One of the few movies I like more every time I see it is Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused. I did not come of age in Texas in the summer of 1976; indeed, I am Canadian and was a teenager when the comedy released in 1993, 17 years later. But it is a movie that proves that late adolescence is often the same country. In one of the many drunken sociological conversations that pepper both this stage of life and the wandering film, bubbly free-thinker Cynthia Dunn lays out her "'every other decade' theory": "The 50s were boring. The 60s rocked. The 70s, my God, they obviously suck. So maybe the 80s will be, like, radical." The moment is memorable because Linklater allows himself so few superior jokes on his characters. As anybody who grew up then knows, the 80s were not radical. Even the cultural "cool kids" of the 80s, like Elvis Costello in his Buddy Holly glasses and David Byrne in his ever-growing suit, seemed to have a parodic, critical air about their work, like they knew they were producing their best stuff in an Arnoldian Epoch of Concentration.
Meanwhile, the 70s were often remembered as the era of Saturday Night Fever, a silly, narcissistic 'Me decade' of disco and embarrassing jumpsuits. Never mind that Saturday Night Fever is a serious and often sad movie and that the bad faith and individualism that reigned post-Watergate also produced Chinatown, the first two Godfather movies, The Exorcist, The Conversation, Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Nashville, Taxi Driver, Network, Annie Hall, Apocalypse Now and Alien. It seems that it's just the last couple of years when we in North America began looking back at the Ford administration and Jimmy Carter's "age of limits", those disappointing days of scandals, stagflation, riots, oil crises, embassy evacuations and hostage negotiations, and realized that, leaving aside some of the New Age spiritualism of the period, it might have been a more adult, clear-eyed time than we thought.
Pop culturally, of course, everything old is new again. Along with American Hustle-inspired crocheted tops with plunging necklines and David Bowie retrospectives, a few fragrance bloggers have noticed a recent revival of 70s scent style, peaking last year with a celebration of lots of patchouli, galbanum, herbs, moss, smoke and hyacinth. This has been fine with me, as several of my all-era favorites are 70s monuments. Unfortunately, many of the popular feminine perfumes of that decade haven't survived the discontinuation and reformulation gauntlet: Lauren by Ralph Lauren, released in 1978, is no longer recognizable, something has gone seriously awry at Halston and Jovan Musk oil for women, once kissing cousins with Serge Lutens' later Muscs Koubali Khan, is now a weirdly clean and floral Eau de Toilette. Even Opium, likely the most recognizable scent shape of the 70s, underwent a serious reformulation in 2009. Still, many of the original formulas, bold and layered (and probably cheap) as they are, have survived, like Gloria Gaynor. Please comment if I've missed one of your favorite boogie fevers.
Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche: Released in 1971, this classic floral aldehyde combined creamy white soap and cigarette smoke tar, a description that still somehow misses Yves Saint Laurent's very accurate prescription of it being a perfume for a woman who loves the sun and wind. A reformulation around 2003 brightened the Eau de Toilette, amping up the green rose notes and cutting down on some of the mossy bitterness that provided contrast. To me, the modernized version has just the slightest bit less bohemian chic than the original, but it still makes me want to have a gap between my front teeth, a belted leather trench coat and a collection of rare used books from the bouquinistes.
Clinique Aromatics Elixir: This first perfume from Clinique, a floral chypre, shows just how much room there is in that genre. With an unmistakable sillage, it descends upon you, a sultry, dusky blend of patchouli, herbs, chamomile tea and rose, winding its way about like smoke from a genie's lamp. For years I have owned and admired it, but rarely feel I can pull it off. Aromatics Elixir is perfume as serious business. Through my rich and varied family and career history, I have encountered two groups of friends who wear it as a signature: secretarial ladies in middle age and drag club performers. A landmark.
Chanel Cristalle: Cristalle Eau de Toilette was developed in 1974 by the great perfumer Henri Robert. It is a very fresh, crisp take on a floral chypre, dewy hyacinth book-ended by lots of lemon and an oakmoss-and-rosewood base that gives a very convincing impression of hay. Both natural and elegant, it smells the way white cotton drying in the sun should do. While she died three years before it came on the market, I feel Coco Chanel would have approved. Certainly, it is one of my favorite fragrances from a favorite brand.
Yves Saint Laurent Opium: Love it or hate it, Opium was the fragrance that defined 1977 and several years afterward, spicy, smoky and as rumbling as thunder. As I mentioned, there has been a post-IFRA rejig, which, though skillful, means new bottles aren't really Opium: the new version is woodier, with more mint and pepper up top and the punch of cloves and richness of the balsam notes largely gone. People often mention Opium's immediate contemporary, Estée Lauder Cinnabar, as a substitute for the vintage stuff, but Cinnabar always had more cinnamon and is a fuzzy fragrance, rather than a fiery one. Though it lacks the symphonic complexity and carnation of the original Opium, Estée Lauder Youth Dew is closer in silhouette, to my mind.
Cacharel Anaïs Anaïs: Strangely aloof for a fresh lily fragrance, Anaïs Anaïs now comes in "L'Original" Eau de Toilette, which maintains the spicy hyacinth and dry mossy touches of the 1978 version.
Note: top image is from a promotional poster for the movie Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston; it originally appeared in Vogue in 1972.
Thank you for the article–I wouldn’t argue with a single choice.
Here are a few 1970s scents that I have smelled from a new bottle in the last three years that still great and pretty much as I remember their original selves: Private Collection, Cinnabar, White Linen, and Al(l)iage; No. 19; Equipage; Eau de Guerlain, Eau de Rochas, and Eau de Orange Vert; Azzaro Pour Homme; First; Reminiscence Patchouli; Aramis Devin and 900; and Yatagan.
Has anyone smelled a new bottle of Polo or Z-14?
I’ve recently smelled Z-14. It smelled the same to me, although a little thinner.
I bought my husband a bottle of Z-14 two years ago. I don’t remember smelling it on anyone before (he and I were both teens in the mid-80s), and it probably HAS been messed with. Nevertheless, I picked it up in Walgreens, spritzed it once, and bought it on the spot. Wow, sexy stuff.
Yes, I have a bottle from maybe five years ago, and am complimented by others almost every time I wear it. I believe I paid 12 CAD for it.
I tried to pick ones I knew had been worn and were big sellers during the era — hence no Diorella either — but I love your list: EL Private Collection is one of my favorites, and I left out masculine fragrances for brevity, but it was a great era for cologne, as well. Not much is known about perfumer Vincent Marcello, who did Yatagan, Halston Z-14 and Private Collection and then mysteriously disappeared into private life, apparently. By virtue of that trio alone, though, he must be one of my most favorite perfumers. “Eau de Guerlain, Eau de Rochas, and Eau de Orange Verte” – yeah, what a line-up, eh?
I didn’t like Aromatics Elixir until 2 years ago….and then something clicked. Now I occasionally crave it!
It’s best on a chilly fall morning on the soccer field! LOL One spritz is all I need, with room between me and other soccer fans…. 🙂
Maybe I can add soccer moms to my list of AE devotees? 😉 Actually, as much as I complain when it rains on my two small footballers, Aromatic Elixir *does* sound perfect for a chilly fall morning. I will have to try that! I’ve always tried to pull it off in the evenings, previously.
I wore it as a teenager! I loved it then, and still like it now, but I live in a very hot climate (grew up in a cold one) and it rarely feels “right” in warm weather.
Great article, Erin! To my nose, 1000 is the diamond at the center of the ’70s fragrance tiara, maybe because it was my ’70s-chic-in-the-best-sense mother’s signature scent.
Mille is Mille is Mille. Nothing, but nothing like it. I know Luca Turin felt he **had** to like it, but it is the scent that keeps my nose to the ground to seek out **more.** The 70s were epic in every sense of the word; you felt alive, you wanted to try everything. Mille was the queen at the top of the Gloria Gate, surveying, approving and encouraging.
I have always liked 1000, too, and didn’t quite get the “dowdy” descriptor. I can’t believe your mother was all navy sweaters and flats! I love, love Luca Turin’s reviews and seldom disagree, but I do feel a few 70s ones got short shrift (even if four or five stars) in Perfumes: The Guide. I’ve often wondered if the No. 19 review won’t be one Tania Sanchez eventually regrets, for example. And speaking of Jean Patou… another truly great cologne of the era was Eau de Patou.
Great retrospective, Erin! The only 70s perfume that I can remember wearing was Oscar by Oscar de la Renta. Everything else I wore (and I was a perfumista even then) was from earlier decades.
Oscar used to be great! Somebody was just telling me the other day that they didn’t like the reformulated version and it was one of their great lost loves. Many of the lusher 70s florals seem to have taken a beating, particularly recently. (I sigh over my Nahema PdT, thinking there will be no more where that came from.)
I wore Oscar in the 80’s and 90’s. It was my favorite huge floral bouquet. I often was told it was too mature for me but I didn’t care. I have an old bottle I recently bought online that I sniff from time to time. It smells wonderful but I don’t often wear it. It gives me a fuzzy head for some reason. Current L’Heure Bleue (edp and edt) remind me very much of the old Oscar. I adore them both, especially the edt.
I don’t think of myself as a terribly intimidating person, but I’ve never had anyone tell me my fragrance is too mature for me… and good thing! It’s always nice to get compliments, but you know best what suits you, says I. 🙂
Loved Oscar and wore it in the 70s as well. If I am not mistaken there is a 40th anniversary limited edition bottle out now.
I loved wearing Oscar years ago. Once again I think perhaps we are scent twins! 🙂
That is what I have been saying 🙂
For me, the 70’s brings back mainly memories of drugstore fragrances. I was in my early adolescence and didn’t know much about any of the department store perfumes (except for Chanel No. 5 which my mother occasionally got for Christmas). So I think of Jovan Musk, Love’s Baby Soft, Heaven Scent, Bonne Bell Skin, Windsong, etc. One of my brothers (whose name is Charles) used to give everyone Charlie as a gift. I remember putting it on one day before getting a ride to school with him in his car and him saying, “what smells like crap?” And I sang, “it’s Charlie!”
I hope you follow Angela’s posts — she is always finding and reviewing things like Bonne Bell Skin, it’s very handy. And yes, that list is a trip down memory lane. Do you remember Love’s Fresh Lemon, too? Or Coty’s Wild Musk?
I wore both.
I definitely had a bottle of the Fresh Lemon at some point.
It wasn’t my decade. And I am beyond grateful that I wasn’t the one responsible for the embarrassing clothes I was wearing in those years, having been a child at the time.
But I do wish green florals would have another heyday now.
I’m sure green florals will come back around. Lately all I see are black florals straight out of my early 90s high school days . . .
I still can’t believe my mother put my sister in Hee Haw overalls like these:
http://www.rokit.co.uk/products/DUNGEN003711-rokit-long-dungarees-38-35-blu
But it was the 70s, so all is forgiven. 😉
Oh, dear. There’s a picture of me around here somewhere wearing 1970s overalls, but they’re nowhere near as colorful as those.
It wasn’t your decade fragrance-wise or do you mean it doesn’t feel like “yours” because you were so young? Maybe now that rompers for adult women are back, your clothes from those days don’t seem so embarrassing? 😉
Mostly it was the matching polyester top-and-bottom sets. Oy. I know I had one that was purple and red stripes.
That sounds great fun!
I’m lucky to own 3 bottles of vintage Opium, 1 bottle of vintage Rive Gauche! I love AE too!
I envy you! Disco Bill 🙂
I wore pretty much every one of the aforementioned! I was out of the US for most of the seventies, and so I was possibly also exposed to some different stuff than what was popular here at the time. Some of my other favorites were: Calandre (1969), so I’ll cheat and glide it into the seventies, Metal (1979) so I’ll squeak by and keep it in the seventies, and one of my favorites of all time, Inoui, was pretty much smackdab in the middle, 1976. Ooh! another just popped into my head, Coriandre, which was 1973. I hear mention of these on occasion, but I’m now realizing that perhaps they weren’t readily available here. Chime in if you can clarify! My exposure to perfume back then was usually through duty-free shops and European department stores, and here in the US suburb I was from I rarely had the opportunity to venture far from what was on offer in the drug store. I was actually thrilled to have the opportunity to go to the drug store and test what they had, and there was quite a lot that was pretty darn good! For all I know, the same experience is currently available at some other stores here but I just never bump into them.
I wore Coriandre, Calandre and Metal as well..they were available in the States. Inoui was the one that got away 🙂 but I know it was available here as well.
Paco Rabanne (both the feminine and masculine scents) were big here, I think. And, of course, Coriandre! So big and green and funky.
I fell down the rabbit hole in 1971 and I pretty much had easy access to everything in NYC from drugstore to high end dept stores. I wore Field Flowers, Aromatics Elixir, no 19, Tea Rose, Wild Musk, Jovan Musk oil, Aliage, Sweet Honesty, Private Collection, Love’s Baby Soft, Love’s Rain, Love’s Wind, Halston, Amazone, Cristalle, Touche, Molinard de Molinard, Metal, Di Bourghese, Anais Anais, Bill Blass (gosh how I miss that one!), Rive Gauche, Lagerfeld, White Linen, Lauren, Cinnabar, Calvin Klein, Magie Noire, Candid,, Oscar, Opium,, Pavlova, First, Tatiana, Jontue, Chloe, Charlie, Grey Flannel….I am sure there were others that I cannot think of at the moment. Both my best friend in high school and my mother were perfumistas so we were all a very bad influence on each other-LOL!
That’s a very impressive list! You certainly were very bad and wonderful teenaged perfume nuts. 🙂 And, my word, Perfumer’s Workshop Tea Rose, don’t know how I forgot about that one. I have a very nice older bottle of Magie Noire, too, but I feel recent versions have gone down the tubes — would love to have some of vintage parfum.
The thing I really loved about the 70s and 80s is that some great perfumes could be found every where…even Avon and the drugstores sold fragrances that by today’s standard would be considered niche.
Oh my you have a fantastic list, I had most of those too!! I fell down the rabbit hole sometime in the 70s myself; I remember one of my teachers from grade 4 or 5 (Miss Schwengler) always smelled wonderful. My friend from high school introduced me to Oscar in the late 70s.
I can add a few others I went through such as Tweed by Lentheric, L’Air du Temps, Charles of the Ritz, Babe, Revlon Moon Drops, Fidgi and Je Reviens Worth.
Thanks for the great trip down memory lane!
Oh my yes!!! I forgot about L’Air du Temps, Babe and Fidji! Loved those too!
Charles of the Ritz is hardly ever mentioned, but my best friend’s mom wore it, and we’d sneak spritzes whenever we could…
Tweed! I stole squirts of that in the 80s from my parents’ bathroom cupboard.
Bill Blass: yes!!!
Nice to see that two other folks remember it! It was one of my favorites and unusual for the time with that pineapple note…..
My mother, who was very chic back in the day, wore Bill Blass and Opium. Second marriage and different priorities now, she turns her nose up at my perfume hobby… But I remember her dressed in Missoni, Liberty, and Cacharel, AND wearing BB perfume.
Your mother must have looked and smelled divine!
This is a fun read, thanks Erin. I went from eleven to 21 in the 70s and I was a very rebellious teenager so my memories are lots of painful adolescent stuff, but I loved perfume even then. Chanel 19 and Rive Gauche were my big favorites but there were also really good things at the drugstore, the original Herbal Essences shampoo would be a fantastic perfume wouldn’t it? Heaven Sent was gorgeous. Lots of lemon scented everything and those Coty solid perfume compacts. I wish I still had my Frye boots and bags and the jeans my friends and I painstakingly embroidered with flowers and butterflies, that stuff is very collectible now.
Frye boots are so back! And you’re right, you could probably have sold those jeans for a mint now. Sounds like you have some good memories of the teenaged days, too, which hopefully you can enjoy, while trying to forget the embarrassing stuff we all carry around from that awkward age. Funny how attached we get to the scent of functional products, isn’t it? I really miss Tame creme rinse.
My sisters and I were Tame girls, too! And I loved the scent of Breck shampoo, for some reason.
Ringthing, have you ever smelled Huitieme Art’s Aube Pashmina? It made me think of Herbal Essences right away. (Please don’t tell me I’m wrong, y’all; I love my illusions!)
I adore 70s green florals – no 19, Cristalle, Métal, Jean-Louis Scherrer, Weil de Weil. Maybe galbanum is an addictive drug.
I hunted down a vintage Rive Gauche and was disappointed though – it got reebayed in no time. I thought it was a blind buy but realised I actually knew it well and hated it! No idea who I used to smell it on but maybe I didn’t like them.
Glad to see Métal being mentioned so often. And galbanum is a latex resin, like opium. Maybe you’re on to something….
Too bad your unknown villain poisoned you against RG.
I was wearing fragrances that my mother inherited from her mother. My grandmother would visit with one of my uncles who lived in Europe and always brought home fragrance. So I was wearing Dior, Chanel, Lancome, etc. in high school in the ’70s. I think Vent Vert, No. 19, and Lancome’s Sikkim were my favorites.
Ahh, Sikkim… Lucky you to have worn that one in high school!
P, how lucky you were that your mom shared. You must have been the most sophisticated smelling young lady at your high school!
Fabulous walk down memory lane, thank you, Erin!
As a child I felt knocked sideways by some of the heady perfumes of the time. I had a music teacher who really, really loved Cinnabar. Youth Dew (always in my grandmother’s bathroom) and Aromatics Elixir (a neighbor’s signature) are indelibly imprinted on my little girl brain. And there were many great Avon scents in the 1970s, like Cotillion and Sweet Honesty, anyone remember those?
My 1980s high school smelled purple from all the Opium that was being spritzed around even a decade after it came out. Clouds of Lauren, Heaven Sent, and Love’s Baby Soft billowed out of the girls locker room, with Polo and Paco Rabanne Pour Homme for the boys. I don’t know how our teachers could stand it, but it was wonderful.
I remember Cotillion and Sweet Honesty! Drained several bottles of the latter! Also, I loved Ariane and Candid back then, and Timeless was also very popular.
Hey, Sweet Honesty is really showing up on a lot of lists. And yes, generations of teachers have had to put up with a lot! I have to say I’d personally prefer that I had students reeking of Paco Rabanne Pour Homme and Lauren than Axe spray and PR Lady Million.
My parents weren’t even planning me in the 70’s but I do those the fragrances. I love old Opium (and agree about Cinnabar), AE, Rive Gauche…. I agree above though, with old Oscar! It’s still so easy to find in antique stores too.
I actually owned AE in high school and got frequent compliments for it.
I have to say I don’t know if my parents were planning me then either, but along I came! Have to check out a few antique stores… (Though it’s a little alarming that scents I remember so well from childhood are now in antique stores. I feel like my Dad did when they turned his primary school into a history museum 🙂 )
I graduated high school in 1976, so watching Dazed and Confused is like revisiting a part of my life. Ah, nostalgia.
I started out the 70s wearing the typical junior high school scents: Love’s Baby Soft, Heaven Scent, those Coty Sweet Earth solids (https://cleopatrasboudoir.blogspot.com/2013/04/sweet-earth-by-coty.html ) and later moved on to Pavlova (does anyone remember that?), Charlie (!), Anais, Anais, Rive Gauche, Halston, and the ones I still wear – Diorella and White Linen. Not a bad decade.
Yes, Pavlova is on my list above as well 🙂 and so are many of the others you mentioned!
More than a decade later, we still had the McConaughey character hanging around, the 25-y.o. trying to pick up the high school girls. And there were a fair few bongs made in Shop. Being 16 and needing to get to the Aerosmith concert is apparently timeless. (Like White Linen!)
This is the second or third mention of the Coty Sweet Earth Solids. Love solids and love the name – sorry I missed those.
“Alright, alright, alright…” what a great character he was! Love this movie and the soundtracks. I was in high school from 1977-1980 and into Cristalle, Love’s Fresh Lemon, the Coty Sweet Earth solids and whatever I liked from my Mum’s collection… aliage being a favourite. I always spell the name in lower case letters as that’s how I remember it from the packaging. Anyone else recognize Anjelica Huston in the photo?
I did! I don’t know if Robin picked that picture on purpose for me, because I’d just mentioned to her that Anjelica and Lauren Hutton were my 70s (and all-time) style icons.
Ha-ha! Those 70s models were fantastic. I think people really had style back then. Most now are just slaves to fashion. As another Canadian I was listening to CBC radio yesterday and S.E. Hinton was being interviewed as it is the 50th anniversary of her book ‘The Outsiders’. Another great film – what a cast!
With a scent-phobe mom and a sheltered childhood, it was a miracle that I remember Charlie, Anais Anais and Tatiana – they were my sister’s and I had no qualms about wearing her stuff, fooling myself that I can sneak-spray them and not be found out 🙂
How did your sister get away with owning perfume when you weren’t allowed? And what happened when your sister caught you?
We fought about anything and everyrhing everyday so I figured the aggravation related to that was a freebie. She’s a few years older and my parents enrolled her in a “finishing school” one summer to learn to be a lady and so she was more exposed AND one of my aunts (the one with a refrigerator only for perfumes and cosmetics gifted her with perfume.
Great post – loved the 70s! I didn’t actually wear Rive Gauche then, but I have vivid memories of trying it on and loving it. I now have a couple of vintage bottles from ebay that I treasure.
Coincidentally, I was just conversing with chocolatemarzipan on the Enchanted April post about Dame Perfumery New Musk Man Cologne smelling so much like Jovan Musk Oil.
I wasn’t sure whether to trust my decades-old memory of Jovan Musk Oil, but chocolatemarzipan confirmed it. What a find!
It’s funny: many commenters remember their high schools as being filled with popular scents of the time. I don’t: I remember a few girls wearing some Avon fragrances but that’s about it.
What really stands out, though, is that my senior English teacher wore Rive Gauche! She smelled so, so good!
I’m really curious about that Dame now…
Also curious. Although, interestingly enough, just six months ago I found a probably 40 year-old dabber of Jovan Musk Oil at secondhand. The cardboard packaging was completely faded and dog-eared and I thought the sealed oil inside was likely to be turned, but it’s fresh as paint! (i.e. smells like unwashed hair and Studio 54 sweat) Those dark brown glass bottles save a lot of juice. And so do those Rive Gauche metal canisters.
Ah the 70s…I was a teenage girl during the disco ball daze. Lemme take a trip down my 70s fragrance lane. My choices of scent were Jovan Woman (which I still love to this day), Cachet, Emeraude, Tigress (meeowwwwww), Tigress Musk, Toujours Moi, and Chantilly, and Avon Timeless. I guess I have always liked the floriental/green/chypre like scents, and on a 18-year old girl those were some pretty heavy hitters for that time. I got pregnant in 1978, and any kind of perfumey smell made me gag…but after my daughter was born in February, 1979 (during the Chicago Blizzard of ’79) and the 70s morphed into the 80s, I went on a new perfume hunt; I discovered Magie Noire, Opium, and Poison (which gave me a whopper of a headache), and Obsession. Got preggers again in 1987, and once again, any perfume scent had me holding on to the porcelain god (and my husband at the time decided to bathe in Polo and Fahrenheit *bleh* which only made it worse).
Now that I am a salt n pepper haired old broad, I have revisited some of my faves from the Travolta era: as mentioned, Jovan Woman, which to me could have been the adopted child of Aromatics Elixir (another fave ????). I have Magie Noir back in my life, and I have welcomed back Chanel Coco and the classic N°5, and Avon Timeless. As we used to say back in my day, with these powerhouse scents, “a little dab’ll do ya” Oh and i forgot to add Aromatics Black to my collection… Hmm, reminds me if Hypnotic Poison…
Sorry this post is long, but I’m a newbie here and just wanted to share. You’ll pardon me now while I put one of my favorite disco records on my turntable….
Hello, and welcome!! Spin some Donna Summer for me, please?
No worries, loved your time machine comment and newbie enthusiasm is always welcome. This one had suspense, too, with your daughter being born in the blizzard of ’79! How did that work out? I was lucky enough during my two pregnancies that smells didn’t overwhelm me — although I’ve always been able to gag just thinking about a gross smell — so I’ve held on to my love of vintage Fahrenheit. 🙂 Funny, we also say “a little dab’ll do ya” around here still all the time.
Oh goodness my scent sensitivity nearly killed me during my pregnancies… Perfume? Hell I couldn’t even come near an open tube of toothpaste. I didn’t use soap or shampoo for months!
A great, fun article… It got me thinking about five 70’s masculines to consider. I was born in 1971, and the 70’s sometimes seemed a bit out of reach growing up in the Reagan era during my teens, with everyone trying to distance themselves from the sense of sixties countercultures having been played out. Nevertheless, I think I have a soft spot for the frangible humanism and riskiness of the expression of those times, and that includes perfumes. I love the addictive bitterness of Yatagan, for instance, which my wife refers to as “Christmas in the 70’s” (it’s tones really do make me think of dark-stained knotty pine paneling and harvest gold everything), a composition that I think is still in wonderful shape, formulation-wise. I never wore Polo in its heyday, but recently was able to compare an early 90’s Cosmair bottle to the newer stuff… Very recent reforms of Polo have actually brought it closer to its original character: it is fascinating to smell because it is so different from anything mainstream one would smell now. Conversely, I very much want to enjoy Azzaro, but feel it has gotten rather cheap and thin in the heart and base. The same goes for Grey Flannel, I’m afraid, the first fragrance I ever purchased, wore and loved; sadly it (at least since the last trace of oakmoss was removed around four years ago) no longer conjures the damp beauty it used to. In my medicine cabinet right now, there is a brand-new sample of Paco Rabanne Pour Homme, which, though not all that long-lived, does render a credible time-travelling navel-lurch in its poignant mix of machismo and soap. There is to me a strange tenderness in all of these fragrances (even the brash tobacco of Polo), as all of them seem to suggest a kind of urge to be present, to offer oneself for acceptance or rejection, that many earlier and later fragrances do not quite connect with. I wonder where it went?
I’m sad about current Grey Flannel, too. I loved GF as a teen-aged girl in the 70’s but didn’t wear it then. Several years ago I finally decided to buy some, but the then-current version was so unlike its old self that I ended up passing on it.
I’m second guessing myself now about that last, sentimental remark of mine.. I think a similar kind of presence/vulnerability shows up in some of the great 1980’s masculines as well (Antaeus or Caron’s Third Man, for instance.) Maybe it’s time for a 1980’s (and unisex) instalment of this series?
FearsMice: this is not exactly a replacement, but I found that Narciso Rodriguez Pour Homme (the EDT, not the EDP) had a damp forest character that reminded me of Grey Flannel when I used to wear it (mid 1980’s). It is an unusual fragrance, with more of a fougere character, but the connection was there, for me at least.
John, thank you for commenting on the NR Pour Home EDT. I’ve never smelled that before, but will seek it out now. And I’ll happily take your word for it that it’s safe(r) to sniff Polo again. Yay!
I thought Grey Flannel was the Rock of Gibraltar, immovable by time, but come to think of it, the IFRA would not allow it to get away with all that moss and violet leaf. Luckily, I have a huge bottle from about eight years ago which should last me until risk assessors come to their senses (or forever, whichever comes first). I do like Narciso Rodriguez Pour Homme, though. Caron Third Man, OTOH — that one has definitely been terribly tampered with.
Hmmm, I’ve only tried a recent vintage of the Third Man (a couple of years ago at the Caron boutique in NYC)… I enjoyed what I experienced (a complex citrus-jasmine fougere with indolic & floral overtones on a base of vetiver and cedar), but my impression fro things I’ve read is that the current construction and note pyramid is just a different animal from the moss-heavy 1980’s vintage.
What a delicious walk down Memory Lane! As a child/teen, I never had the money to buy perfume for myself and was rarely gifted it, but I must have spent untold hours sniffing the available dept store, drugstore, and Avon offerings! There are only a few mentioned here that I don’t have a scent-memory of: Inoui (no Shiseido back then in my small town), Patou 1000 (Joy was IT!), Love’s Rain and Wind (darn! I loved Fresh Lemon; did not like Baby Soft. So, shoot me…), Weil de Weil, original Azzaro for men…
No one has mentioned Norell; it came out in the late 60s, I think, but I remember it as a 70s scent, and if I had had the money in high school, I think it would have been my first choice for purchase.
Yes! Norell! My mom had a bottle of that one and she always let me share her perfume..I forgot about that one! Thanks for reminding me 🙂
I just got my first bottle of Norell about a year ago – it’s a great one! And I liked Fresh Lemon better, too.
Thank you for an article that brought back many memories. I bought Opium the year it was released, courtesy of a Christmas gift voucher from the US oil service company I was then working for in Aberdeen, Scotland. I was flat sharing at the same time with two students who respectively wore Madame Rochas & Rive Gauche – we were all in our very early twenties. Of course this was before the proliferation of companies releasing new fragrances seemingly every week! I have mentioned this before on here & Robin commented at that time that our flat must have smelled lovely!
I was just thinking that! You must have been the best smelling flat in all of Aberdeen (and indeed Scotland). 🙂