Dear Shaded Viewers,
Picture this: Paris in late July, humidity clinging to your skin, and a hush in the air as anticipation builds. At Dover Street Market Paris, a new fragrance is about to debut—not just any perfume, but one composed by modern maestro Max Richter in collaboration with Comme des Garçons Parfums. If it feels a little like something out of a film, you’re not far off. With Max Richter 01, the soundtrack to your life doesn’t just float through your headphones—it lingers on your skin.
Richter’s approach upends everything predictable about celebrity scent launches. Forget tropes of seduction and swagger; this is a scent intended as “a quiet narrative.” The fragrance isn’t about dominating a room, but coaxing you inward, into the layered world of Richter’s memories, both obvious and obscure. The composition leans deliberately cerebral: Graphite, Vetiver, Piano Soundboard Cedar, Violin Bow Rosin, Transistor, Magnetic Tape—notes as tactile, textured, and analog as the composer’s own music.
It’s a scent for anyone who carries their childhood, or the fragments of an unfinished song, tucked away in a pocket.
The project was born from a swirl of creative dialogue between Richter, his partner Yulia Mahr (herself a force in the art world), Comme des Garçons Parfums’ president Adrian Joffe, and a crew of frequent collaborators. If that reads as “a lot of cooks,” it only makes sense for a fragrance trying to capture something as expansive as memory, possibility, and the future tense of nostalgia.
Joffe puts this ambition plainly:
“I think what is interesting with this is that we hope we’ve made a perfume with you that could evoke memories that you may not know of yet—lost or future ones.”
It’s as if the plan is to catch a scent you’ve forgotten, or maybe haven’t lived yet—a quiet, radical invitation to dream forward and backward at once.
Mahr’s hand is everywhere—in her distinctive packaging, in the original art plucked from her series, “The Church Of Our Becoming,” and even more so in the exhibition set to unfurl in the DSM Paris courtyard through August 24.
“I’m so happy my series gets to sit alongside this beautiful perfume and in the extraordinary courtyard at Dover Street Market Paris. The world I see is beautiful in its diversity, in its complexity, the world I see is stronger for it. The world I see is in the process of becoming.”
The world is in the process of becoming—a fitting thesis for both her art and this multi-sensory collaboration.
For Richter, this convergence of perfume and music is almost inevitable. He muses,
“I’ve always wanted to compose a perfume because, in my mind, scent and sound are sisters. In both mediums you work by relying on, or being in touch with, the things you don’t yet know, and that is really exciting to me.”
It’s a poetic rationale for a perfume that opens with notes of Cade, Cumin, and Ylang Ylang, moves through a heart of Black Pepper, Pimento Berries, and Tagetes, and settles into a base of Cedarwood, Vetiver, and Patchouli—strange, earthy, and quietly magnetic.
- Name: Max Richter 01 Eau de Toilette by Comme des Garçons Parfums
- Price: 130 € / £120 / $160 / ¥22,000
- Size: 100ml
- Launch: July 24 in Paris (Dover Street Market Paris, Dover Street Parfums Market, Comme des Garçons Paris); rolling out to all CDG and DSM stores, and select global retailers soon after
- Art Exhibition: “The Church Of Our Becoming” series by Yulia Mahr, at Dover Street Market Paris courtyard through August 24
- Core Team: Creative director Christian Astuguevieille, perfumer Guillaume Flavigny, designer Zak Kyes
It takes a peculiar sort of genius to bottle nostalgia— to transmute memory, hope, and heartbreak into atomized, wearable form. Richter has spent a career composing music that feels, at turns, like diaries, lullabies, eulogies, and love letters; his first fragrance is no less tender and surprising. This is not perfume as punctuation, but as ellipsis—a scent that lingers, questioning, in the space between notes, between moments, between the self you remember and the self you are becoming.
