Marc-Antoine Barrois may be the most successful couturier you had never heard of — at least until his award-winning fragrances came along.
Tilia, the fashion designer’s newest scent, took home the Perfume Extraordinaire and the Independent Fragrance prizes at the 2025 Fragrance Foundation UK Awards, while at the French edition of the event, it was a finalist for Niche Fragrance from an Independent Brand.
It was the second time that a Marc-Antoine Barrois perfume had won a Perfume Extraordinaire award in Britain, where, he said, he does a lot of business: In 2020, Ganymede, a woody, spicy composition with hints of leather, also received the prize. The accolade, which recognizes what the foundation calls the year’s “most exceptional and creative fragrance,” put the five-fragrance brand in the company of such industry heavyweights as Guerlain, owned by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, and Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, owned by the Estée Lauder Companies.
Named for an imaginary celestial star, Tilia features notes of linden blossom, jasmine sambac and broom, a yellow flower with a vanilla scent found in many locations, including the island of Belle-Île-en-Mer in Brittany. Mr. Barrois, 41, lives there with his husband and their three young children.
Mr. Barrois said that three years ago, when he and Quentin Bisch, a master perfumer and his longtime collaborator, began talking about creating a floral scent, the goal was to come up with “something luminous and different.”
“I do perfume as I would do a couture collection, not as a single look,” he said. “Perfume tells a story. It’s a new imaginary world. With Tilia, I wanted to capture simple happiness, like a fantasy about a summer that never ends.”
Mr. Barrois described his collaboration with Mr. Bisch, who works at the fragrance manufacturer Givaudan, as one of “complete, almost unspoken” trust. The two men are the only ones to wear scents during their development and to finalize their compositions.
Not Their Mothers’ Couturier
About 10 years ago, Mr. Barrois was an under-the-radar couturier and sometime jewelry designer.
While still a student in textile engineering, he apprenticed with the now-retired couturier Dominique Sirop, and then was hired by Hermès, where he worked under Jean Paul Gaultier. But craving more direct contact with clients, Mr. Barrois decided in 2009 to open his own tiny atelier between a Chinese takeout and a kebab shop on a small street in the Ninth Arrondissement.
“There was always this gap between me and the client, so I thought I would do couture,” he explained recently. “It was a gamble but I was young and ambitious and full of energy.”
Mr. Barrois said he scraped by for the first few years, subletting his apartment to make rent and moonlighting for designers such as Jean-Claude Jitrois and Giambattista Valli. Specializing in bespoke men’s clothing, with the occasional limited-edition horsebit jewelry (a design inspired by a horses’s bit), he eventually found a following among the sons of Mr. Sirop’s clientele.
“Here were customers who were interested in dressing well, and were willing to pay 10,000 euros up front for a custom-made tuxedo,” he said. “They just didn’t want to be dressed by their mothers’ couturier.”
But when a series of coordinated terrorist attacks hit Paris on Nov. 13, 2015, business vanished overnight. Two clients never returned to Paris to pick up their suits, he said.
Mr. Barrois turned his attention to perfume, reaching out to Mr. Bisch to create a memento for customers. In part, he said, it was meant to erase the olfactory memory of the food joints next to his atelier, but he also wanted to pursue a creative outlet he had kept in mind since his time at Hermès, whose perfumes he particularly admires.
“I’ve always considered myself as having a vision that is not so much about fashion,” the designer explained. “I am too sensitive to sustainability and to ecology to consider myself a fashion designer, because fashion is what pollutes the most. I prefer to talk about creative pieces, because if creativity can be timeless, that is the DNA of art.”
That first scent was B683, with notes of saffron, chili, black pepper, violet and leather. Its name was a play on the home asteroid B612 of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s Little Prince, with Mr. Barrois’s own Oct. 6, 1983 birthday providing the numbers.
The business has blossomed since that first perfume, Mr. Barrois said, with retail sales on track to reach approximately 100 million euros ($117.2 million) this year.
The New Cool
Like many a creative, the designer has credited Sarah Andelman, the co-founder of the Parisian concept store Colette, with believing in his work from the outset.
Mr. Barrois recalled his surprise in 2016 when Ms. Andelman said she liked the B683 perfume so much that she would stock it next to ones more famous at the time, including Moschino’s Fresh Couture and a debut fragrance by Zlatan Ibrahimovic, then a star on the Paris St.-Germain soccer team.
“Here I was, this total unknown, with a fragrance we made for me to wear as my own signature,” he said. “When I asked why, she replied, ‘In the future, authenticity will be the new cool.’” An initial run of 500 bottles sold out in less than two months, he said, and the brand continued to sell exclusively at the store until it closed in 2017.
His name quickly caught on among fragrance enthusiasts. “What really stood out was his couture-inspired approach to fragrance,” Tatiana Birkelund, the senior vice president of brand partnerships and buying for the beauty, jewelry, gifts and home categories at Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus, wrote in an email. (The stores carry all five Barrois fragrances.)
“Marc-Antoine’s background as a textile engineer gives him a very unique perspective and approach to fragrance — exploring unexpected directions with structure, precision and imagination,” she continued. “His work feels artistic and intentional, which is the type of creative clarity that resonates with our customers.”
The brand’s headquarters and atelier are on Rue du Faubourg St.- Honoré, with another boutique in the Galerie Véro-Dodat, a covered passageway near the Palais Royal ; in 2022 it opened in the Piccadilly Arcade in London.
Late this year, a fragrance-only pop-up is scheduled to open on Wooster Street in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, a place holder for a 300-square-meter (3,300-square-foot) store, the brand’s largest yet, scheduled to open in February during New York Fashion Week. In addition to fragrances, the store is expected to stock a new ready-to-wear line based on crisp white shirting, candles, body salts and jewelry, and to display couture prototypes for order. There will also be furniture from the “Mission Aldebaran” installation that Mr. Barrois and the architect and artist Antoine Bouillot presented during Milan Design Week in April.
(During Paris Design Week, scheduled Sept. 4-21, Mr. Barrios’s fragrances, couture and the sculpted benches that he showed in Milan were to be featured in Le Labyrinthe, an immersive show curated by Jérémy Pradier-Jeauneau at the Hôtel de la Marine.)
Farida Khelfa, a former model and fashion muse to Azzedine Alaïa, discovered Mr. Barrois’s work in Milan.
“It was a rather astonishing and singular, with a light at the end of a passage that was almost suffocating,” she wrote in an email, describing the set as “a Pierre Soulages black, surmounted by enormous stones.”
She characterized the fragrance scenting the exhibition — a rich tuberose seasoned with paprika, called Aldebaran — as “really spellbinding.”
Though investors have come calling, Mr. Barrois said, he has no intention of relinquishing control of his company, preferring instead to pass the business to his children. And if there was one primary ingredient to his success, he considers it to be neither trendiness, nor a competitive edge.
Instead, he said it was kindness: “When you are kind, people remember you for the right reasons.”
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