Comme des Garçons (CDG), the fashion brand launched by enigmatic creative Rei Kawakubo in 1969, brought avant-garde designs to the global market in an astounding flurry of gravity-defying constructions, all-black uniforms, and dizzying print designs. Kawakubo presented a visual identity that defied traditional norms of proportion and silhouette and rejected the idea of cookie-cutter aesthetics.
In 1994, the brand began its reign in the fragrance department. During this time, aside from Annick Goutal or L’Artisan Parfumeur, there was little niche representation. The market was dominated by players like Thierry Mugler, Calvin Klein, Clinique, Giorgio Armani, Issey Miyake, and Estée Lauder. The ethyl maltol blast of Angel aside, most formulas were focused on harmonious compositions rather than experimental notes and advertisements featuring idyllic visions of romance, cool, and sensuality.
Comme des Garçons Parfums looked to take perfumery to a more abstract place: the fragrance bottle as an artistic experiment—less looking to sell a dream and more to sell a creative concept or statement. That evergreen ideal retains relevance and impact to this day.
The brand’s debut scent was Original Eau de Parfum, a warm chypre fragrance by Mark Buxton with notes of cardamom, coriander, rose, incense, and sandalwood—a spicy antidote to the sea of lightweight citruses, fruity florals, and gourmands of the era.
The composition featured a spin on the traditional fragrance pyramid, with traditional top notes like pepper in the base notes, or a base note like cedar in the middle notes. The accompanying campaign imagery featured a moth pollinating an orchid, marketed with the tagline “works like a medicine, behaves like a drug. A perfume for oneself.” “Most of the fragrances we have done since then have shared that same language and idea,” Adrian Joffe, President of Comme des Garçons International, told BeautyMatter.
To date, that line-up includes 122 fragrances. The brand has 600 retailers worldwide including Nordstrom, Liberty, Luckyscent, Mecca LN-CC, and Saks Fifth Avenue—spanning both large department stores and independent niche stores. With Europe as its biggest market, Comme des Garçons Parfums’ retail value for the year ending May 2025 was approximately €25 million ($27 million).
Joffe views the fragrance line as “totally and utterly part of the same cosmos [as the fashion brand]. Every star in the CDG firmament shares its concepts and value systems with every other star there.” All packaging is designed by Kawakubo. Some in the brand’s “Pebble” bottle (a smooth rounded bottle that lays perfectly in the palm of the hand) or a “Monster” bottle (a dented and bulging design, some might say reminiscent of the infamous Spring/Summer 1997 Lumps and Bumps collection). In a world based on standing out on the shelf, bottles that lay flat feel like an anti-consumerist statement: a product for the wearer to hold, rather than the merchandiser to show off.
Pushing creative boundaries over the last three decades has also at times come with pushback. “We didn't expect such an initial rejection of the Pebble bottle. Nobody wanted a bottle that didn’t stand up. Of course, there was a hard core contingent who loved it immediately, but it took decades for it to become the iconic bottle it is today,” Joffe said.
While there are Comme des Garçons launches that do come in traditional glass bottles, the juice inside still has a creative edge. There are anti-perfumes like Odeur 53, Martine Pallix’s blend of nontraditional notes like hot metal and photocopier ink. Launched in 1998 around the concept of scent memories that don’t exist in nature, the eau de parfum was a loud and proud blend of 53 synthetic notes with no natural components. Odeur 71, which arrived in 2000, focused on urban scent anecdotes like dust on a hot light bulb and a toaster. The Series perfumes center around themes including Synthetic (such as Tar and Garage scents) and Accident (like Radish Vetiver and Chlorophyll Gardenia eau de parfums).
Outside of its own brand cosmos, the brand has collaborated with style figures like Stephen Jones, Pharrell Williams, and Daphne Guinness; companies like publisher Monocle and streetwear brand Stüssy; and artists like KAWS.
“We study each possibility and decide together with instinct and feeling,” Joffe says of choosing Comme des Garçons collaborators. “It just has to feel right. Usually, we prefer the collaborators who have a good sense of what they like it to smell like and also have a good option of why they want to make a fragrance.”
When asked how Comme des Garçons Parfums keeps pushing the envelope while still creating a commercially viable product, Joffe replied, “The primordial aim is to create exciting, never been smelled before fragrances, using our own CDG perfume language, and in parallel aspire for the said fragrance to be commercially viable. We have never seen any reason why the two aims should be mutually exclusive. And a perfume for everyone is neither possible nor desirable.”
Joffe describes the brand’s creative process as “multilayered and multitextured” with “no rigidly defined way.” Creative Director Christian Astuguevieille has been overseeing said process since day one, with a wide array of perfumers from Antoine Lie, Maurice Roucel, Quentin Bisch, Emilie Bevierre-Coppermann, and Nathalie Feisthauer working on the fragrances.
During its three decades of operations, the brand has expanded horizontally, never vertically. “Vertical expansion seems to take away a possibility of accident and synergy, since by its nature, it needs an overcontrolling temperament. This leaves less chance for the beauty of imperfection,” Joffe said. “We feel our job is to have ideas and create amazing fragrances. We do not need to own the means of production or the shops where they will be sold.”
In 2002, Spanish fashion and beauty conglomerate Puig was brought on to manufacture the brand’s pebble-packaged fragrances and distribute their catalog of products. In December 2023, their half license ended. “After the very amicable separation from the half license with Puig, from whom we learned a lot, we are planning many exciting ventures, which we don’t quite want to talk about yet since they are all in the profoundly gestating phase,” Joffe said.
Globally, Comme des Garçons Parfums has built a strong following for its spicy woody and incense-heavy scents. Its bestsellers are Wonderwood (a deep and distinctive blend of cedar, cypress, oud, and sandalwood), CDG2 (an aromatic fusion of aldehydes, ink, and patchouli), Hinoki (a calming and coniferous mix of turpentine, camphor, thyme, and oakmoss), Kyoto (inspired by Buddhism and Shintoism, with notes of coffee, teakwood, and amber), and CDG BLACK (a smoky eau de toilette with black pepper, birch, licorice, and vetiver).
Of newer releases, Marseille (a floral, woody musk perfume inspired by the namesake soap) and Ganja (a cannabis-containing creation) were “surprising successes,” with the latter being the number one selling perfume at Dover Street Market Paris.
As part of their 30th anniversary, the brand launched Odeur 10 at its Aoyama flagship in Tokyo. The scent is inspired by the disinfectant aspects of hydrogen peroxide, an “extremely clean” scent that is meant to feel comforting for the wearer. The product debuted together with the publication Comme des Garçons Parfums: 1994-2025. In the catalog, the brand’s spectrum of fragrant experiments is described as a “spirit of disruption—of liberation from established doctrine and the desire to disengage from convention.” With another (currently unnamed) vetiver scent underway and an independent business model for the decades ahead, that spirit of disruption is now entering its next era.
