Can a Fragrance Smell Like a Max Richter Score? He Thinks So

Comme des Garçons Parfums has never been particularly conventional. Since its beginnings in the early ’90s, Rei Kawakubo and creative director Christian Astuguevieille have artfully pushed back on scent expectations, creating fragrances infused with traces of kerosene (Garage), “chemically synthesized metals” (Copper) and notes of a demolished construction zone (Concrete). Who wants to smell like synthetic kerosine laced with cedarwood and vetiver? Lots of people, it turns out.

The approach is conceptually adventurous, to say the least. Now, the house is playing with the idea of scent and composition with a new fragrance developed by British symphonist Max Richter, known for his sweeping, minimalist scores in The Leftovers, The Handmaid’s Tale and Ad Astra, as well as influential works like his “Recomposition” of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (a Paris runway favorite if there ever was one). His project Sleep had London philharmonic regulars getting into bed at the Barbican for eight hours of REM-inducing orchestral lulling. John Galliano chose Richter’s “Spring 1” for his jaw-dropping Artisanal 2024 couture show. His next project? The score to Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel imagining how Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife (Jessie Buckley) live through the loss of their child. Whether you know Richter’s name or not, you’ve heard his work—and most likely felt something from it.

Enter Max Richter 01, an eau de toilette pulling together important objects from the composer’s work and life. “I wanted to make something I personally could fall in love with,” shares Richter over Zoom from his holiday, fresh off the Dover Street Market Paris celebration for the scent in late July. He says this is the guiding light of all his creative endeavors.

“I always felt it would be fun to compose a fragrance and to treat it in the way that I would compose a piece of music,” he explains. “I decided to start with my own creative territory, which is the studio and the things that go on there.”

This meant plenty of wood notes calling to mind the modernist Oxford, England forest studio he shares with his partner, the artist Yulia Mahr. It also meant notes of less common substances. “The piano sound board, the kind of wood that you get in pencils, because I write a lot about pencil,” Richter lists. “Graphite and the rosin on a violin bow. Also more contemporary materials, like the elements that make up the components within electronic synthesizers and the oxide on magnetic tape.”

Richter worked with perfumer Guillaume Flavigny, the nose behind Comme des Garçons Black and Tom Ford Rose Prick, to arrive at the final fragrance: a woodsy scent with just enough strangeness to make it at home in the avant-garde world of Comme de Garçons Parfums. It has a melancholic feel to it before it envelops you in vetiver, cedarwood, and Indonesian patchouli essence. Richter likens a spray to putting on a warm jacket. Think of it as a trip through the physical elements and sense memories that make up his creative tool kit—something to put on during a crisp fall day or when you’re hoping to channel the energy of Richter’s more uplifting compositions. (Richter has sported Comme de Garcons Green and Black Pepper, and, in his younger days, Pour Monsieur Chanel. Now he can wear himself.)

The fragrance is accompanied by images Mahr shot on a thermal lens of statuesque trans and non-binary bodies in a series called The Church of Our Becoming, on view now at Dover Street Paris; the bottle shows two hands from the exhibition coming together in a delicate touch. (I think this idea of looking deep into something is very evocative,” Richter says, adding that a fragrance can bring the same intimacy.)

For the composer, scent isn’t that different from music. “I see fragrance as being analogous to the way music works: they both access emotional landscapes very directly, in an unmediated way,” he says. “We live in a very front brain, cognitively defined world, and the deeper parts of us, the almost unconscious, subconscious parts of us sometimes get forgotten. Both music and fragrance allow us access to those spaces.”