Marc Atlan

HARLEY WEIR shot face of Vivenne Westwood DEMPSEY STEWART in a blockbuster 30 page editorial

Husk. The name suggests an empty shell but this brilliant young magazine out of London is anything but empty. Or a shell.

Fragrance as jewelry: Dior Fragrance Collection

The metal stamped bottle stopper seen from above

Bottle #001 in the limited edition of 100. I throb !

The black box as black hole, as sepulchre, as bottomless pit....and within all that a fragrance meant to evoke orgasm.
Marc Atlan's delicately under-lit installation for the release of his debut fragrance "Petite Mort" houses a tiny bottle of the parfum in a black room that lends itself to many a metaphor.

"Petite Mort, little death, total
release; beyond a scent, more like a convulsion of the senses"

Mr Marc Atlan is launching his very first fragrance and "Petite Mort" , from its name to its imagery and inevitably, the actual fragrance, is unabashed in its expression of perfume as art.

Marc Atlan for that legendary Helmut Lang perfume ad

Marc Atlan, inimitable Art Director has just relaunched his site and TI had this first glimpse to share.

Long live the vitality of strong ideas activating beautiful objects.

So I'm trying to be nonchalant and...poised as I wait for my buzzer to sound but deep inside I am seriously bugging out.

encased in a red textured box, each object conveys the substance and heft of a valuable keepsake.

True, we haven't had the chance to use the product (well not yet) but listen: Kjaer Weis' branding, structural design and packaging is being orchestrated by TI fave Marc Atlan. The eminent Mr Atlan forwarded us these preview images and it was certainly a lovely visual treat well within the tradition of his work for Comme des Garcons and Helmut Lang's perfumes. Aside from being a high end organic make-up brand, Kjaer Weis' great breakthrough on this project is to create the first fully refillable make-up system in the world. Here are the further details

The restless modernists of the 20's had the blunt industrial lines of Chanel No 5 to consecrate their age, my age has Comme Des Garcons parfums to summarize our times .CDG parfums are a true luxury . The 90's was in many ways the apotheosis of the celebration of all things "industrial" within the confines of fashion. Remember those floor length slip dresses in griege, the covers of Harper's Bazaar lit with flourescent tubing and of course the rapid adoption of Comme des Garcons' "concrete bunker" retail aesthetic into the general store design vocabulary.That moment in fashion will always be summarized in my mind by the cold electric smell of 1993's Odeur 53, the No 5 of my 90's generation (sorry CK 1. Your love was short-lived).

Some of Marc Atlan's Greatest Hits

From I-phones to limited edition Nikes, why has design become this much of a market force? Is it that we're experiencing an on-going visual evolution of contemporary culture in the same way we are under-going a technological revolution? I'm not trying to write a master's thesis. (Part of the discipline of The Imagist for me is to learn to be...succinct). I'm just trying to figure out how the hell the whole world got to be so design sensitive. When did American product packaging start to overwhelm its content? To personalize the issue a little bit... I was out out to dinner last night with a pal from an ad agency, when the subject turned to Fabien Baron and his powerhouse agency Baron and Baron. Its not a company anymore it seems.Its a brand in itself, if you'll pardon that dirty word..."brand".
Baron you know from the firm's traditional image management of magazines : Paris Vogue, the 90's Harper's Bazaar- which obviously I've been looking at a LOT- Interview magazine, Arena Homme +, as well as fashion ads -most notably Calvin Klein. We gossiped a little bit about the influence Le Baron and Karl Templer now had over the direction of Calvin, down to the models, in which that team seems not to be as personally invested in. Certainly not the way Calvin the man invested in Kate Moss and Brooke Shields and now no girl or boy for Calvin is allowed to be a bigger story than the clothes.