Marc-Antoine Barrois Reflects on His New Soho Boutique, Perfumes, Couture, and More
At his simply beautiful new store, the couturier spoke with Galerie about the vision behind his NYC outpost and strategic path
The new Marc-Antoine Barrois store at 120 Wooster Street in Manhattan’s Soho invites visitors in subtly before opening two successive ground-floor vistas that ease the path between them. The perfume is the first thing guests see. Barrois famously turned the standard growth pattern of a fashion brand on its head when he brought out perfumes early in his line’s existence.
Bottles of Barrois’ five main scents sit on clusters of ovular polished wood pedestals, with three available as both Eaux de parfum and Extraits de parfum.
Moving through a skillfully managed narrowing of space, visitors enter the Ready-to-Wear area, where elegantly solid, square-edged couches and velvety spring-olive cushions face a wall adorned with witty giant ant sculptures. The ants come from the designer’s affection for New Yorkers, reminding him of strong worker ants walking and the process of construction the store. It feels like a living room, wonderfully comfortable and bathed in sunshine.
The custom-designed carpet in the second room beautifully refers to rivers, a natural theme also seen in the ribbon-like railing that waves and flows from the broadly skylit second room to the couture fitting room on the ground floor. There, visitors will see a concert hall-style piano for small musical events.
The lower level couture fitting space is also meant for talks about perfume. The walls are decorated with work by French abstract painter Silvère Jarrosson and cartoon sketches for the panels from one of Barrois’ favorite comics, The Worlds of Aldebaran, by Léo. Haute couture is the last place Americans might expect to meet a comics book fan, but Barrois crosses a unique gathering of perspectives in his design awareness that of course has room for the bandes desinées.
The store, like his prior ones, was designed in collaboration with Antoine Bouillot. Its particular contemporary modernity couldn’t seem further from the Baroque and and Rococo golden age of Versailles, but Barrois sites the Palace as an early influence: “If you visit Versailles, every painting means gives a message to people. It took me probably 10 years, if not 20 years, to try to manage to translate into something very much more contemporary.” Changes that have come over time include an increasing environmental commitment manifested in the perfumes and inspired by the arrival of Barrois’s nephew, niece, and children. In 2019, the Marc-Antoine Barrois brand reformulated all of the fragrances to take out chemical that he did not want children coming into contact with, such as UV filters and preservative, to make them as clean as possible.
A rack of the Ready-to-Wear line’s pristinely quintessential, primarily unisex white shirts is suspended in the second room, where visitors will also find a sitting room to further explore the perfumes. Scarves and jewelry are here, too.
There are two worlds on offer in the fitting rooms to put clients at their ease. The downstairs haute couture fitting room and the two main rooms are all about light and clean lines, but the second, upstairs dressing room unites with the store’s overall artful embrace by taking a step away, as if into a dream: “What’s fun is that, for me, it’s like Inception. It’s like people leave the 21st-century when they enter the store. Enter my universe, and then, if it’s not enough, they can jump into a second dream, which is entering the world of another artist. And that would change all the time. I love Inception as a metaphor.” The main floor dressing area is currently decorated by artist/designer Katie Heaton with a cozy sapphire night maximalism that features a mural of a theater and birdhouse-like sculptures.
Galerie caught up with Barrois on a recent afternoon, in an interview that has been edited for length and clarity.
Why perfume, and why white shirts?
In 2009, when I launched my brand, it was only couture—inviting people to buy less, but better. So I was doing everything made to measure, including white shirts. I’m wearing a white shirt every day. Being very sincere, it’s the first thing I wanted to do—to work on it, and do it as a ready-to-wear, and that allowed me to do it even much better than when I was doing it to measure.
The first perfume came in 2016. I thought—I was still an artist, thinking of myself as an artist, but not renowned enough to launch a fragrance. And people were so mad about it, so crazy about this first fragrance—B683—that I decided to create a second one. The second one got even more attention, and it was awarded, and it was the beginning of the line of perfume becoming more important than my other work.
The first one is a spicy, woody fragrance. The idea behind it was really to create something that was kind of the perfume of a grandfather, transformed into the 21st century, twisted so that it could fit for us. So it’s old-school, and women loved it too, and I really learned that perfume can be not only for men, but also for women—very, very unisex. In the same way, I’ve always considered everything I do as pieces of art. There’s no muse for men, no muse for women—it’s just a question of taste. I can do the most beautiful white shirt and you have the right to dislike it. I can do the most beautiful fragrance—different tastes exist, and someone will not like it, someone will love it. It reminds them of something.
It sounds like you’re thinking of a variety of ideas with the perfume—not a person?
No, not a person, because I really do believe that each of my perfumes is more of an emotion than a person, more of an emotion than an ingredient…I see it as something that transports me somewhere else.
It’s a bit of the same concept as the store here, where we invite people to quit the 21st century and enter my own creative universe. The boutique is a bit mesmerizing at the beginning—with those avatar-like mushrooms coming out of the floor with the bottle on top—and then you come into the store and discover this living room, which invites you to wonder at pieces of art.
Can you tell me about the process of designing the store and how you chose the people you worked with?
So we came into the place and walked through it many times, thinking: where does my energy bring me? We started by demolishing everything—breaking down everything that we could break. There were plenty of fitting rooms, plenty of racks, and we wanted to see nothing. Then it’s about walking around…we realized that at no point were we going from the entrance to the back in a straight line. The energy there was pushing us toward the other wall. We were walking in curves. Basically, we were doing an “S” to arrive at the desk.
And this place was quite dark, because there was no mirror and all the walls were hidden behind a curtain, so we could not see the light from the beginning. And for me, it was a crush—this light. I thought, “Light is really what makes a place.”
And then the question is: how do we build different things? What does New York represent for us? For me, New York represents an urban jungle. And all the buildings are like huge trees everywhere. So we created those wood block elements — like blocks of New York. The carpet is meant to be like water falling on the floor of a forest, making that impression.
What do you think you learned specifically with making this space?
I think I learned how important it is, when the space is big, to create small spaces within it—because it looks much bigger now than it looked when everything was broken. And finally, when you creatively change the purpose of a place, you can also change the energy in it.