A Fragrance That Smells as Rich and Complex as a Max Richter Composition Sounds

Vogue

22-07-2025

Yulia Mahr: Sitting outside this process as Max was working on this perfume, I found it very beautiful that he included so many elements that were a really important part of, not only of his day-to-day life like the pencil smells, but also his whole profession and his childhood. What I love about the scent is that you can smell all that when you come to it. You can really pick up the notes of all these bits of his life coming together.
Max, were you kind of sensorially aware of them even before the fragrance came along—like when you would open up a piano?
MR: I think, yes, they're all sort of important parts of my world in a way. You open up a piano and you get that kind of cedar. You're in a room with an orchestra, you can smell the rosin [for treating bows]. It's a very sort of 360-degree experience. And I guess the other thing that goes into it is our location. Our studio is in the woods, so there are a lot of earthy things like vetiver in there. It's an attempt to try and make a composite object, which kind of expresses where I am at now and where we are together in our studio.
And why do this now?
MR: I think the stars aligned. It's an idea that I've been carrying around for a long time. I know Adrian and they'd used some of my music previously on another of their projects, and there was a feeling that it would be good to connect. We had lunch together and we talked about everything but the fragrance, and we got on really well. It really was a beautiful series of moments.
Of all the possible fragrance collaborators, you ended up with Comme des Garçons, which is known as being more conceptual.
MR: Both Yulia and I have loved their stuff forever. I wear Black Pepper, Amazing Green, and Comme des Garçons 2. It was a no brainer, really. They're such a sort of creative, visionary outfit. They have this sort of independent spirited, very artistically ambitious output.
And then working with Christian and Guillaume, what was the dialogue back and forth?
MR: It was very simple. I just gave him a load of suggestions to start from, and he made a range of options. And then we just sort of focused in and took away things which weren't quite there, which kept the iterative processes pretty quick. It was three or four iterations, I think.