There can be no beauty without meaning, for us,” says Rolf Snoeren, one half of Dutch design duo Viktor & Rolf. To those who follow these endearingly nerdy art-school kooks, this statement is hardly shocking. Snoeren and his partner, Viktor Horsting, stage their seasonal fashion shows like gallery installations—often, the collection almost seems secondary to the artistic statement. They’ve employed exaggerated concepts since the early days of their couture shows—for Winter 2000–2001, fog was pumped into the room to limit visibility, and each outfit was adorned with tiny bells. For Winter 1999–2000, poor Maggie Rizer modelled the entire collection, which was slowly added layer by layer until she was laden with clothing, rotating on a lazy Susan. It seems almost reasonable that at V&R ready-to-wear shows, girls have worn antlers, had their faces painted entirely black or white, or sported duvets doubling as coats. Unpredictable? Always. Elaborate? Absolutely. Contrary? Unequivocally.
Snoeren and Horsting’s creative process also defies convention, deliberately or not. Their starting point is always the name of the collection; the embodiment follows. “It’s not a usual way of working,” admits Horsting, the more introverted of the two, during our chat in a cozy salon at Paris’s Hotel Le Meurice. “But we cannot design when we do not know the thought behind it.” This extends to their new fragrance, Eau Mega (from $90, 800-898-2328). The wordplay is obvious, but what’s really indicative of the V&R universe is the paradox of the name—“eau” means light and watery in the perfume lexicon, while “mega” means, well, mega.
This fascination with uncommon pairings was apparent in their first scent, Flowerbomb—a garden bursting with opulent flowers meets ominous explosive weapon. The creamy floriental perfume, housed in its pink grenade-shaped bottle, is “mysterious and surrealistic,” says Horsting. Eau Mega, while also intended to be an explosion of scent, is “slightly more real, more ready to wear,” says Snoeren. In the twosome’s bespectacled eyes, that means a new spin on freshness that is “feminine, extravagant and sexy,” Snoeren continues, eschewing any associations normally brought to mind by an eau, such as “masculine, citrus and sportif.”
It’s fitting that noses Olivier Polge and Carlos Benaïm constructed Eau Mega in reverse, “almost upside down,” says Polge. Breaking from the standard approach—like any structure, most perfumes are built from the ground up—they began with the top notes. After selecting violet leaves, basil and crispy pear, they built the juice downward. “The difficulty of the work was to create a full fragrance with elements that were not putting a shadow on the initial boost of the scent,” Polge explains at the fragrance’s launch. Heart notes of peony, sambac jasmine and lemon, and base notes of cedar, cashmere wood, sandalwood and white musk “worked well, respecting the fluidity of the fragrance and the freshness.”
And leave it to V&R to devise a new spin on an iconic beauty objet. Designed by Fabien Baron and dubbed the “Megamizer,” the brand’s signature seal functions as the actual bulb spray, a reinterpretation of an old-fashioned fragrance atomizer. Purposely oversized, it appeals to the pair’s fondness for exaggeration. Horsting says: “We like the idea that you press on our logo...and the imagination comes out of it.”
First published in FASHION Magazine November 2009
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