Held in Brackets - COMME des GARÇONS’ Most Elusive Fragrance Yet?

There are objects that feel less made than uncovered - as though they have been waiting, quietly intact, for the right conditions to bring them into view. COMME des GARÇONS Parfums’ “[ ]” has that quality. It does not announce itself so much as emerge, already carrying a set of internal logics that resist easy translation.

Even the title declines to settle. The brackets are not coy; they function more like a frame without an image, or a pause that never quite resolves into speech. It recalls that moment in Beckett where language begins to thin out, not because there is nothing left to say, but because saying it would diminish it. The name, if it can be called that, does not describe the work. It holds space for it.

What sits behind this gesture is an alignment that feels improbably exact: COMME des GARÇONS Parfums working alongside Dia Art Foundation and Meg Webster. Each brings a different discipline, but more importantly, a different tempo. COMME des GARÇONS has long treated perfume as a site for disruption rather than embellishment - scents that privilege tension over harmony, materiality over metaphor. Dia, since the 1970s, has sustained artists whose work resists circulation, whose meaning accrues slowly, often inseparable from the spaces they occupy. And Webster, whose sculptures - salt, soil, water, light - seem less constructed than staged, has always worked at the threshold where matter becomes experience.

That threshold is where “[ ]” begins.

Certain things resist explanation. Some even fit in your hand.

The bottle arrives first as a kind of proposition. A polished silver pyramid, precise and reflective, echoing Webster’s own forms - most notably her salt installation at Dia Beacon, which has sat, quietly altering, for over two years. The pyramid is an ancient geometry, loaded with ideas of permanence and transcendence, but here it feels less monumental than contingent. Its mirrored surface refuses to hold still; the room folds into it, the hand that holds it becomes part of its structure. It is not a container so much as a device for displacing certainty.

Inside, the fragrance follows suit.

There is, initially, a moment of orientation. Bay oil from Madagascar flickers into view - sharp, green, almost medicinal - followed by geranium, which lends a cool, slightly metallic lift. Olibanum threads through this opening with a dry, resinous clarity, something faintly ecclesiastical, faintly clinical. It feels like standing at the threshold of something - not yet inside, but already removed from where you were.

Then the ground shifts.

Carrot seed oil introduces a density that is difficult to describe without resorting to touch. It is not sweet, not vegetal in any straightforward way, but root-like - as though the fragrance has begun to move downward, into something darker, more compacted. The mushroom accord that follows is where the composition quietly refuses expectation. Built through myrrh, labdanum and tree moss, it does not mimic the smell of mushrooms so much as the atmosphere that allows them to exist: damp, shaded, faintly mineral. A kind of living stillness.

It is here that the scent begins to feel less like perfume and more like environment.

There is a passage in Sebald where landscape becomes inseparable from memory, where walking through a place is also a form of excavation. “[ ]” carries something of that logic. It accumulates rather than develops, each note less a step forward than a layer settling into place. You are not moving through it so much as being slowly surrounded by it.

The base extends this enclosure. Patchouli grounds the composition, but without the heaviness it often brings. Sandalwood softens the edges, while a mineral wood accord introduces something cooler, more structural - less timber than the idea of structure itself. There is a faint dryness that emerges over time, like air moving through stone. The scent seems to thin and thicken in cycles, appearing and receding as though it were subject to its own internal weather.

What is striking is not just the composition, but its behaviour. It does not project outward with any urgency. It stays close, forming a kind of perimeter around the body that becomes perceptible only when you enter it. This proximity alters the dynamic entirely. The fragrance is not encountered at a distance; it requires participation.

Webster’s early works often involved enclosed spaces that positioned viewers in relation to one another, heightening awareness of presence, of proximity, of the act of perceiving. The pictogram on the bottle references these diagrams, but more importantly, the fragrance itself seems to enact them. To wear it is to inhabit a small, shifting field - one that is both internal and shared, depending on who steps into it.

There is a tendency, when confronted with something like this, to reach for analogy. Land art, certainly. The quiet insistence of Heaney’s bogs. The recursive spaces of Borges. But none of these quite hold. The perfume resists being folded neatly into any one lineage. It sits somewhere adjacent to them, borrowing just enough to remain intelligible before slipping away again.

Perhaps it is closer to something like Bachelard’s notion of intimate immensity - the idea that certain spaces, however small, can open onto something vast. “[ ]” operates in that register. It is contained, precise, but capable of expanding far beyond its physical limits. Not through projection, but through attention.

Webster has spoken of wanting to evoke the bodily experience of the natural world - soil underfoot, light moving through trees, the sudden presence of an animal crossing overhead. These are not images that translate easily. They are fleeting, contingent, often registered before they are understood. The fragrance does not attempt to recreate them. Instead, it seems to ask what conditions might allow them to return.

Dia’s involvement begins to make sense in this light. The institution has always been concerned with duration, with the slow unfolding of perception, with works that do not reveal themselves all at once. “[ ]” carries that ethos into a medium that is, by nature, transient. The tension between those two states - permanence and disappearance - is never resolved. It is simply held.

At a practical level, this is still a 50ml eau de toilette, composed by Emily Coppermann, structured around bay, geranium, olibanum, carrot seed, mushroom accord, patchouli, sandalwood. It exists within the familiar frameworks of perfumery, and within the economies of luxury that support it. But those facts feel almost incidental once you encounter it.

Because what remains is not the list of notes, nor the object itself, but a shift in how the act of wearing something can be understood.

You do not put this on to become something else. You put it on and, gradually, something else begins to happen around you.

The brackets never close.

And whatever sits inside them is left, deliberately, unresolved.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Comme des Garçons Parfums.