Montreal

Marc-Antoine Barrois doesn’t just create beautiful perfumes. He is also reinventing the standard of safety and sustainability in the fragrance industry. We’re highlighting his efforts to make your favourite scents more “virtuous”.

My name is Marc-Antoine Barrois, I’m a couturier and artistic director of the eponymous brand I created fifteen years ago. I had discovered Haute Couture while working for two years alongside Dominique Sirop, who had himself worked with Monsieur Saint Laurent, and above all for years with Hubert de Givenchy. I continued my apprenticeship at Hermès with Jean-Paul Gaultier, where I experienced luxury ready-to- wear, then at Jitrois, where I designed for men for the first time. In 2009, at the age of 25, I decided to create my own men’s fashion house, with the aim of rediscovering the traditional fundamentals of Haute Couture: service, quality, and creativity.

It was only a few years later, in 2013, that my ecological conscience was awakened. The trigger was quite precise. I remember seeing this report on the disappearance of insects in France. In 30 years, insect populations had declined by 80%. The report talked about the windshields that are now rarely marred by an insect after hundreds of kilometers on the freeway, whereas I remembered that as a child my brothers and sisters and I were responsible for cleaning up the thousands of flies, mosquitoes and other insects crushed on the bodywork after every journey. We were no longer talking about a mass extinction in the distant past, but about a recent extinction, which had taken place over the last 30 years, and which I had unconsciously witnessed …

I suddenly felt fully responsible. Not for having killed billions of insects, but for not having realized earlier that, as I was growing up, with my head held high by my studies and then my professional life, I was endorsing a change in the world for the worse, when we aspire to the better.

I began to question my own actions, and began to revise my copy with more modesty, aware of the importance of consuming less and better. In my private life, I’ve converted to all-organic and bulk products, I’ve started taking the bike or public transport again whenever possible, and I’m trying my hand at permaculture in our garden. At work, I’ve started to emphasize that my creations are sewn in Paris with fabrics that haven’t crossed the planet, and that it’s more ecological to buy a few well-made garments than to constantly buy cheap (or not) fashions that are renewed every season.

So when after the unexpected success of B683, the first fragrance I created with the perfumer Quentin Bisch, we started thinking about a second fragrance and sustaining this creative activity parallel to couture, I wanted to go back to the drawing board, questioning every step of the process so that it was in line with my convictions.

Everything was already manufactured locally, from the packaging to the filling, but there were still many areas for improvement. We began by including in the specifications for our new fragrance that it would be stable without preservatives or UV filters, the former all being considered likely endocrine disruptors. Ganymede then successfully passed all crash tests without these additives, and we launched the process of reformulating B683 to remove these same preservatives usually added systematically. It was now 2019, and I felt like a pioneer in respectful perfumery at a time when so many consumers were sensitive to «green beauty».

Since then, I’ve pursued the change towards an economic model that’s as virtuous as possible. We have our shipping cartons and grouping crates made by an ESAT (stands for “Établissement et Service d’Aide par le Travail” – meaning Help through Work Establishment and Service) in Paris ‘area, where our perfume boxes are now made with cardboard padding, thus doing away with the plastic velvet flocked foam that is not recyclable. In addition to being reusable, since the boxes are sized so that postcards or folded A4 sheets can fit inside, our packaging is now entirely recyclable.

We have replaced cellophane with a self- adhesive hologram label that guarantees the authenticity of our products, without the use of plastic. Similarly, we recycle as much as possible of our cushioning products, so that every day, when we send out a perfume, this last step does not create future waste but, on the contrary, reduces our ecological footprint. Finally, we have a refilling solution for our glass bottles.

Today, I’m proud to be taking part in my own “humble” way in a world I believe to be a better place. By showing that this is possible while being viable and sustainable, I hope to invite others to also question their ways of working, producing, and consuming on a daily basis.