Comme des Garcons Parfum

If you want a fragrance that smells like everyone else's, Comme des Garcons Parfums is probably not for you. The line was built to be unconventional and avant-garde, deliberately aligned with the rule-breaking spirit of Rei Kawakubo's clothing rather than with crowd-pleasing perfumery. For people who collect scent as an art form, that singular, often polarising character is exactly what makes it feel worth it, so sample first to be sure it speaks to you.

A natural starting point is the house's first release, simply called Comme des Garcons, which arrived in 1994 and set the tone for everything after it. If you want to understand just how far the brand will push the form, seek out Odeur 53, its 1998 anti-perfume blending 53 non-traditional notes. Between those two you get a clear read on whether the CDG sensibility suits you.

Comme des Garcons treats fragrance the way it treats fashion: as a creative experiment rather than a formula for mass appeal. The house is known for agendered, unconventional scents, and even named one creation an anti-perfume built from 53 non-traditional accords. That willingness to be challenging rather than simply pleasant is the brand's whole identity.

Yes. The house produces a line of agendered fragrances, meaning they are designed without a fixed masculine or feminine address. This mirrors Rei Kawakubo's long habit of blurring those lines in her clothing, where feminine and masculine elements are deliberately fused. You wear a CDG scent because it suits you, not because it was assigned to a gender.

The company created its perfume line, Comme des Garcons Parfums, in 1993, with its first fragrance released in 1994. That was more than two decades after Rei Kawakubo founded the fashion label in Tokyo in 1969. The move into scent was a natural extension of a house that had already pushed jewellery and other disciplines beyond clothing.

The label was founded by designer Rei Kawakubo, who started it in Tokyo in 1969 and established it as a company in 1973. Her husband, Adrian Joffe, is CEO and set up the structure behind the perfume business, including licensing some fragrances to Puig from 2002 while selling the rest in-house. So the scents sit within a family-led, designer-driven house rather than a faceless beauty conglomerate.

Part of the appeal is provenance: these scents come from one of fashion's most influential houses, and they carry the same uncompromising point of view. Releases like Odeur 53, the KAWS-designed G I R L bottle of 2014, and the 2017 launch Concrete show a house that keeps collaborating with artists and reinventing what a fragrance can be. For enthusiasts, owning one is owning a piece of that ongoing experiment.

The brand's name itself was inspired by Francoise Hardy's 1962 song Tous les garcons et les filles, drawn from the line meaning like the boys and girls my age. That androgynous, youthful idea runs through everything, from the distressed, punk-leaning clothes of the 1980s to the agendered fragrances. Understanding the name helps explain why the scents refuse easy categories.

Frequently. The artist KAWS designed the bottle for the unisex fragrance G I R L, released on 28 August 2014, and artist Katerina Jebb produced the visuals for the Luxe series Champaca. The 2017 launch of Concrete was marked in the US with a dinner curated by artist and chef Laila Gohar. These tie-ins reflect the house's long association with international arts and cultural projects.

It depends on what you want from a daily perfume. Many CDG scents are bold and potent rather than soft and inoffensive, so they can feel more like a statement than a quiet companion. If your day calls for something discreet, a more traditional fragrance may serve you better; if you want a scent that draws comment and reflects an artistic mood, this is exactly the territory to explore.