Bouke de Vries crafts porcelain perfume bottles for Dries Van Noten

Belgian artist Bouke de Vries has created five unique porcelain bottles for Dries Van Noten's unisex perfume Soie Malaquais, launched in 2022. The bottles are sold at the designer's London and New York stores, priced at £6,000 each. A limited-edition series is also available online. The scent, developed by Marie Salamagne, features notes of chestnut, rose, blackcurrant, and cardamom, inspired by Van Noten's garden. De Vries, known for reassembling broken china fragments into dynamic objects, subverts the 18th-century tradition of ornate porcelain perfume bottles. He describes his designs as responding to the fragrance's beauty: elegant but not entirely well-behaved. Working alone in a shed in his Shepherd's Bush garden, De Vries initially trained in ceramic restoration. He notes that the scale of a perfume bottle felt natural for his poetic approach to reimagining broken objects.