A New Perfume,¹ the latest from Comme des Garçons, is a welcome thing: I miss Comme des Garçons. They haven’t done anything under their own brand since 2010’s Wonderwood,² and they haven’t done anything that I loved since their 2009 collaborative effort with Monocle, Monocle Scent Two: Laurel.³ A New Perfume is something of a return to form — it’s old-school, weird Comme des Garçons, although perhaps not quite in the way I expected. It features the usual ad copy mumbo jumbo in the Comme des Garçons style (“A rejected bottle survives to hold an imaginary flower constructed linearly”), and a description that pretty much sums up what it smells like:

The fragrance opens with the man made organic composites of aldehydes and safraleine, opening up slowly to hawthorns and derivations of lilac, before exploding in a riot of flower oxides, then finally succumbing to notes of industrial glue and brown scotch tape with hints of musk and styrax.

That’s just right. The opening is in-your-face synthetic…

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