Dean Mayo Davies: Your fans love Comme’s esoteric approach to olfactory. Fragrances keep coming, but they’re perceived as suggestions for the customer, a chance to take different experiences rather than marketing exercises. Other brands use perfume as a kind of magic-cashpoint, treating their latest output as if it is their only perfume before the campaign finishes, discounting it cheaply in chemists and pushing the next one. I’m sure perfume is a good money-spinner for Comme des Garçons too, but I’m really interested in the way someone would get more ‘value’ by buying Comme des Garçons Parfums. Rei and yourself seem to treat perfume as importantly as you do cloth - it’s yet another material for you to take an idea or concept and explore it fully. How important is this philosophy to you? 

Adrian Joffe: This way of thinking is extremely important, primordial. It’s exactly what you’re saying. Perfume represents simply one more way of expressing the values of Comme des Garçons, just like a dress on the runway, the interior of a shop, a retail strategy or event. Or even a name card. Everything is one, nothing is part of the whole.

DMD: Synthetic: Series Six are my favourite genre of CdG smells, particularly Garage and Soda, but it feels like they wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Odeur 53. How important is Odeur 53 to the history of the company? It felt like a landmark in the fragrance world - ‘anti-perfumes’ hadn’t existed before that...  

AJ: Again, I couldn’t agree with you more. Odeur 53 was the epitome of our anti-establishment, anti-perfume way of going about making perfume. All this means however is that we don’t abide by the rules if we don’t want to. Put another way, creation, by its very definition, has to be unshackled and unfettered by rules and norms in order to exist.

DMD: Completely. Do you know approximately how many fragrances Comme des Garçons has?  

AJ: I think it’s about 48.

DMD: Can you talk us through the process of creating a perfume. I know the ideas of magic and accident are really important to the company’s clothing but does this extend to the lab? It’s based in Paris, yes? 

AJ: Yes, it’s in Paris. We discuss what we would like to do next, talk about concepts and themes and start the process. We don’t really like to talk about the process that much, but making a perfume is far more complicated than most people imagine.

DMD: Do you find that customers prefer dramatically different scents across the world? What has worked where geographically and what hasn’t? I find it fascinating. Have you been surprised to find any alarming trends or correlations? 

AJ: Certain countries have certain preferences, yes, although the top two everywhere is Comme des Garçons 2 and Kyoto. In England the cologne series is unusually popular.

DMD: You famously said that Comme des Garçons would never discontinue a perfume. Does this ideology remain? And is there a unique way in which the company is structured to allow you to do this?  

AJ: Yes indeed, I think to discontinue a perfume is a sign of disrespect. We are able not to discontinue because of our small size and lower minimums, although as we grow and hit 50 perfumes I admit it is getting more difficult. Hence we have hit upon a new idea of an olfactory library; this will be a memory of every perfume we have ever made, all in the same container with a sticker design denoting the original design. So when we run out of a not-so-popular perfume, we’ll simply produce it in the library. We will launch this idea with seven currently out of stock perfumes in the first half of 2009.

DMD: Is there a fragrance that is most you? And which is most Rei?

AJ: Rei still likes best the first and original eau de parfum. My favourites are Odeur 71, Hinoki and Jaisalmer.

DMD: Björk once said when she hears her own music, she hears memories not songs. Do you have a similar experience when you smell a Comme des Garçons perfume? 

AJ: Totally. It is well known that smelling a perfume is a walk down memory lane.

DMD: Recently Comme des Garçons has started inviting others to create their own fragrance. First it was Monocle magazine and now Stephen Jones. Was Stephen high on your wishlist? Can you tell us a bit about getting him on board and the message behind his project... 

AJ: Stephen was actually the first collaboration, it’s just that Monocle [Hinoki] launched before it. The concept is entirely Stephen’s and was about a violet crashing into a meteorite.

DMD: I think it makes perfect sense to have Stephen debut as your first ‘personality’ perfume. A fragrance is like a hat after all, it completely changes a person’s aura.  Do you have any others lined up for the future? Will Junya or Jun Takahashi get do do their own (the world is waiting!) Or a creative slightly further away, but one you admire nevertheless - Raf Simons, say... 

AJ: Well, after Monocle and Stephen we are almost ready with Daphne Guinness and Undercover [Takahashi]. We have begun working on the fifth, which will be for Artek, the Finnish furniture people. In principle, to start with, the idea was to make a perfume for one person or company in a particular field, so we are not looking for another hat maker or another Japanese designer.

DMD: Who, throughout history, living or dead, would be your ultimate invitee to create a scent? 

AJ: Leonardo da Vinci or perhaps a great philosopher like Plato or a spiritual teacher like Thomas Aquinas.

DMD