Time to dig out your old CK One: 1990s scents are back
BAggINg the latest thing may be a bonus in skincare and make-up, where tech is thrusting ever forward. However, in perfume it can be something to avoid.
What is ‘new’ is so often not new at all, but a ‘flanker’. Translation: a spin on some already commercially successful concoction, designed to ring every last bit of mileage out of this tried-and-tested formula for those seeking that old chestnut ‘the same, but different’.
Done well, homages with a twist can be spectacular. One thinks of Hermes’s spicy- green Equipage geranium of 2015, tragically no longer available, which was then house perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena’s addictive re-edition of guy Robert’s 1970 classic.
More often, however, a tweak will be less a conversation with the original than some cynical attempt to exploit it. In which case — not least during a cost-of-living crisis — better to return to the genuine innovation than be beguiled by some corporate ploy.
Two contemporary classics that have stood the test of time are celebrating their 30th birthdays this year. One is as popular as they come; the other, a cult obsession — namely L’Eau d’Issey by Issey Miyake (£59 for 50ml, boots.com) and Féminité du Bois by Serge Lutens (from £116 for 50ml, harveynichols.com).
When people talk about 1990s scents — currently modish again, along with 1990s fashion — they tend to be talking about Calvin Klein’s CK One (£31 for 200ml, boots.com) of 1994, that fresh, herbaceous splash billed as the ‘first unisex perfume’.
It wasn’t. Perfume was gender-free until 20th-century marketeers came up with this strategy to double their dosh. Note the gender-fluid 4711 Original Cologne (£8.20 for 100ml, allbeauty.com), created in 1792: aromatic citrus, lavender, rosemary and rose with a hint of musk, which will be enjoyed by CK One fans.
Moreover, it was Lutens’s Féminité du Bois that reignited the passion for gender-neutral perfume proper. Like all genuine artistic creations, this scent will be love or hate, heaven or hell, depending on your proclivities. The cedar wood of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains is warmed by the cardamom and cinnamon of the souk, all honeyed leather.
The spicy oriental fragrances of the 1980s were big, blousy, sexy in a cartoonish, knock- youunconscious manner. Think YSL’s Opium, Dior’s Poison and Calvin
Klein’s Obsession. Luten’s aroma is the opposite: sensual, sophisticated, austere in aspects, yet with something clawingly feral about it; cerebral, but suggestive.
As with all Lutens’s creations, if this floats your boat, then you will always long for it. Fans become mesmerised, infatuated.
Issey Miyake’s 1990s knockout L’Eau d’Issey you will recognise. The avant-garde designer also loathed the vulgarity of those 1980s heavyhitters, informing perfumer Jacques Cavallier that he detested every scent with the exception of water.
So Cavallier started with calone, the chemical compound that lends the cool, wet, airy ‘ seabreeze’ quality to washing powder. The addition of rose petals and white flowers came together in a sheer, aqueous floral; hugely imitated, never bettered. The chic Swiss flatmate I had at Oxford in my twenties used to be swathed in it, its minimalist elegance befitting her postmodern design aesthetic.
Three decades on, a bottle of L’Eau d’Issey is now sold every 15 seconds in Britain. A flacon of its latest incarnation (yes, a flanker), Issey Miyake Eau & Magnolia (£65 for 50ml, boots.com), sells every 7.2 minutes.
The male version — Cavallier’s woody aquatic L’Eau d’Issey Pour Homme (£41 for 75ml, boots.com) launched in 1994 — is still more popular, with one sold every seven seconds. Almost three decades on, it remains one of the more interesting, less crassly butch offerings. I’m guessing a fair few of these buyers are female, seduced by its woody greenery in the same way that women are drawn to the many variations on vetiver.
It’s the stand-alone brilliance of a perfume such as Chanel’s No 5 which is celebrating 101 years (from £65 for 35ml, boots.com), guerlain’s Shalimar, 97 years (£64 for 30ml, johnlewis.com) and Clinique’s Aromatics Elixir, 51 years (£35 for 45ml, johnlewis. com) that makes us crave them — their originality and exquisite weirdness, if you will. And nothing will ever out-flank them.
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