FOR BELGIAN FASHION label Dries Van Noten, every collection of clothing works from places of familiar tension: colour set hard against shadow, richness pulled taut against a sense of lightness. It’s a duality that is easy to appreciate on a runway, but for perfumer Gaël Montero, tasked with building the house’s newest fragrance Velvet Violet, available at Mecca now, it became the groundwork for a fragrance that would take those elements off the runway and into a new medium.

“The idea [for Velvet Violet] came more from the contrast that exists in the world of Dries Van Noten itself,” Montero tells Esquire. “I wanted to translate that contrast olfactively.”

If you come to Velvet Violet thinking you know what violet smells like, Montero may have a surprise for you. Working within a woody, floral gourmand structure, he opens the fragrance with a powdery note of violet that’s given sharper edges courtesy of pink pepper. It dodges the candy-sweetness that violets are most famous for and heads into heart of savoury sesame and barley before it settle into a base of vetiver and tonka bean. It wouldn’t be too far from the truth to say it smelt like that slightly resembles the Persian dessert, a nan-e berenji, with the added touch of violet over the top. On skin, it delivers a trompe l’oeil of thick orris butter as you take in the first breath before all the elements begin to unfold themselves.

According to Montero, everything in the composition is designed to pull violet away from where perfumery usually keeps it. 

Dries Van Noten Velvet Violet

$500 from Mecca

“What interested me was precisely the contrast between the two,” Montero says. “Violet is often interpreted in a very recognisable way, either floral, powdery, or candied. I wanted to move away from that register and bring it somewhere more textured and unexpected. Sesame introduced a roasted and slightly savoury dimension that changed the perception of the violet.”

That departure runs through the raw materials themselves. Violet Leaf Absolute, paired with ionones, gives the fragrance its green depth, while the roasted facets of sesame and vetiver shift how that green reads on skin. “Woods, vetiver, sesame, and their roasted effects completely shifted the context of the violet note and so changed its perception,” Montero explains. “The idea was not to recreate a familiar violet signature, but to place it in a new structure where it could feel textured, vibrant, and slightly unexpected.”

Montero is surprisingly blunt about why violet needed rescuing in the first place. “Violet can sometimes trigger very familiar references in perfumery,” he says. “I wanted the fragrance to create surprise and curiosity. By placing violet in a woody and roasted environment, the note becomes less expected and more difficult to categorise. You recognise the violet, but you experience it differently.”

Gaël Montero

This instinct to can be traced back to how Montero found his way into perfumery in the first place, which wasn’t a single defining moment so much as a string of encounters. Before he’d formally studied the craft, a Kuwaiti perfume shop owner introduced him to Middle Eastern perfumery. In Montpellier, he crossed paths with Françoise Marin, former director of the Givaudan Perfumery School, and Jean-Michel Duriez, then an in-house perfumer at Rochas. Two formative years followed as assistant to Jordi Fernandez at Givaudan in Barcelona, before he joined the Givaudan Perfumery School himself.

While Velvet Violet marks his first project for Dries Van Noten, it isn’t Montero’s first attempt at rebuilding a note nobody thought needed rebuilding. For Maison Crivelli, he delivered perhaps the most photorealist wet tobacco note on the market in Safran Secret, simultaneously taking the current trend for saffron into a whole new direction. In 2025, he worked with cult Korean brand BORNTOSTANDOUT to create Dirty Milk, a filthy-sweet number that both repels and fascinates.

“I just enjoy using ingredients I love and finding new interesting ways to combine them,” he says, though he’ll concede that sensation, texture and architecture keep resurfacing. He tries not to grow attached to any one material, though right now, alongside a long-standing pull towards woody notes and musk, violet is clearly holding his attention.

Working to a fashion house brief rather than a fragrance-only one changes what’s being asked of him, Montero says. With Dries Van Noten, translating an entire visual language mattered as much as building an accord. “The challenge was to create something coherent with the identity of the brand without becoming illustrative,” he says. “The work was more instinctive and sensory, guided by the creative atmosphere that is already present in the fashion itself.”

Related:

BDK Parfums celebrates 10 years of creating fragrances that evoke worlds

Contre-Jour by Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle isn’t for everyone, and it’s incredible