The American artist’s new CDG Parfums collaboration gives a sense of nature’s potential for “complex and creative pleasure”
In 1999, when Comme des Garçons first opened its Chelsea outpost in New York, there was nothing else of note in the neighbourhood aside from Dia Art Foundation, which had been anchoring West 22nd Street since 1987. “When we first moved there, there was nothing on the street except Dia and a few galleries,” reflects Adrian Joffe, president of Comme des Garçons International. “We’ve been neighbours for a really long time.” Their first formal partnership came in 2016, when CDG supported Dia’s publication of The Lightning Field, with Dover Street Market hosting the launch. Now, decades of neighbourliness have distilled, naturally, into a deeper, afferent accord: [ ] Dia x Meg Webster, a new CDG Parfums collaboration with New York’s storied contemporary arts institution.
If [ ] Dia x Meg Webster is CDG Parfums’ second fragrance developed with an institution – in 2014 they collaborated with London’s Serpentine Gallery – it’s their first under the hand, or nose, of a visual artist: American sculptor and installation artist Meg Webster. Initial musings on a fragrance coincided, as if by design, with Webster’s first major solo exhibition at Dia’s Beacon outpost, which opened in 2024. Scent has always been intrinsic to the experience of her sculptures, which are often made from the earth itself: cones of salt, beds of living moss, spirals of sticks. “I liked the challenge of not copying the scent of the works themselves,” she says, “but creating a fragrance that reflects the essence of viewing my work and experiencing the arrangement of primary forms.”
Webster began with four words: “Forest. Rock. Soil. Flesh” – and the late Christian Astuguevieille, CDG Parfums’ creative director of three decades, responded by sending over some 20 samples. “I worked with Dia over a two-year period smelling samples that were sent by Christian Astuguevieille and perfumer Emilie Coppermann until we arrived at one that worked,” Webster recalls. “She knew what she wanted it to smell like,” Joffe adds, “which is always the best way.” The final fragrance is pellucid and enveloping in equal measure – carrot seed oil and patchouli suggest forest floors, geranium and tree moss recall the ground after rain; there is something diaphanous, feathery in its top notes before the base of Madagascar sandalwood deepens and settles on the skin with time.
The packaging and bottle, both designed by Webster, are as thought through, and symbolic, as the scent: a polished silver tetrahedron that references the geometric forms commonplace to her practice. Its reflective surface shifts with the light to evoke, as she puts it, “the ephemeral quality of perfume through the impermanence of reflection.” On the bottle, a pictogram – [ ] – drawn from the diagrammatic elements of her early sculptures, which used enclosed spaces to position viewers in relation to one another and the work. “My early work included walkways and forms to enter and meet someone,” Webster explains. “It is a notion of two people joining” – a characteristically precise idea for a perfume, that a fragrance might activate something between the people who wear it, as much as adorn them personally.
, 2017)
“Flesh,” Webster says of the most unusual of her four founding words, “speaks of the body perceiving the works. As well as the materials that form a kind of flesh for the works.” A thought that stays with what she has made here: a perfume that moves beyond illustration, extending the sculpture into a new register. Time, in [ ] Dia x Meg Webster, doesn’t move in one direction: it reaches back through the decades-long friendship between two institutions, sideways through the breadth of Webster’s practice, and forward – or perhaps diagonal – into the relationships it activates between the people who wear it.
Scent, after all, is a medium that cannot be controlled: it shifts with body chemistry, with temperature, with time. For an artist whose practice is so precisely constructed, this loss of authorship becomes, perhaps, its own kind of freedom. “I did not desire to control their experience,” she admits, “but to give them the opportunity to enjoy a sense of freedom and nature’s potential for complex and creative pleasure.”
[ ] Dia x Meg Webster is available at Dover Street Market and select Comme des Garçons stores globally, with a percentage of proceeds supporting Dia Art Foundation’s programmes.
