10 Questions With… Marc-Antoine Barrois and Antoine Bouillot

MISSION ALDEBARAN installation.

The oft-siloed worlds of fashion and furniture design are converging. Nowhere has that become more evident than at Milan Design Week—still the largest annual event of its kind. Anchored by the long established Salone del Mobile fair, the city-wide happening plays host to an increasing number of activations presented by various industries looking to harness the potential of cross-pollination and diversification. Car, beauty, and even appliance brands have gotten in on the game. Several are also venturing into the realm of homeware products and working closely with purveyors of fine materials to do so. At this year’s edition, which ran from April 8-11, 2025, at least 10 leading haute couture houses and ready-to-wear apparel brands mounted especially immersive installations. All of this makes perfect sense given the Italian city’s history as a bastion of fashion and textile production long before furniture was its thing.

Among the more notable and comprehensive of these grand undertakings was multi-hyphenate Marc-Antoine Barrois’s MISSION ALDEBARAN staging. The widely celebrated Parisian couturier and perfumer—having cut his teeth with the likes of Jean-Paul Gaultier and Dominique Sirop before establishing his own house—imagined the project with equally polymathic and lauded designer Antoine Bouillot. The multidisciplinary designer and creative director is the force behind wildly successful interiors practice Honneur Society and co-founder of collectible studio Bellon Bouillot, represented in New York by gallery STUDIOTWENTYSEVEN.

The project is not merely a sensorial spatial experience like the rest but a fully fledged articulation of an underlying concept, one underpinning the launch of a newly formulated perfume branded with the same name and developed with fragrance expert Quentin Bisch. Barrois and Bouillot rounded out the particularly enveloping installation with limited edition furnishings, a book, and merchandise. This “total work of art” and “world-building” narrative approach allowed them to fully explore the dualistic interplay of light and dark; a poignant theme in these uncertain times. The ambitious endeavor took close to a year to perfect and carry out.

Marc-Antoine Barrois and Antoine Bouillot. Photography by Olivier Yoan.

One enters the iconic, emphatically Art Deco-style Salone dei Tessuti in Milan’s Lazzaretto neighborhood only to find a mirrored cube occupying the double height space. An aperture demarcated by black ropes appears to conceal the entrance but actually leads into a much more extensive densification of these elements—an eventually pitch black ”forest.” One moves further and further into the seemingly endless abyss only to decipher the glimmer of slowly emerging light from far off in the distance. What eventually emerges is a circular clearing with a large Aldebaran star-inspired luminaire suspended above a field of carefully crafted Tuberose paper flowers infused with the fragrance—and encircled by rock-shaped marble settees. A multidirectional score plays along the perimeter. Everything is either rendered in black or white.

Barrois and Bouillot spoke to Interior Design about various aspects of this labor-of-love endeavor.

Explore This Installation By Marc-Antoine Barrois + Antoine Bouillot

For Milan Design Week, Marc-Antoine Barrois and Antoine Bouillot created a whimsical forest filled with fragrance. Photography by Keffer.

Interior Design: How did your collaboration first come about?

Marc-Antoine Barrois: Having worked in fashion, scent-creation, and a number of other creative fields, I’m always interested in channeling the notions of elegance, timelessness, and nature’s inherent beauty; regardless of what form that might take. Antoine and I share that appreciation on a deeply emotional level. We both have a sensibility for the world of childhood and the sense of sublime discovery that comes with that stage of life.

Antoine Bouillot: Somehow, we don’t need to overly explain things to each other. There’s an inherent symbiosis in the approach we each take to many facets of our respective practices. I’ve designed a number of Marc-Antoine’s boutiques in Paris and London.

ID: Tell us more about the vision behind MISSION ALDEBARAN?

M-AB: I believe that scent is an experience, a story, and a journey. The ALDEBARAN installation and fragrance embodies optimism, inviting visitors to lose themselves in darkness only to rediscover the brilliance of light and fragrance.

AB: Every element created for this event was carefully conceived to capture and convey the profound emotions Marc-Antoine and I experienced with this perfume. Each part tells its own story. We live in challenging times and our idea was that these components could inspire a sense of sanguinity. The installation, especially in the context of an exhaustive Milan Design Week, offers visitors a chance to rest, contemplate, and regain a sense of wonder.

Seating on display resembled earthy pebbles.

ID: Take us through the thinking behind the ALDEBARAN perfume.

M-AB: The Tuberose blooms at night and, in doing so, emits an especially strong aroma. On a deep emotional level for myself and hopefully others, this condition is indeed an expression of light and dark. ALDEBARAN is the first sole flower fragrance I’ve developed. It’s so potent and sensually captivating that when I close my eyes, it elicits a lot of imagery—what we ultimately evoked in the installation and other components of the project.

ID: How did you select the location? 

M-AB: The idea for the installation came first. About 10 months ago, we began looking throughout Milan for the right venue. Initially, we considered a very raw industrial space near Centrale Station, but then came upon Salone dei Tessuti that has a strong history that’s still evident. It also made sense with my background in textile as the building was once used as a warehouse for this city’s thriving fabric industry. The flow of the space from the main hall down a corridor with wood paneled antichambers was ideal for some of the additional programming we wanted to include: more intimate spaces for showcasing the furniture, drawings, and shop toward the exit.

The installation leads visitors on a quest toward a clearing with a large Aldebaran star-inspired luminaire suspended above a field of carefully crafted Tuberose paper flowers by Marjorie Colas Studio infused with the fragrance.

ID: How were some of the other collaborators integral to this holistic staging?

AB: Of course we love working together, but we also like to bring in other experts that can add their own perspective to the overall concept. With the initial idea of having the star element hover over the field of flowers already in place, we needed an additional treatment to express the notion of hope and optimism. Consulting scientific researcher Aurélie Jean and astrophysicist Anthony Salsi, we learned that the Aldebaran Star has a strange rhythm in its celestial pattern, which we choose to translate in the frequency of the pulsating light. It’s not a heartbeat or malfunction.

It also just so happens that composer Thomas Roussel (noted for his work scoring fashion shows taking place in unconventional settings) is also a fan of astrophysics. It might seem like there isn’t sound in the space because the original music he created is so connected to the movement of the light that it feels intrinsic. Each element of the composition is divided among 12 individual speakers, surrounding the clearing. Both components are like celestial bodies colliding. It’s funny because we find people who end up having strong links as well. Noted philosopher Marie Robert provided insights into the enduring power of optimism.

ID: How are the stone and wooden platform benches another expression of the underlying concept?

AB: For this component—our first furniture collaboration—we drew inspiration from pebbles we found on Belle-ile, an island off the coast of Brittany. They much seems simple and arbitrary on first glance but really stem from that underlying idea of light and dark; the initiate experience of children looking for the perfect and smoothest example of this mundane yet fundamental part of nature. 

Seats will be available for purchase through MISSION ALDEBARAN and STUDIOTWENTYSEVEN.

ID: What was the development behind this key element?

M-AB: We ended up choosing a few things, scanning them, and directly translating them in marble forms, which inherently take on the function of a seat. The wood underneath serves as an anchor.

The materials we choose to work with have intricate graining and imperfections, which render in extraordinary detail. When you cut into a block the size of a room to achieve this scale and shape—conducive to the human body—these idiosyncrasies reveal themselves. Nature is the truest of designers.

ID: How does this relate back to the installation?

AB: The experience of a child searching for pebbles is similar to what a visitor might experience going through the installation. For some, the process of going through the dark forest might be daunting, but once they reach the clearing, they can have a moment of calm after being shaken up a bit. This is essentially the process of discovery, a natural desire. 

Visitors are encouraged to explore each part of their journey into the installation through darkened corridors.

ID: How does the book serve as a souvenir of the overall project?

M-AB: The book begins with numerous pages depicting this progression with black pages slowly featuring more and more white lines until they end up filling the page. Then, the narrative of the child in search of the stone and the Aldebaran store is played out, depicted in cartoon form.

ID: What are the next steps for MISSION ALDEBARAN?

M-AB: The installation could very well travel to other spaces and events like Art Basel Miami and enter into a completely different dialogue with the environment in question. The seats will be available for purchase at my boutiques and through STUDIOTWENTYSEVEN.

Closeup of paper Tuberose flowers illuminated by starlike lighting.

An aperture demarcated by black ropes appears to conceal the entrance to the installation.

The project celebrates the launch of a newly formulated perfume developed with master perfumer Quentin Bisch.

Throughout the installation, natural elements and organic forms play a key role, encouraging a sense of play.