Speak about being prepared.

Shortly after Italian retailer and entrepreneur Claudio Antonioli acquired Ann Demeulemeester in 2020, he approached the founder and asked if she would create a perfume for the home: Seems the Belgian designer had already spent greater than 20 years contemplating, crafting and perfecting a signature scent.

She had way back hung out within the Pays de Grasse region of France — considered the birthplace of contemporary perfumery and a mecca for flower cultivation — to check notes, and visited the Osmothèque in Versailles, home to the world’s biggest scent library.

“I do consider that folks knock on my door after they need me, or after they are right for me. And I assumed, in the future anyone will knock on my door and say, ‘Let’s make a perfume,’ after which I even have to be ready. It’s so simple as that,” she said over the road from her home outside Antwerp. “I knew exactly already for years what I would love to do, the notes that I liked, and what was the thought.

“I also thought it was a pleasant enrichment for the brand because I’m a bit romantic,” she continued in her understated way. “I assumed, ‘OK, a brand also has its perfume.…It was an old dream coming to reality.”

Anointed A, after her first initial, the amber-colored, genderless perfume will probably be unveiled at a launch event on the historic Ann Demeulemeester flagship store on Leopold de Waelplaats in Antwerp Thursday. It is going to even be sold at anndemeulemeester.com and in select specialty stores including The Broken Arm in Paris, Dover Street Market in London and Antonioli boutiques in Milan, Ibiza, Turin and Lugano.

Here’s a fragrance project born with none temporary, market study or focus group. It’s Demeulemeester’s first latest creation under her name since relinquishing the creative helm of her fashion house in 2013.

“I didn’t have a formula, or a plan. After all, I had all of the ingredients in mind. But how do you translate 30 years right into a scent? It’s a superb query, and likewise probably the most difficult to reply,” she explained. “So the one thing I could do, and what I all the time do, is follow my heart.

“Making a perfume, greater than the rest I even have ever created, has to do with instinct. It’s ethereal. I don’t have a cloth, like a material, or a shape. It involves other senses and something nonmaterial and non-tangible,” she continued. “So I completely trusted my instinct — almost like, imagine a wild child going into the forest and imagining, ‘What would she prefer to smell? What could be intriguing? What would go to the origin of beauty?’ This sort of pondering.”

Demeulemeester described A as rooted in nature, with an “animalistic” aspect, and other qualities hard to place into words.

“It has something mysterious. For me, it needs to be fascinating. It also needs to be sensual, intriguing,” she said. “Well, that’s how I’ve all the time thought of fragrance.”

Today, many designers enter the perfume arena with a wardrobe of scents.

Not Demeulemeester.

“For me, it’s very precious to have thee perfume. Making 20 is simpler than making one — you could have to make an actual selection. You have got to go to the essence of what you wish to say,” she explained. “It’s also romantic to have one perfume that has to cover man, woman and child.”

Demeulemeester has faint fragrance memories. She grew up within the Flanders countryside, not removed from the French border.

“The one thing I can say is that, as a baby, I used to be drawn to nature and I loved the smell of grass, flowers,” she said. “I don’t have a selected memory of a perfume. I didn’t just like the perfumes worn by my grandmother. I assumed they were too sweet and too powdery.”

The truth is, Demeulemeester said for many of her life, she didn’t wear fragrances until she created her own, occasionally using essences, or scenting her house with fresh branches or other cuttings from the garden.

“Last week, my husband was in an art gallery, and anyone got here as much as him and said, ‘I actually need to know what that smell is, it’s so beguiling. Please tell me.’ It’s nice if you could have a remark like that — then you understand that what you probably did has a reason to exist because we aren’t the one ones liking it.

“You make something, you begin out of your heart, you make it in a way you’re thinking that is gorgeous,” she said. “But then I can only hope that other people will prefer it.”

Her signature scent comes only in perfume format, which implies a high concentration of essential oils derived from cold pressing natural materials. A 75ml bottle will retail for 330 euros.

It opens with top notes of clove, cumin, Ceylon cinnamon, Sicilian lemon and Calabrian bergamot. Demeulemeester allowed that these elements are surprising. “But also they are fresh and so they are like a bit little bit of get up,” she said. “After which it goes quite quickly to the guts of the perfume.”

Here, the designer contrasts jasmine and May rose with birch-oiled leather, a mixture she finds strange yet beautiful. Underneath are base notes of patchouli, vetiver, rosewood and sandalwood.

“I don’t have to clarify you that I really like leather. I used numerous leather in my life,” she said, referring to her signature collection, which she established in 1985, winning international popularity of her soigné tailoring and dark glamour. “And I just like the smell of leather, too.…As a baby, I sometimes visited with my father the tannery of a member of the family, so I used to be acquainted with the smell of leather.”

Within the seventeenth century, high quality leathers were treated with essential birch oil as a part of the tanning process, which “was a really expensive and really chic smell to have,” she noted.

Antonioli put her in contact with Italian nose Nicola Bianchi to perfect the formula. The perfume will probably be produced in-house by an Italian fragrance atelier.

“Inside nature, outside culture,” was how Demeulemeester described the flacon and packing, which she designed together with her photographer husband Patrick Robyn, and their son Victor, a graphic designer and photographer.

“I wanted something really strong and almost modernistic,” she said of the square column, as emphatic as a skyscraper, with a glossy black facade, the designer’s name writ small. Visible through the juice is the letter A, tall and sharp just like the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, one side of the letter a pointy pin.

The perfume comes cradled in a sturdy, modernist box, all its surfaces wrapped in white painter’s canvas. Sheltered contained in the lid is a postage-stamp sized portrait of Demeulemeester from 1992.

Why?

“That was a special request from Mr. Antonioli. But I had nothing against this because I feel this little portrait explains thoroughly the perfume,” she offered. “When you take a look at the image, it’s me, nevertheless it doesn’t really appear to be me. It’s like a picture of a bit wild child, and for me that goes to the guts of this perfume. So I used to be OK with that.”

Demeulemeester described a seamless collaboration on the project together with her husband and son, a lot in order that “in the long run, we didn’t know who did what. We did it together.”

“I’m a designer, and I really like to design not only clothes, but I also like to design other things. It’s what we do — we create. That’s what makes us joyful. And if we’ve a great idea in a day, then that’s a great day.”

A graduate of Antwerp’s Royal Academy of High-quality Arts, Demeulemeester was one in every of the unique Antwerp Six who helped put that small Belgian city on the worldwide fashion map.

She began showing in Paris in 1992 and quickly became a fashion star, with WWD anointing her “Queen Ann” in a headline following a blockbuster collection in 1995 that might influence runways in other fashion capitals. She counted her musician friend Patti Smith amongst her muses, together with poets akin to Arthur Rimbaud and Hermann Hesse, and artists akin to Jackson Pollock and Jim Dine.

Demeulemeester mined a dark and romantic fashion vein, and built on an inimitable approach to tailoring that usually referenced menswear and military styles. Delicate blouses, sumptuous leather jackets, sturdy riding boots and feather necklaces were also a part of her mixture of tough and tender.

Sébastien Meunier took up the reins after the founder’s departure. Following the Antonioli acquisition, the home experimented with an in-house team, and had a temporary dalliance with Paris-based designer Ludovic de Saint Sernin.

Its latest creative director Stefano Gallici, previously menswear designer on the brand, is to indicate his first collection during Paris Fashion Week on Sept. 30.

Since exiting fashion, Demeulemeester segued into ceramics, initially creating tableware for Belgian homewares brand Serax. She has since expanded into lighting, vessels and furniture.

“I feel if you could have a voice, it’s not so difficult to precise it in several mediums,” she said.