Scent is the most intimate of the senses—a tether to memory, time, and the unseen. For Paris-based couturier-perfumer Marc-Antoine Barrois, this sense also connotes the celestial. His newest fragrance, ALDEBARAN, made its debut during Milan Design Week with an immersive installation conceived in collaboration with designer Antoine Bouillot. Set within the historic Salone dei Tessuti, MISSION ALDEBARAN traces a sensorial and emotional arc—part memory, part starlight, part dream.
Named after the luminous red star 65 light-years away, the fragrance centers around tuberose—known as the “flower of the night.” “When it came to tuberose, the flower was the white in the dark,” says Barrois. “Expressing hope and optimism, inspiring our idea to follow the light.” Bouillot echoes the sentiment: “Optimism is a way of looking ahead, not fixating on the darkness that may surround you, but instead imagining and finding a path forward.”
Inside the historic building, visitors are confronted with a mirrored cube that fills a central hall, its reflective surface betraying little of its contents. Upon entering through a small doorway, the is suddenly enveloped in darkness and a sea of hanging ropes that they must part in order to move forward—all vision lost, no sense of the way forward or back. "It's about those childlike feelings," says Barrois, a father of two himself. "Disorientation and wonder. One journalist went inside and came immediately back out. She said it was a little bit traumatic. My children, on the other hand, loved it. They stayed inside for a long time." The journalist eventually summoned her courage and made it to the core of the installation—a clearing at the center of the cube bathed in soft, undulating light (strobing at a frequency that emulates the Aldebaran star's frequency); and a warping, distended soundscape. A central orb clustered with origami tuberose blooms that emit the flower's musky fragrance is surrounded by marble seating—precisely scaled-up replicas of keepsake pebbles from the beaches of Belle-Île (down to every groove and notch, the result of a painstaking and exacting fabrication process). “In the clearing, you form a profound connection with yourself,” Bouillot, the installation's co-conspirator, explains. The air is invigorating, the stillness magnetic. “Seeing a faint light in the distance... intuitively draws you to follow it.”
A blend of immersive design, olfactory storytelling, and cosmic reflection, MISSION ALDEBARAN offers a quiet, radiant meditation on the endurance of light—and the near-mystical connection between our senses. The project's conception is the subject of a concurrent exhibition that includes video documentation of the pair's process, framed references to their various sources of inspiration, and last but not least, the original pebbles that inspired the installation's seating. In its comprehensiveness and ambition, the project marks a new chapter for the Maison of Marc-Antoine Barrois—an independent house known for poetic scents like B683 and Ganymede, and a couture line rooted in intimacy and elegance—anf for Bouillot, a multidisciplinary designer whose holistic practice spans architecture, fashion, and sensory experience, shaped in part by his early work under a renowned Japanese minimalist.
To celebrate the fragrance's debut, Barrois and Bouillot gathered media and art world figures during Milan Design Week for a dinner in the installation’s shadow. Guests were served a selection of monochrome courses served by a waitstaff dressed in all black. Before dessert, as Barrois gave his remarks, the servers returned in stark white, a final visual gesture echoing the ethos of MISSION ALDEBARAN—the movement from shadow into light.
