EXCLUSIVE: Dries Van Noten Talks Fragrance, Fashion and Flowers

PARIS — Dries Van Noten might have stopped dressing women, but he continues to dress perfume bottles and help fashion what’s inside them.

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The Belgian designer, who retired from his namesake label in June after almost four decades in fashion, is readying the release of four new Dries Van Noten eaux de parfum on Monday, on driesvannoten.com and the brand’s stores, followed by Selfridges on Sept. 1.

“When we built the original collection of 10 different perfumes, I really enjoyed it,” Van Noten related during an exclusive interview. “I thought it was a very interesting process, and I really wanted to continue, because it’s a completely different way of being creative.

“It’s really abstract. It’s a smell. And it’s a little bit out of my comfort zone to do things like that, because — of course — I’m very hands-on with colors, fabrics and materials, and here it’s something very ethereal,” he continued.

Van Noten discovered fragrance-making with his brand’s first collection , released in March 2022. “I knew also there were still much more options than what we created. So I thought: Why don’t we continue?”

He and the Puig-owned Dries Van Noten brand gave a pool of perfumers a new challenge. They knew what the brand had already made — perfumes and colognes made of “impossible combinations.”

“We said: ‘You have to surprise me, you have to shock me,’” the designer said. “’Show me things I didn’t think about ingredients [or] quantity of ingredients.’”

The results include Vanille Camouflage, by Firmenich’s Alexandra Monet, which contains a duo of vanilla from Madagascar and creamy vanilla Tahitenis. There’s also Crazy Basil, by IFF perfumer Jean-Christophe Hérault, to which Van Noten is addicted and has made him unfaithful to a former favorite, Cannabis Patchouli.

“It’s so much green basil that it was really more than tomatoes mozzarella,” Van Noten said with a laugh.

The new scents count, as well, Bitter Splash with grapefruit and vegetal leather notes, by Symrise perfumer Suzy Le Helley, and Camomille Satin, by IFF perfumers Julien Rasquinet and Paul Guerlain.

“I knew in the collection we could use something which was slightly more decadent, heavier, and then [perfumers] came up with the strange combination of a decadent perfume but still bringing in the chamomile, which is quite friendly, and the heavy version of the vanilla, which makes it nearly voluptuous,” Van Noten said.

“I’m very happy with the results,” he added, of the four new entrants, which were created with sustainable practices and include naturally derived ingredients.

The designer lent his eye to product packaging as well.

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“There, my skills as a fashion designer come back, because I really dress the perfume. I dress the non-existing person who wears perfume in the bottle,” he said. “The first idea was really to have the clash, the impossible combination that we have in the scents also translated in the bottles.”

Those are made of material juxtapositions, such as porcelain and engraved metal. For Van Noten, the process is like creating fashion but in miniature.

“It takes the same skills as we use to make outfits,” he said.

Whatever the craft, he is in 100 percent.

“I do nearly everything with the same obsession,” Van Noten said. “I garden in a very intense way. I cook in a very intense way. A dish is never going to go out of kitchen without a nice presentation or flower — or something like that. Because I eat as much with my eyes as with my nose, as with my mouth.”

The packaging reflects a personal take on what the perfume reminds him of. Because of the large quotient of basil in Crazy Basil, Van Noten opted for two greens, using opaque glass and plastic.

“It’s fun,” he said, of the making-of process.

The perfume project has changed how Van Noten moves through the world.

“I just came back from Venice, and I was walking around in the library [there],” he said. “It was really hot and humid.”

There was a rather unpleasant smell, of humid books.

“Old books — it’s not the nicest smell,” Van Noten said. But he was struck with the beauty of the place, with the light streaming in and how the odor intermingled.

Van Noten thought: “Maybe it’s something we can try to play with.”

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