How Mecca and Comme des Garçons taught Australia to smell differently

IN 2001, Australia smelt very different. The Great Niche Explosion was still more than 15 years away and the fragrance industry was largely organised around familiar luxury and designer brands. Beauty and grooming destination Mecca, still technically a boutique at this time, had just gone digital and launched an online version of its growing physical footprint.

It was at this cusp of a revolution in the way we would shop that the retailer added Comme des Garçons Parfums to its line-up of international brands. “Choosing [to stock] Comme des Garçons signalled something important,” says Mecca’s founder, Jo Horgan. “It signalled that our fragrance category would champion creative thinking, daring formulations and storytelling that moves you. Not just pretty bottles on a shelf. It was our way of saying, ‘This space will be a home for the bold’.”

It would also lay the seeds of a two-decade-long partnership that has now culminated in a limited-edition exclusive of the brand’s best-selling Zero fragrance, available only through Mecca.

Zero Than Pink, created by perfumer Fanny Bal, is a visual reconstruction of Zero, presented in a pink-wrapped bottle designed by Comme des Garçons Parfums creative director Christian Astuguevieille. Limited to 155 bottles globally, the edition coincides with both the long-standing partnership between the two companies and the opening of Mecca Bourke Street in Melbourne back in 2025. For Adrian Joffe, president of Comme des Garçons International, it represents “a wonderful extension and deepening of this fabulous relationship.”

It’s impossible to understate the impact that Comme des Garçons Parfums has had on the fragrance industry. In particular, the rise of niche perfumery as it stands today. When the brand launched its first scent in 1994, it broke the usual conventions of how a designer fragrance was meant to smell, an alluring accessory to fashion collections. These were challenging; they certainly didn’t conform to familiar accords of what we would consider to be a “beautiful smell” and in some cases were arguably, deliberately, off-putting (the infamous Series 8: Guerrilla Series is a prime example of this.)

“It [was and] is just another way to express our values,” Joffe says. Those values – to create something that did not previously exist and to disregard established industry norms – shaped the brand’s approach to scent long before the category developed language around “niche” perfumery.

That position became explicit in 1998 with Odeur 53, says Joffe, a fragrance constructed from aromas not found in nature. Replacing traditional jasmine, florals or even animalioc notes was a list of industrial run off: printer ink, hot metal and laundry drying on a clothesline. 

Built using Headspace technology, it dispensed with traditional raw materials entirely. “Anti-perfume was the idea from the beginning,” Joffe explains. Rather than rejecting fragrance outright, the concept reframed it as a medium capable of abstraction, provocation and conceptual depth.

Series Six took this one step further. A series of plastic bottles that aspired toward the bottling of affect via aroma. Tar and Garage, Laundry, Soda and the abstract aldehyde weirdness of Skai and its scorched plastic notes. In 2011 they brought out the unnamed Comme des Garçons 2011, a sculptural monster of a bottle that refused to lay or stand straight and smelt like scotch tape and glue. But between the weirdness were moments of ethereal beauty. CDG2, the elevated Incense Series and their bestselling Wonderwood.

Horgan says that when she first encountered Comme des Garçons Parfums more than 25 years ago, the experience was formative. “They didn’t behave like perfumes; they behaved like ideas,” she says. “Conceptual, emotional, almost sculptural.” 

That distinction informed her early thinking around fragrance as a category and how it could evolve in the Australian market. Not as a beauty adjunct, but as a creative, dynamic universe deserving of the same curatorial rigour as fashion or art.

When Mecca launched their fragrance category in 2001, including Comme des Garçons laid the blueprint for what the pillar would become. “We weren’t trying to recreate what already existed, we were trying to reimagine what fragrance could be,” Horgan tells Esquire. This insight established a framework that prioritised concept, narrative and experimentation over familiarity or mass appeal – an approach that continues to shape the retailer’s fragrance floor today with brands like D.S. & Durga, Byredo and Perfumer H. Brand that all carry the rebellious spirit of Comme des Garçons’ olfactive legacy within their creations. 

“In many ways, Comme des Garçons – and their retail concept Dover Street Market – paved the way, they showed what happens when retail transcends “shopping” and becomes cultural, creative and alive. [The new Melbourne flagship] Bourke Street store is our own leap forward in that same spirit.

Of course, to a market so used to smelling like freshly squeezed citrus or linen, ambers or florals, the notion of smelling like a church or a lightbulb wasn’t the easiest sell.

But over time, customer understanding of the brand has deepened alongside broader shifts in perfume culture. “In the early days, customers approached Comme des Garçons with this incredible sense of intrigue,” Horgan notes. “Once you invite customers into a world where concepts like ‘tar’ or ‘concrete”’ can be translated into something beautiful and transportive, it creates a space for innovation and experimentation, where customers are willing to be open-minded and curious about the fragrance journey,” she says.

“Today, that curiosity is paired with a much deeper appreciation.”

The brand’s influence, once peripheral, is now widely acknowledged as revolutionary.

Interestingly, Joffe remains reluctant to define its impact himself – perhaps because that he sees that impact as one that is still ongoing and evolving. “That’s for others to decide.”

Check out our pick of the best five Comme des Garçons fragrances stock in your wardrobe

---

Related:

The 8 men’s haircut trends that will be huge in 2026

How Youth To The People created the perfect menu for healthier skin