Artist Bouke De Vries Creates Sculptural Porcelain Bottles For Dries Van Noten Perfume The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

A perfume bottle can be more than a container, and in the case of Dries Van Noten's Soie Malaquais, it becomes a small-scale work of art. Dutch artist Bouke de Vries created five unique porcelain bottles for the fragrance, which launched in 2022 and is now sold in Dries Van Noten's London and New York stores. A limited-edition series is also available online.

The collaboration places de Vries's sculptural language inside the luxury fragrance market, where material, form, and presentation carry as much weight as scent. One of the unique bottles is priced at £6,000, a figure that signals how closely the project aligns with collectible design as much as with beauty retail.

Soie Malaquais was developed by perfumer Marie Salamagne and features chestnut, rose, blackcurrant, and cardamom. The composition gives the fragrance a layered profile: warm, floral, and slightly spiced, with a dark fruit note that keeps it from feeling overly polished. In that sense, the bottle and the scent work in tandem, each reinforcing the other's sense of refinement.

De Vries is known for porcelain works that often engage with fragility, repair, and transformation, making him a fitting collaborator for a project that asks viewers to consider the bottle itself as an object of desire. Dries Van Noten, meanwhile, has long treated fashion, scent, and design as interconnected disciplines rather than separate categories.

The result is a collaboration that sits comfortably between contemporary art and luxury commerce, while also suggesting how far fragrance packaging has moved beyond utility. In this case, the vessel is not an afterthought. It is the point.

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