Fluid Identities
Unabashedly masculine scents are on the rise—though they’re as likely to be worn by women, with a dash of daring.
Masculinity has not had the greatest press of late. That said, Trump, Weinstein, and co. are not so much virile as puerile, confusing manliness with misogyny. Real men have no need for such abuses, and this feels like a time for real men. As ever, where society wrestles with a subject, so the perfume world reflects this in olfactory guise. For, while the trend for genderfluid fragrances continues apace, there are indications that wearers are looking for more gendered statements. Dior has been at the forefront of this vogue with François Demachy’s phenomenally successful Sauvage, launched in 2015 in eau de toilette form, and released last April as a dynamic eau de parfum. A ruggedly clean, herbaceous concoction, Sauvage has enjoyed seismic popularity, becoming Britain’s male bestseller in an unprecedented two and a half years. Its new incarnation is deeper, moodier, still more imbued with what the house refers to as “punchy freshness”, transporting us to a world governed by animal instincts.
Such instincts are all about, as Michael Donovan, creator of the new brand St Giles, explains: “During the obsession with unisex scents in 1990s, olfactory fashion became homogenised, neutered, sexless,” he says. “Later, in the Noughties, metrosexuals flirted with flowers. However, men have discovered a new confidence of late, leading to a resurgence in fragrances that growl.”
These perfumes are not merely male, but macho, with something rough about the edges. At times, this machismo can be so hyperbolic it registers as brute force, such as Cartier’s Eighties powerhouse Santos: a beautifully audacious aromatic wood. Guerlain’s Heritage proves no less coruscating. Jean-Paul Guerlain created it in 1992 when he realised he would have no male heir working in his field, defying the fates with a great fist of patchouli. More than a quarter of century on, his successor Thierry Wasser evokes a similar bravura with Le Frenchy, a wittily over-thetop cologne.
Frenchness has become something of a byword for displays of masculine self-assertion. Pierre Bourdon’s ravishing French Lover for Frédéric Malle retains a tempestuous eroticism never quite assuaged by the refinement of its iris, cedarwood, and vetiver. Quentin Bisch’s French Affair for Ex Nihilo is a fusion of bergamot, lychee, rose, and chili pepper on a moss base, and has the dandy’s self-assurance in being determinedly oddball. Cire Trudon’s Revolution, by Lyn Harris, recreates the smoke, sweat, and oil of 1789, evoking the most dashing revolutionary.
Frequently, the bold will be conjured by the feral, often in synthetic versions of the animal scents that give perfume its potency: musk, civet, castoreum, and ambergris. They underpin the most robustly explicit fragrances such as YSL’s Kouros and Hermès’s Eau d’Hermès. The most infamous is Knize Ten, created in 1921, and the scent of Weimar decadence, beloved of Marlene Dietrich and the last Kaiser. “Knize Ten doesn’t play pretend fetishism like so many modern scents. It is itself a fetish,” says James Craven, archivist at Belgravia’s Les Senteurs. Luca Maffei’s Extrait version of Houbigant’s Cologne Intense issues from 2015, but exhibits such old-world, animalic excess that one can enjoy being scandalised.
Leather conjures its own realm of animal magic. Hermès paid tribute to its equestrian roots first in Equipage, with its spiced wood and peat, then with Bel Ami: bigger, bolshier, its patchouli and Russian leather redolent of seduction. Jean-Paul Guerlain’s Habit Rouge is a show-jumping homage, summing polished saddles and cigarette smoke. Memo Paris’s Irish Leather makes for a sublimely earthy yet refined stable scent: all juniper, hide, and warm wood. Tom Ford’s Tuscan Leather is the stuff of cowboy fantasy: raw, alluringly acrid, and altogether intoxicating, while Annick Goutal’s superbly haughty Duel is a gauntlet dashed to the ground, sweat gathering on the opponent’s starched shirts.
The irony, of course, is that wherever a fragrance feels resplendently male, there will be women real to make it their own in the name of subversion. Monsieur Malle informed me that I wear French Lover impeccably. I adore sporting the provocative Duel, while Knize Ten was the scent of my single days: an
incitement that never failed to beguile.