Jasmine on hot asphalt: remembering Christian Astuguevieille of Comme des Garçons Parfums

There are smells that sort you into tribes. Jasmine and hot asphalt is one of them. “A July evening in a village in Provence... gardens overflowing with jasmine, but the alley has just been freshly tarred.” If that makes your heart race, you already speak the language of Christian Astuguevieille.

As creative director of Comme des Garçons Parfums, he didn’t chase pretty. He made pretty flinch, then learn a new vocabulary. The result is a canon that still feels thrilling. The anti-perfumes Odeur 53 and Odeur 71 gave us photocopier heat, dust, warm electricity. The incense pilgrimage of Series 3 produced Avignon, Kyoto, Zagorsk and proved solemnity can be sensual. The synthetic suite dared us to call the offbeat beautiful, with Series 6: Synthetic Tar and Garage smelling like roads and engines yet somehow skin-hungry.

If you want proof of range, look at the arc from metallic calligraphy in Comme des Garçons 2 and the inky masculinity of 2 Man, to the forested thrum of Wonderwood and the green-pop sparkle of Amazingreen. Add the cult serenity of Monocle Scent One: Hinoki and the lacquered burn of Black, and you see a single through-line. Not shock for shock’s sake, but curiosity turned into structure.

I remember wearing Avignon on a sweltering August train and feeling the cool stone of an imaginary nave settle over my shoulders. I remember the first time I sprayed Tar on a strip and got jasmine drifting in the open window outside my studio. The mind stitched them together before my hand did. That was Astuguevieille’s trick, and his generosity. He trusted us to connect the dots.

Under the eye of Rei Kawakubo, he made perfume a place to think as much as feel. You did not need to understand every note to be moved. You only needed to recognize a truth you had never named, like flowers breathing over a brand new road.

He is gone, at 79. The next time the evening turns warm and the street still smells black and soft, let your wrist carry a little Tar, a little Avignon, a little Odeur 53. Then listen. The oddness will start to sing.