This month, Dries Van Noten is celebrating its beloved cult fragrance Soie Malaquais by turning it into a series of collectable sculptures. The house is teaming up with Bouke De Vries – the Dutch artist known for transforming ceramic fragments into ornate, baroque reconstructions – to create five one-of-a-kind “masterpiece bottles”.

Soie Malaquais is one of Dries Van Noten’s most loved fragrances. Released in 2022, it was designed to evoke the “tactile pleasure” of silk – a warm, enveloping chestnut accord, lifted by rose, blackcurrant and cardamom. Just as distinctive is the bottle: like the rest of the Dries fragrance collection, it’s a statement object in itself, with a coloured glass and a porcelain base inspired by Delft blue-and-white ceramics.

While de Vries notes that he was a long-time fan of Dries Van Noten, this foray into fragrance was new territory. “I never wear scent,” he says with a laugh, talking to me from his studio in west London. The brand approached him despite this, drawn to his meticulous eye, love of sustainability, and open embrace of imperfection. “They gave me total carte blanche,” he remembers. “They told me, ‘Do what you want to do.’” The only requirement was that he had to make five unique bottles, plus some additional still-life sculptures for the London and New York boutiques.

Within those parameters, de Vries worked intuitively, putting himself at the mercy of the fragments in front of him. “I don’t do drawings,” he says. “I don’t know where it’s going to end … The fragments I have in my hand determine how the thing develops.” He sourced materials by following leads online, prioritising offbeat pieces that are easy to overlook, from humble ceramics to fragments from a 17th-century shipwreck.