Dear Shaded Viewers,
TO VETIVER is not just a new CdG perfume, it is a burning red beacon for a house in mourning and in motion, a final love letter from Christian Astuguevieille written in vetiver, smoke and ancient resins.
The first impression of TO VETIVER is pure horizon line: the vermilion bottle glowing like a maritime signal against Jamie Hawkesworth’s restless seas and blurred skies, a perfume imagined as a passage rather than a point of arrival. Comme des Garçons describes it as “an enthusiastic olfactory poem,” an “exhilaration of echoes of an exalted journey along time immemorial and time to come,” and that sense of movement is built into the name itself – not vetiver as a static note, but a vector, towards vetiver.
In the campaign images, the bottle becomes a compass slipped into a wave, a flare lodged in an oversized terracotta horn, as if sound and scent were being amplified and hurled into the future. The overall feeling is of standing on the deck of a ship at dusk, somewhere between storm and serenity, the sky bruised, the water molten, and this surreal red object buzzing with possibility in the palm of your hand.
On skin, TO VETIVER opens with a crackle of Black Pepper Absolute and the bracing clarity of White Thyme Oil from Spain, a vertical spark that slices through the air like a lighthouse beam. Those head notes are not polite seasoning; they are friction, ignition, the moment a match head flares before the darkness reasserts itself.
Then the heart note – Vetiver Oil DM, extracted from the roots of the grass – slides in and “heart‑grounds” the composition, a bitter‑green gravity that feels both mineral and earthy, like wet roots clinging to riverbanks. Here, vetiver is not the clean barbershop cliché but something older, more stratified, layered with mud, stone and memory, a root system that has been listening for centuries.
Amber (rendered here as Ambrofix) and Opoponax Oil from Somalia weave through this rooty core, bringing a low, resinous hum that feels lit from within, recalling sacred fumigations and temple smoke.
Musk (Moxalone) and Myrrh Resinoid close the circle, giving the drydown a skin‑warm, faintly animalic hush, as if the ancient resins from Mesopotamian tablets and the vetiver mentioned in the Bhagavad Gita had agreed to share the same breath for a few fleeting hours.
“Antiquity nourishes the future,” the press text insists, and TO VETIVER takes that as a working method: archaic ingredients engineered like avant‑garde technology, a fragrance that moves forward by tunneling backwards. It feels very Comme des Garçons in that sense – a perfume that behaves like an artefact dug up from a parallel past, then thrust into the present with uncompromising clarity.
TO VETIVER is the last perfume completed by Christian Astuguevieille, the house’s long‑time creative director of fragrance, who passed away earlier this year at the age of 79.
A multidisciplinary artist and visionary “nose” behind CdG’s so‑called anti‑perfumes, he spent three decades expanding what scent could be: photocopier toner, hot metal, dust, concrete, the smell of nothing and everything at once.
For Astuguevieille, vetiver was a recurring obsession – a raw material he returned to like a writer to a favorite word, bending it into new shapes across the CdG universe.
In TO VETIVER, that devotion becomes explicit: the perfume is introduced as “inspired by Christian Astuguevieille’s eternal adoration of vetiver,” a final chapter in which his beloved root is allowed to speak at full volume.
There is something deeply moving in the idea that his last completed work is not a shock tactic but a hymn – grounded, woody, resinous, almost liturgical – a “lyrical experience of emotion, a happenstance of love and creation, for the ages.”TO VETIVER reads like a quiet manifesto: that the most radical gesture, after years of olfactory provocation, might be to return to the classics and listen to them more closely than ever before.
The premiere of TO VETIVER is as considered as its composition.
On May 6th, the fragrance launches in Venice at Fondazione Dries Van Noten’s magazzino, during the exhibition “The Only True Protest is Beauty,” turning its debut into a kind of fragrant intervention within a broader meditation on aesthetics and resistance.
From May 7th, it begins a slow, almost pilgrim‑like roll‑out through Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market stores and selected wholesalers worldwide, emphasizing encounter over saturation.
The pricing plants it firmly in CdG’s cult‑luxury bracket – €160, £155, $188, ¥29,500 for 100ml Eau de Parfum – an investment in a bottle that looks and feels less like a product than a portable sculpture.
Creative direction by Ronnie Cooke Newhouse and Karl Bolander shapes the object as a graphic exclamation mark, “TO VETIVER” stamped in emphatic typography across that glowing pebble, while Hawkesworth’s photography situates it in unstable, liminal landscapes: sea, sky, horn, threshold.
The result is a total artwork in miniature – text, image, bottle and juice all circling the same question: how do you make an ancient ingredient feel like a message from tomorrow.
On the body, TO VETIVER promises tension rather than comfort: pepper and thyme sparking above a dark green root, resinous smoke twisting around a soft yet persistent musk.
It is easy to imagine it on a night crossing between cities, mingling with fog, concrete and cold metal railings, the vetiver cutting through the environment like a low, unwavering note.
But there is also tenderness: as the hours pass, the myrrh and musk soften the composition into something intimate, close to skin, like a memory that refuses to fade, or a voice you still hear long after the person has left the room.
In that sense, TO VETIVER becomes a kind of wearable elegy for Christian Astuguevieille – not melancholic, but insistently alive, a reminder that the most radical futures are often rooted in the oldest, deepest things.
I have always loved vetiver, and what a beautiful final, luminous homage – Christian’s last composition for Comme des Garçons feels less like a farewell than a lingering presence, suspended in smoke, resin, and memory.
Later,
Diane
