Marc-Antoine Barrois would like those who smell his fragrance to see the light. “My vision of it is that I see this light in the dark,” he said of Aldebaran, his newest perfume which he launched with an art installation at Milan Design Week. “It’s so luminous, it burns your eyes.”
Launched in April, Aldebaran is Barrois’s seventh perfume since he first expanded into fragrance in 2016. Like all of his perfumes, it is made in collaboration with Givaudan perfumer Quentin Bisch. The two conceived of the scent to “challenge” what can sometimes be a staid category: florals, namely the classic tuberose. “Quentin and I both are people who get bored with staying too easy, and we want to go for challenges, to do better every time,” he said.
Barrois began his business as a couturier in Paris in 2009, building a clientele largely for his bespoke suits and tuxedos. The idea of creating a perfume only came at the suggestion of a client, and when Barrois launched his first fragrance — 2016’s spicy, leather B683 — he made just 500 bottles, expecting the stock would last 10 years.
Instead, they lasted two months. And nearly 10 years later, his production has increased tenfold. When Barrois launched the solar floral scent Tilia in 2024, he started with an initial run of 50,000 bottles and replenished the stock with another 50,000 bottles two months later. He estimates his award-winning mineral suede scent, Ganymede, first launched in 2019, sells 200,000 bottles each year.
Fragrances are a common sales driver for luxury fashion brands and can be said to be responsible for keeping up the commercial needs of couture houses like Chanel and Jean Paul Gaultier. But while many high-end fashion brands rely on perfumes optimized to reach as large an audience as possible, Barrois said he would like his fragrances to represent the same craftsmanship as his couture, which might run €13,000 for a bespoke cashmere jacket. His perfumes, which are sold for $170-$395 a bottle at 450 points of sale in 50 countries, now account for more than 90% of his business.
“For me, a perfume was not just an industrial product we could sell,” said Barrois. “I’ve always seen it as a piece of art, and a piece of my art that needs to belong to the whole story of my life.”
His fragrances initially found an audience through word of mouth. In 2016, a client brought a bottle of B683 to Sarah Andelman, founder and creative director of Paris’s legendary concept store Colette, which shuttered in 2017. Barrois said he was surprised when he learned that Andelman wanted to stock a fragrance from an unknown designer like himself.
“She said, ‘In the future, what’s going to be cool is the authenticity, not just to be like the cool guy. To be authentic is going to be what people are looking for,’” he recalled. “She was a visionary because that’s totally what people are looking for, and brands are struggling to find authenticity.”
Retailers like Colette were instrumental to finding an audience, Barrois recalled. He said he became aware of B683’s resonance when Brussels perfume store Senteurs d’ailleurs told him they had sold 600 bottles of the perfume in six months.
While the Marc-Antoine Barrois perfume line is now stocked in not just independent boutiques but also large-scale retailers like Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman, he said individual salespeople are still key to the line’s resonance with consumers.
“The common principle between all those points of sale is you can never find my perfume just on a shelf with no one to explain it to you,” he said. “The destination is not a shop. The destination is an ambassador, someone who is well-trained. And we have trainers inside the company to train people so that they can train sales associates everywhere.”
But perhaps no individual is as responsible for the success of the line as Quentin Bisch, the perfumer behind all of Barrois’s fragrances. Their collaboration has proved both critically and commercially successful: 2019’s Ganymede was named the best independent niche fragrance at the 2020 Fragrance Foundation Awards and a finalist in the independent category for the 2020 Art and Olfaction Awards. Tilia is a finalist in the Perfume Extraordinaire category at the 2025 The Fragrance Foundation U.K. Awards, the winners of which will be announced on May 8.
Bisch has become an in-demand perfumer since first working with Barrois, making blockbuster scents like 2017’s Delina for Parfums de Marly and 2023’s Guidance for Amouage. In 2022, Delina and its various flankers accounted for 40% of Parfums de Marly’s sales — the following year, Advent International acquired the brand in a $700 million deal. Brands typically outsource the creation of their perfumes to a variety of perfumers across various companies, but Barrois said he is committed to maintaining their collaboration.
“With all the brands he had created fragrances for before, it was like a one-shot, and then they worked with other perfumers. And only when they realize that Quentin Bisch is the superstar, they continue [to work with him],” he said. “Quentin Bisch is a genius, and everything he touches is just amazing. I want to continue to work with Quentin because he’s the only one I can express myself with.”
But Barrois still believes that buying a perfume means buying into far more than a beautiful scent — it means buying into an entire ethos. A beautiful scent is not enough to make it worth upward of $100 or $200 a bottle.
“The fragrance in itself is one thing, but the perfume, or the creative universe around it, makes it something unique,” he said. “Even if the perfume had been good, I would have never, ever bought the Moncler perfume with the digital things on it. It feels so awkward to me — compared to what the world needs, in terms of ecology and sustainability — that even if the perfume was the best perfume, I would never buy it.” In 2021, the Italian luxury outerwear brand Moncler launched a fragrance with perfume bottles featuring light-up LED displays.
Those buying into the Marc-Antoine Barrois ethos are perhaps buying into restraint rather than excess. He debuted his first ready-to-wear collection in September, but he would still like to encourage his customers to buy his pieces, be they a T-shirt or a perfume, as investments rather than craving something new every season.
“I think you cannot tell someone, ‘Buy my shirt, and in six months, you’ll have to buy a new one, because this one’s going to be out of fashion.’ No, it’s a beautiful piece. … We have to buy better and buy less stuff,” he said. “Respect what you have. And happiness is not about having what you can’t have; it’s about being happy with what you have. Because that would help people to buy less.”
