Violence has always been part of our culture. One of the forces shaping any society. Often frightening and evil, sometimes pathetic and sordid, at times evidence of how terribly low we can become, how barbaric and animalistic we really are.

Violence has always been part of our culture. One of the forces shaping any society. Often frightening and evil, sometimes pathetic and sordid, at times evidence of how terribly low we can become, how barbaric and animalistic we really are. Indeed, animals can be seen as better or even nobler than ourselves, as their violence is carried out without reason or intellect and instead is just instinct.

So how then to explain our love of violence and its omnipresence in our culture? It is in virtually every blockbuster film, great book or popular song. Without it there is no teenage rebellion, no rock and roll. It was there in every twist of Presley’s hips and from then on in every part of popular culture that has formed the society I have known and loved for the last 50 years. In photography sexuality and violence are common bedfellows: just look at the work of Mapplethorpe, of Newton, Bourdin and Von Wangenheim.

I have used it in my work from my Skinhead days to my time at Dior. Kicking, crashing, shooting and exploding, violence appears again and again as I try to make sense of the world. I have used it in anger and in frustration, I have used it to bring energy and change and I have used it to show the tragedy and sadness of our failings. It has shaped my work as it has shaped our world.

Some years ago I was asked by the American publication Visionaire to chose a photograph and then create a scent to illustrate it.

I decided on a picture from my Skinhead book, taken in the summer of 1980 in Petticoat lane, in East London.

I can recall the event so clearly. It was lunchtime and the sun was baking down on the old East End tenements. The smell of brick, the smell of his faded light blue jeans and his white singlet freshly washed, the smell of the polish from his boots, the smell of the Indian cooking that came from someone’s kitchen, the smell of his sweat. Then there was who he was, one of the most notorious and feared of all the Skinheads around at that time. A huge man, his muscular arms covered in tattoos so inflammatory that they alone made his mere presence terrifying. Without anything happening at all - no action, no disturbance - the feeling of violence was everywhere around him.

The scent I came up with for Visionaire was an amusing experiment, but not what I am looking for now. Nevertheless the idea of creating a scent along these lines stayed with me. Then two years ago I met Sissel Tolaas, an extraordinary woman. She had already worked on creating a scent based on fear in men that proved unexpectedly to be an aphrodisiac to some women. (Incidentally I was recounting this to a friend of mine that runs a big production company and she said that the smell of frightened men was what she smelt everyday!) I am calling this a scent but it might be better referred to as a drug; not a set of fragrances evocative of one person, event or place, rather a set of chemicals released in the sweat of men as they fight. Will they alter our behavior in the way an aphrodisiac does?

Over the next three months I am going to work with Sissel and try and create a scent called Violence. Originally I wanted to say that this was a scent for gay men, in the way that most of the scents I work on are aimed at a heterosexual woman, but I have never seen the use of dividing and classifying sexuality into gay and straight, hetero and homo. We are sexual beings and sexuality takes on many many forms, most of which, regrettably, we will never have lifetimes long enough to explore, experiment with or invent. The more open we are to ideas and different ways of understanding ourselves the richer we are as people.

I will try and show you all the steps on the way - from the beginnings and rationale of the concept, accruing of the actual jus, the design of the bottle, creation of the image, the marketing of it and then the selling.

The idea behind SHOWstudio has always been to show the process - hopefully with this project I will be able to do that in a very accessible and simple way. Like all projects, failure is part of the process and I will not hide that. I believe failure is just as important as success.

In writing this I am well aware of the morality of such an undertaking, of how violence in many forms is abhorrent. However to simply accept this version is to underestimate ourselves. I feel it is better to look at the facts in front of us and not just see the world as we would like it to be, but to see what is really there, however difficult this may be.

Skinhead violence to fish markets - radical perfumiers are finding inspiration in the oddest places...

The high street may be awash with easy-on-the-nose perfumes, but a new wave of creatives are coming up with less conventional formulas that offer a refreshing alternative to the mainstream. The photographer Nick Knight, the artist Sissel Tolaas and fashion designers such as Boudicca and Gareth Pugh are just a few to have developed more confrontational scents, and the results are altering the world of perfumery for good.

In stark contrast to the hundreds of overtly commercial, crowd- pleasing fragrances on the market, these perfumes are an avant-garde statement of intent. Nor do they start life as a 'We need to hit women aged 18-25'- type twinkle in a marketing man's eye: they are not aimed at any particular demographic and are rarely gender-specific.

Perhaps the first truly conceptual perfume was Comme des Garçons' Odeur 53, launched in 1998. The unisex fragrance billed itself as the first anti-perfume and was completely synthetic, composed of notes such as washing drying in the wind and dust on a light bulb. It was as much about the idea as the realisation: the smell of household appliances, static electricity and uncompromising modernity stood in stark opposition to the legions of scents conjuring nature, flowers, leaves and woods. Added to that, like Chanel No 5, it was an abstract scent designed to create a new olfactory sensation, rather than a simulacrum, designed to mimic the existing smell of a single flower.

Ten years on, a new breed of innovator is trying to create similarly radical statements. Perhaps the most radical is Nick Knight's Violence, which he is working on with Tolaas. 'I've created a lot of imagery for perfumes over the years,' says Knight, 'but most of them have a romantic vision, based on the past, with the same sort of ingredients – jasmine, rose or musk. The thing is, smell is enormously powerful and a lot of perfumes are bland. Yet smells associated with things such as car tyres are just as attractive to us.'

The project began when the rarefied art and fashion magazine Visionaire asked Knight to describe the scent of one of his photos and he went back to his "skinhead" series, photographed in the early-1980s, which brought the smell of the sun on the bricks in Brick Lane, of sweat, boot polish and Indian food to mind. 'It was a moment of violence,' he recalls. 'It was the smell of violence.'

Knight's intent is not to condone aggression, merely recreate its scent and explore it. 'I'm one for realism. In life you want to see or smell things that aren't pretty too. There is lots of imagery to do with violence in our lives. We are obsessed with violence. Nearly all of our pop culture is based on it.' To create the scent, Knight has asked professional fighters to wear T-shirts during their pugilistic encounters, then send them to Tolaas to analyse and extract scent. He is writing a blog on SHOWstudio about the creation of the fragrance, exposing and detailing each step in its evolution to lay bare and deconstruct the mystical process. It is set to be marketed and launched on the website as the very first internet perfume; a limited run of bottles will be produced.

Violence, like Odeur 53, is a perfume that acknowledges we might take pleasure in the most unlikely or taboo smells; a draught of creosote evaporating off a fence, or petrol splashed on the floor as we fill up our car might be just as alluring as... well, Chanel's Allure.

Boudicca's Wode, perhaps the most truly groundbreaking recent fragrance launch, has traversed to the illicit and taboo, including notes of opium and poisonous hemlock. Moreover, Wode lives up to its name and is the first pigmented perfume spray: the cobalt vapour colours the skin blue then disappears without a trace. 'The paint dissolves through some chemical combinations – it's the magic of science,' say the Boudicca designers Brian Kirkby and Zoe Broach. 'Queen Boudicca's tribe would mark themselves as warriors. The markings, the coloration, would have been associated with bravery, courage, status, virility, fertility and heroism.' If it is possible for a perfume to transmit avant-garde principles, then Wode comes very close to it, with innovations of colour and intimations of illegality.

Before this year, it was rare for young, conceptual designers to venture into the realm of scent. The fashion brands that dominate perfumery are often the corporate monoliths. But now, the Six Scents project curated by Joseph Quartana of Seven New York, has enabled cult names such as Gareth Pugh, Bernhard Wilhelm, Preen and Alexandre Herchcovitch to collaborate with innovative noses and create their own perfumes.

Pugh's Diagonal, designed in cahoots with Emilie Copperman, is as sculptural as his fashion. 'It's a struggle between lightness and darkness,' Pugh claims. Indeed there is something quixotic and multifaceted about this scent. In one breath you get dessicated coconut and fig; in another citrus. Then comes the Elizabethan odour of clove. Other ingredients include dill, black pepper, nutmeg and black tea. 'Emilie chose notes that don't necessarily sit well together but cause an interesting friction,' explains Pugh. 'It's quite unisex, resulting in an all-encompassing effect.'

Meanwhile, the 'celebrity' perfume is taking a new direction too, as figures beyond the normal paparazzi-fodder types turn their hand to fragrance. Hotly anticipated is the collaboration between Comme des Garçons and Daphne Guinness, the aristocratic socialite whose unique haute-couture style promises to translate into an equally unusual sensory proposition.

So now there is a wealth of choice for those predisposed to the radical. Not least the new, seven-strong range by perfumier Mark Buxton, who, being responsible for the spicy and resolutely ahead of its time Comme 2, has acquired a cult following as an industry iconoclast. The new range, coming to Britain this year, relates to colours and impressions he's had when travelling: English Breakfast, for example, recalls Japanese fish markets at 4.30am. 'I didn't make any compromises,' explains Buxton. 'Often my perfumes are very different, but they still have to smell good.'

The definition of what smells good, though, is clearly evolving from the traditional notions of rose and jasmine and musk, as perfumes' new conceptualists broaden the parameters of the odours we want to wear to include some surprisingly stimulating things.

Wode by Boudicca is available at Browns (www.brownsfashion.com). Gareth Pugh's Diagonal is available at B Store (020 7734 6846, www.bstorelondon.com); and Mark Buxton's range is available at Colette (www.colette.fr). Violence is a work in progress, and will be available from www.showstudio.com. Daphne Guinness's scent will be available at Dover Street Market this spring (www.doverstreetmarket.com)

First published in The Independent, 18 January 2009