Soleil Éteint
Role: Creative Direction, Product, Experience
2025-Ongoing
Independent Project
Client: Dries Van Noten
Soleil Éteint
Role: Creative Direction, Product, Experience
2025-Ongoing
Independent Project
Client: Dries Van Noten
Soleil Éteint is a speculative world-building project exploring how emerging creative technologies can expand the process of constructing visual narratives and environments.
Taking advantage of the freedom of a self-initiated brief, I explored generative design workflows to build an immersive campaign world from the ground up.
The concept centers on a summer-to-fall transition fragrance and campaign for Dries Van Noten, capturing the lingering warmth of a season that refuses to fully fade.
Soleil Éteint
Role: Creative Direction, Product, Experience
2025-Ongoing
Independent Project
Client: Dries Van Noten
Soleil Eteint is a speculative world-building project, developed to explore how emerging creative technologies can expand the process of constructing visual narratives and environments.
Taking advantage of the freedom of a self-initiated brief, I explored generative design workflows to build an immersive campaign world from the ground up.
The concept centers on a summer-to-fall transition fragrance and campaign for Dries Van Noten, capturing the lingering warmth of a season that refuses to fully fade.
MOOD
Soleil Éteint
The sun has extinguished.
The feeling of the moment after something ends.
Not loss, Not sadness,
But retention.
The heat that lingers in stone after sunset,
The scent left on skin after someone leaves,
The memory that feels warmer than the moment did.
Dries Van Noten holds a line of distinctive fragrances.
For the next drop, the concept centers on a moment of transition.
In a world that is moving faster than ever, moments of stillness become rare.
This campaign celebrates that in-between - the space where one season is still dissolving into another.
Drawing from my experience working in beauty and collaborating with fragrance houses, I built an accompanying fragrance story to extend the concept of Soleil Éteint.
Citrus peel and pink pepper open the scent with a fresh brightness. It unfolds into the warmth of the saffron, iris, and orange blossom. The fragrance then settles into a base of labdanum, cedarwood, suede, and ambroxan- creating a textured warmth that lingers on the skin, echoing the heat that remains in the stone after sunset.
With guidance from friends at Robertet.
OLFACTIVE COMPOSITION
MID NOTES
Saffron
Iris Concrete
Orange Blossom
Dried Fig Leaf
TOP NOTES
Bitter orange peel
Bergamot rind
Pink pepper
Sage (light dose)
BASE NOTES
Labdanum
Cedarwood
Suede Accord
Ambroxan
Soleil Éteint
The warmth that remains
The fragrance launch unfolds in three acts, each one moving through a layer of the fragrance as it evolves from brightness to warmth to depth. Guests move through the composition in real time, encountering each layer as it arrives.
The experience is gradual, the way scent works on skin. It opens, it settles, it lingers.
The Experience
ACT I
The Lift
ACT II
The Bloom
ACT III
The Linger
The experience is set within the Bisti / De-Na-Wilderness; a landscape of eroded stone and open stillness, holding heat long after the sun has gone.
As the light fades and the air cools, the environment shifts alongside the scent.
Becoming deeper, softer and harder to leave.
The setting becomes an extention of the experience.
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The Lift
Act 1
The experience begins.
The sun is still up - barely.
Guests arrive to a red lacquer monolith standing alone in the canyon.
Dries Van Noten embossed on the surface, catching the last of the light.
A cocktail is served to the guests,
The top notes of Soleil Éteint served cold.
Then a nine minute walk through the Bisti Wilderness.
Nine minutes is the average duration of a fragrance's top notes on skin.
The opening accord - bitter orange, bergamot, pink pepper and sage - is dispersed along the trail.
Guests move through it without knowing.
By the time they arrive at The Bloom, the top notes are gone.
The heart has already begun.
Act 2
The Bloom
The sun is gone and the canyon is still warm.
Guests arrive at The Heart - a serpentine red lacquer installation running through the canyon.
The raw materials of the fragrance's mid notes are laid across the surface.
Saffron, iris concrete, orange blossom, dried fig leaf.
Unlike the top notes which arrived one by one along the trail,
The Heart hits all at once.
You walk in and it surrounds you,
Everything simultaneously, A full chord.
The Heart is forward-facing energy. Red, warm alive, pulling guests towards what's next. They look down into the mirrors and see the sky, The sky that an hour ago was gold - now cooling, darkening. The sun already gone.
Guests are standing between both at once. The heat of what's coming and the reflection of what's left.
You can't look at one without the other being right there.
That's not just the tension of the installation.
That's the tension of the whole human experience of transition.
The Heart
The table is designed to move with the landscape rather than against it, mimicking a single saffron thread. Its' curve follows the natural contours of the canyon floor, bending and winding until it feels like it belonds there.
Red lacquer was chosen for contrast. A deliberate interruption of the pale canyon terrain. In the last of the daylight it reads as heat, something foreign and warm against the white stone.
As night arrives, the table glows from beneath, the red light bleeding into the sand around it. The warmth the sun left behind, held in the dust.
Act 3
The Linger
The table has been cleared. The heat that arrives with the sun has moved.
Into the canyon walls, into the lacquer, into the sand.
As the night cools, blankets are passed.
Cedarwood burns at the edges of the canyon.
This is not a loss. It is the flow of energy that always existed.
The warmth of the day is now held between people, in the glow of what is left, in the closeness of a night that no one is quite ready to end
Base notes don't announce themselves. They accumulate underneath everything else, and outlast it.
Soleil Éteint doesn't end, it redistributes.
Into the air, into the dark, into the people still gathered long after the sun has gone.
Summer doesn't end so much as it dissolves, slowly, at its edges, the way scent does.
The days don't stop; they just hold less light. And yet something is always retained.
Fall arrives not as an absence but as a continuation -
carrying everything that summer left behind.
The Keepsake
Guests leave with a suede envelope, a take away piece of the experience itself.
The envelope holds a kit that carries 3 objects.
A travel-sized roller oil of the full fragrance. The same accord that the guests moved through across all three acts, now held in a single application. A saffron vial - the signature note of Soleil Éteint, the material at the center of the fragrance, and the eye of the experience. The ingredient itself, to be held and used. And a ceramic tile, cast from the same mineral composition as the Bisti Badlands and dipped in the glaze used on the fragrance bottle, the tile is an artifact of the experience - a fragment of the landscape and the fragrance object in one. Its surface is porous enough to hold the roller oil, allowing it to diffuse slowly over time.
