Christian Astuguevieille, a puckish, polymathic artist and designer of furniture, sculpture, jewelry, toys and objects that almost defied description, who used his role as artistic director of perfume at the avant-garde fashion label Comme des Garçons to challenge ideas about what perfume could be — creating unsettling scents that evoked the odors of things like burning rubber, nail polish and overheated copy machines — died on Feb. 13 in Paris. He was 79.
His death was announced by Comme des Garçons. No cause was given.
Among the mysterious and uncanny objects that Mr. Astuguevieille (pronounced ah-STOOG-vee-yay) made during his long career were chairs, cabinets and benches wrapped and knotted with rope, and mirrors that sprouted hanks of soft cotton.
He made jewelry from unlikely materials: necklaces of colorful leather gloves that were stitched together like an Elizabethan ruff and costume gems strung with plastic dolls’ legs.
He also made plush toys that he referred to as monsters: a zebra, say, but with an elephant’s head and a mane of giraffes’ legs and angels’ wings.
He made fetish-like female figures in white porcelain, lashed with cotton rope or tied with what looked like Japanese obis or bustles, as well as somber bronze totems in geometric shapes cocooned in rope and painted jet black.
He once made a collection of 1,000 glass-and-metal spears. “It’s as if a thousand warriors had danced around and then left their lances and gone off somewhere,” he told The New York Times in 1995.
He was inspired by African and South Pacific islanders’ tribal artifacts, traditions and textiles, and by the Japanese practice of furoshiki, or wrapping objects in fabric. He loved origami. He collected creamware and exotic birds’ eggs.
That his work appeared both strange and familiar was intentional. He designed his objects, he said, for an imaginary civilization.
He had impressive day jobs, as a creative director at Parfums Rochas, the fragrance house, in the 1980s, and later at the French fashion company Nina Ricci, where he oversaw the accessories collections. He designed jewelry for Thierry Mugler, Claude Montana, Hermès and Lanvin.
But it was his first furniture exhibition, at the Galerie Yves Gastou in Paris in 1989, that made his name as an artist, attracting collectors and admirers from around the world, including Rei Kawakubo, the designer who founded Comme des Garçons. She saw a kinship between his enigmatic work and her own complex designs — clothing that sprouted humps and bumps and sleeves in weird places. In the early 1990s, when she decided to produce perfume, she turned to Mr. Astuguevieille.
He was not a “nose,” the term of art for a master perfumer. He described himself as an olfactory interpreter who came up with themes that perfumers could then produce. His first fragrance — of more than 100 — for Comme des Garçons was called simply Eau de Parfum, and made by Mark Buxton, a noted perfumer.
Mr. Astuguevieille’s instruction to the perfumer was “to imagine an exotic place that you don’t know,” he told Johanne Courbatère de Gaudric, a French journalist who profiled him for the olfactory journal Nez in 2020. “You are swimming in the middle of a completely black pool, in equally dark water. It’s hot, you feel wonderful, so good that you don’t want to get out.”
The resulting scent was “dry, spicy and woody, with incense and pepper and a slightly church-like restraint,” Paul Austin, a fragrance industry strategist and creative director, wrote in an email.
“In the 1990s, fragrance was still largely about glamour, seduction and polish,” he continued. “Christian shifted the axis. He made it acceptable for perfume to be intellectual, austere and sometimes deliberately unsettling.”
Mr. Austin added: “He did not simply create unusual perfumes. He redefined what perfume could be within a cultural context and helped turn niche fragrance into a serious design discipline.”
“Nail polish,” “pavement after a rain” and “clean laundry” were a few of his directives for Odeur 53, which came out in 1998.
Chandler Burr, the former scent critic for The Times, described it as “fascinating, perverse and basically unwearable,” adding that it smelled “like paving tar.” (He meant it as a compliment.)
For Garage, which appeared in 2004, Mr. Astuguevieille imagined “the scent of a garage containing an old car that has been kept there for several years with a slight whiff of motor oil.”
He often scolded his perfumers, “It’s way too beautiful. It smells way too good.”
One day, Mr. Astuguevieille gathered his team and walked them to a photocopier room. “Can you smell it?,” he asked, gesturing at the still-warm machines. That was his brief for Odeur 71, out in 2000.
For Concrete, released in 2017, he told his perfumers: “Sandalwood. Modern. Broken.” (It smelled like sandalwood.)
Christian Astuguevieille was born on Oct. 22, 1946, in Paris, the only child of Denise and Bernard Astuguevieille, who worked in aeronautics.
The family was an old one, and well off, and he grew up in Normandy and Paris, where he attended a Montessori school. His art and worldview, he said, were influenced by the school’s child-centered teaching method, which focuses on the senses and uses tactile aids like beads, blocks, sandpaper and water.
After studying pedagogy at the École Normale Supérieure, an elite university in Paris, he became the educational director of the children’s workshop at the Pompidou Center and the artistic director at Parfums Molinard, a 19th-century perfumery.
Mr. Astuguevieille is survived by his husband, Frédéric (Poircuitte) Astuguevieille. His marriages to Sophie Astuguevieille and Georg Dressler, who was also his longtime business partner, ended in divorce.
For years, Mr. Astuguevieille lived between Paris and Bayonne, in southwestern France, where he had a 19th-century house on the water. Both homes were filled with his singular objects and his contrarian furniture and housewares: rope-wrapped cabinets with hairy ridges; vases whose openings were obscured by rope; chairs sprouting antlers that discouraged sitting.
“Altering and deforming the original use of things is important to me,” Mr. Astuguevieille told Guy Trebay of The Times in 2011. “I love to mystify.”
Often, he added, when he presented one of his perfume concepts to Ms. Kawakubo, he would lead with, “It’s a little bit crazy, what I’m doing here.”
And she would reply, “Yes, you are truly crazy, but that’s a good thing.”
Georgia Gee contributed reporting.
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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