The perfume label bottling the smells of museums, movies and unorthodox desire

Top notes of “metal, neon light effect, cold and green,” middle notes of “dry concrete” and “oil paint” and bottom notes of “dry book effect,” are not common descriptions for perfume, but most fragrances also aren’t based on recreating the experience of going to New York’s New Museum. Folie à Plusieurs (or madness shared by many in English) is the perfumery bottling the scents of museums, movies and unconventional fetishes. They have made a name for themselves by creating olfactory profiles for sensory experiences that aren’t traditionally associated with smell – and instead of working around clothing brands, Folie à Plusieurs centres its inspiration in art.

“Fashion and fragrance have had a long love affair – ever since François Coty – and I thought that to find new inspirations for fragrances we had to look outside the traditional framework that we are working in,” says Folie’s founder Kaya Sorhaindo. “Artists tend to propose interesting concepts and take risks and I thought that would be a good place to start to breathe fresh life into perfumery.”

Aside from their work with museums and galleries, the Berlin-born fragrance house also works with film in their Cinéma Olfactif series, in which they create a scent based on a particular film’s scene, diffused through the theatre during its screening to create a multi-dimensional experience. Folie originally premiered this series at the Berlin and London Soho House cinemas, because their theatres were easy to control the diffusion in. With the permission of the respective directors, Folie has come up with fragrances for titles such as The Virgin Suicides, Volver, The Lobster and La Grande Bellezza. Their perfume for Mathieu Kassovitz’s brutal drama La Haine – with a feeling of “burnt rubber tracks drawn on concrete pavement” – is one of their most popular with customers.

“This is one of our more aggressive scents, but people love it,” Sorhaindo says. “Most of the fragrances that we create are wearable. There are some that border on ‘is this wearable?’ but I have always been of the mind that there is no such thing as a bad smell.”  

While most department store counters deal in broadly accepted desire with romantic florals, fresh citruses and rugged notes of wood, Folie often ventures into the specificities of unusual erotic impulse. Their performance series “Olfactophilia” – one of the perfumery’s first collaborations with the New Museum – consists of 18 different sexual expressions, each represented in a perfume titled after the fetish. The subject matter ranges from fragrances like, AU·TAG·ON·ISTO, which represents a sexuoerotic arousal triggered by being on stage or camera, to like TEL·E·PHO·NI·CO, a sexuoerotic arousal triggered by discussing obscene matters over the telephone.

“We asked people with non-traditional erotic impulses to describe the experience to a perfumer and for the perfumer to try to render that experience in the form of a scent,” Sorhaindo says. “Some of those fragrances are quite strange, like for example there is lactophilia, sexual arousal from breastfeeding. Of course there is a kind of milky element to it – it even looks white like milk – but it is not as sour as one would think.”

Folie takes an abstract approach when creating scents for experiences that traditionally favour other senses like sight, sound and touch. Instead of creating a lifelike rendering of a certain moment or place, the perfumers work with the details of an experience to piece together a representative smell. For the New Museum, it was about sending perfumers to the institution and seeing what stood out to them.

The Folie founder asked perfumers, Mark Buxton and David Chieze, to recall their experience with the New Museum. “Each of them offered a different memory of how they interacted with the space. Mark wanted to create something based on the metal façade and the sculpture on the building. On David’s side, he looked at the concrete elements on the building and thought more about a performance piece of naked bodies and referenced Maurizio Cattelan’s work.”

As an independent perfumery, Folie limits its sales to its online shop and through collaboration partners, like the New Museum, with bottles retailing anywhere form $57 -$173.

Sorhaindo added that Folie will be headed down to Boston next, to design a fragrance in partnership with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the group will also be starting up its cinema series in its new home, New York City, with films like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain.

“We are trying to use scent, less like a commodity and more like an experience. Instead of something that you wear, it is something that you live through. It helps you expand a certain idea or connect to a certain artist,” he says.