For a man one part couturier, one part fragrance brand founder, it would be easy to draw parallels between the worlds of haute couture and high-end perfumery: both representative of craftsmanship, luxury, and quality, items built to last by only the most qualified of hands, an exercise in precision and artisanal prowess.For Marc-Antoine Barrois, it was also an approach that could find life in fragrance, but his creative mind operates differently from the status quo of seeing perfume as an extension (and the cash cow) of a fashion empire. Barrois is not a man of half-lengths, committing fully to his creative vision and the collaborators who help them come to life all the more fully.His love of the finer details in life came naturally. The Barrois family has a long lineage of work in textiles, spanning back four centuries. “It's really something deep in our DNA, though when I asked my parents if I could study fashion at textile school they were a bit scared. For them, textile meant something that was not growing anymore. They were clever enough to suggest I go to a textile engineering school,” he recalls. The opportunity to meet Dominique Sirop, former assistant for Hubert de Givenchy, had him working in the couture world at the tender age of 19. What followed were stints at Jean Paul Gaultier, Jean-Claude Jitrois, and Giambattisa Valli, before he decided to set up his own label.“I love the real haute couture, where you take time and start with a blank page of paper, you draw a dress for a woman who is going to wear it on the red carpet. In the meantime, my strong ecological values, going back 20 years, were to do something different,” he says.