Comme Des Garcons Parfums Bottles Up Meg Webster's Earthworks
An elemental encounter arriving with notes of mushroom, sandalwood and petrichor.
Summary
- COMME des GARÇONS Parfums comes together with Dia Art Foundation and artist Meg Webster on a new scent
- Inspired by Webster’s artworks, the earthy fragrance channels bodily encounters with the outdoors
- [] Dia x Meg Webster is available as a 50ml via select stores and Dover Street Market worldwide
We often call it “visual art,” but art, as it’s experienced, is multi-sensory. Beyond the eyes, many works engage sound and touch, while others, like Anicka Yi’s “The Flavor Genome” and “Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites” Mike Kelley, look to smell, regarded as the most emotionally resonant sense.
COMME des GARÇONS Parfums, known for its high-concept offerings, recently teamed up with the Dia Art Foundation to create a signature scent for American artist Meg Webster. Titled [] Dia x Meg Webster, the collaboration bottles the spirit of Webster’s immersive earthworks into a sleek, 50ml.
Working within the olfactory, the artist said, offered new tools to explore our atmospheric, intimate experience of the natural world. The sensations of soil underfoot, eagles soaring overhead and Webster’s artistic orchestra of the organic are distilled into an earthy scent, arriving with notes of bay oil, geranium, carrot seed oil, mushroom and tree moss. Mineral wood and creamy sandalwood its base lends a grounding warmth.
Comme Des Garçons / Dia Art Foundation
Comme Des Garçons / Dia Art Foundation
Comme Des Garçons / Dia Art Foundation
The fragrance comes housed in a tetrahedral box, a central form to Webster’s sculptural vocabulary, that, like a sculpture, is defined by how it’s encountered and handled. The mirrored surface nods to the ephemeral encounters with nature and gradual dematerialization, while the bracketed pictogram emblazoned on the packaging references a diagrammatic motif from her early works.
Since launching its first product in 1994, the label has gained the reputation for unexpected scents, like sand dunes, nail polish, tar or Odeur 53, the famed “abstract anti-perfume.” In this vein, tapping art world heavy-hitters make for perfect pairing with past collaborators including KAWS, Max Richter, Tracey Emin and Serpentine Galleries.
[] Dia x Meg Webster is now available in a 50ml offering at select stores and Dover Street Market New York, LA, London, Paris and Tokyo. To celebrate the new collaboration, COMME des GARÇONS is installing Webster’s “Copper Containing Salt II” (2017) at its West 22nd Street store in New York.
