The year was 1981, and if you couldn’t get your hands on a bottle of Giorgio, were you even there? Reportedly the first perfume to be banned from restaurants because it was so voluminous, tenacious and outrageous, what it lacked in subtlety, it more than made up for in getting its wearers noticed. And that was precisely the point.
— Read more in Why the strong, sexy mega-fragrances of the 80s are back at The Telegraph.
If they brought back Giorgio I would wear it!
Sorry, I meant Gio by Armani. That was a big 80’s fragrance that I loved
Gio was fantastic!
Gio is great! I’ve managed to find a few partial bottles over the years and it’s a big beauty.
I am jealous
I can’t read the article but would love to know what new perfumes they say are 80s big.
I can’t think of any.
Giorgio, Poison, Opium, Beautiful are the ones I remember being mentioned, but I can’t access it now either!
Eternity and Coco were the others. I was able to sneak in and see it using Opera on my laptop.
12 Foot Wall is a website that gets you past paywalls. Just go to 12ft.io, paste in the forbidden URL, and click the button. Magic.
I can’t agree with the twin theses of the article, which are that 1) 1980s powerhouses continue to sell well and 2) 1980s-strength fragrances are back in style. In the first case, the scents in question (Obsession, Poison, Loulou, Coco, and others) have been so altered and reformulated to fit modern tastes that they really aren’t the same scents any more, and I was around in the eighties and owned them all so I feel comfortable asserting this. In the second case, there isn’t anything in the mass market that I know of that has any of the presence, potency, and complexity of those eighties scents, because those qualities are just not in style. People mostly buy things that are relatively simple and front-loaded to smell a certain way out of the bottle and then dry down into something safe and generic. (I recently sniffed a bunch of Ariana Grande scents, and no no no.) Opium, Giorgio, Poison, Obsession, and the rest of that lot were IMMENSE and complicated — love them or hate them, they were crafted, almost machined to create a series of effects as they developed on the skin. They took years to develop: they weren’t just deposited on the shelves like so many identical dinner plates. Baccarat Rouge 540 (to name one supposed modern equivalent from the article), whatever its qualities, is not in any way comparable to the juggernauts of the period.
I totally agree with all of your post. I don’t smell anything big or complex anymore.
Wow, did not know about that site and usually too lazy to load anonymous surf sites, which don’t always work for this purpose. Thank you!