How you feel about Byredo M/Mink Eau de Parfum might depend on your thoughts about Dada clothing — say, Elsa Schiaparelli‘s shoe hat.¹ The hat is awfully clever. Who would have thought to take something you wear on your feet, flip it heel up, and put it on your head? But the hat isn’t particularly flattering, and, face it, when you wear a shoe on your head, people notice the shoe and little else. Schiaparelli called herself an artist, but some may have thought of her hat less as art than as gimmick. I’ll let you decide where M/Mink falls.

M/Mink is a collaboration between Byredo and a French design firm called M/M, after its founders, Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak. In a press release, M/M says:

In 2009, reversing the usual idea of receiving a brief from a client, they invited Ben Gorham of byredo to their studio in Paris and presented him a creative direction and concept — a block of solid ink purchased in Asia, a photograph showing a Japanese master practising his daily calligraphy, and a large utopian formula that Mathias drew on Korean traditional paper.

It is rare in our days to find objects with a soul that perfectly fits in the trivial world we’re living in. Even though perfume is totally useless, these seemed to fulfill a kind of spiritual function[…]

Read the rest of this article »