it.
For Bisch, it became about working on a fragrance type that, he says, you don’t hear so much about these days: a solifleur, a perfume built around a single flower. Tuberose is a paradoxical flower, he says, on the one hand milky and on the other, green, “so it’s almost like green milk, which is weird but interesting to work with as a perfumer”. He wanted to select parts of the flower that he smells in nature and highlight them in the perfume, but that meant approaching things differently and not using tuberose absolute as this lacks the very greenness that was so very important to him.
There’s another key element to the formula. “Just before tuberose opens, you may notice the buds have some red spots,” explains Bisch. These he translated into a paprika accord which also contains tonka bean. The result is likely not what you expect if you think of tuberose. “It is modern?” contemplates Bisch. “I don’t know, and I don’t care. It’s contemporary.”
“It’s a short formula,” he explains. “But just because you have a short formula doesn’t mean that there are fewer facets or that it’s less sophisticated. It’s just a matter of balance, and how you balance things within the formula to be sure that all the facets coexist and express themselves while resonating with each other, creating the magic of a good perfume.”
And Aldebaran – named after a star in the Taurus constellation that shines 400 times brighter than the sun and has its own vibrations – really is a very good fragrance, at once it’s fresh, bright, hopeful, enticing, captivating and yet there a also a brief hint of coldness to it, like light reflecting off steel, that slightly cuts the hypnotic spell that tuberose usually casts, lending it intrigue and making it feel lighter and less heady than you might imagine. That said, it’s already a fragrance that I can’t quite get enough of.
In Milan the fragrance launched alongside an interactive installation – devised by Barrois in conjunction with French artist and architect and long-time collaborator, Antoine Bouillot – that brought to life the original inspiration (the installation, aka Mission Aldebaran, went on to win best installation at the design fair). Viewers made their way through hanging robes inside a dark, mirrored cube – in which bearings were easily lost – with music inspired by the star’s own vibrations, towards a clearing with an orb of white light suspended over a mound of hand-made paper tuberose flowers doused in Aldebaran and surrounded by large pebble seats crafted in marble atop wooden plinths. This furniture collection was also made in partnership with Bouillot and inspired by pebbles they found and selected from the beach on Belle-Île, Barrois’s Breton home when not in Paris. The current plan is to exhibit them later in the year at Art Basel Miami; they are also for sale.
Shop Aldebaran here. Photography courtesy of Marc-Antoine Barrois.
