From bottle to trail
Sprritttzzz!
A cult theme for the house’s new cult fragrance was the least we could hope for! So chypre it is, announced immediately by a high-tech and very convincing patchouli that bursts out right from the start along with fruity notes (pear and guava), followed by Tahitian tiare flower and a musk-and-honey drydown that reinvents the genre. Because while lots of recent creations may claim to be rediscovering one of classic perfumery’s key themes, it’s always a plus to REINVENT it… Why?
First of all, because you always have to justify a new product!
Then, because for a long time, chypre suffered from an old-fashioned, out-dated connotation, the combination of pure distilled patchouli, oak moss and rockrose (labdanum) is hardly au courant (even if it’s the basis of the classic recipe) and because some of its ingredients pose a problem when it comes to the latest standards.
And finally, to get the most out of the “vintage” concept, you have to know how to serve it up with a twist… if you don’t want to wind up looking like, totally yesterday!
All that to say that we have seen quite a few so-called “chypres” go by lately, without they’re necessarily being anything to write home about!
Oddly enough, Gucci’s can hold its head up high. I say oddly, because you could criticize the evanescence of the exotic-fruit top notes that promise a breath of fresh air that we barely have time to enjoy. And the formula proudly flaunts a Tahitian tiare-flower floral heart whose character (something of a fantasy, really) doesn’t leave much of an impression. And lastly, because the trail doesn’t have the breadth and long-lastingness that you usually associate with this group (but is that necessarily a bad thing?).
Whatever, we’ll let anyone who was disappointed in this juice – and any other spoilsports – defend their point of view all by themselves.
Gucci by Gucci still succeeds, IMHO, in pulling off one hell of a performance. It manages to leave intact the illusion of one of those late-70s trails with a sort of affectionately respectful classicism that requires a certain distance, admirable “perfumistic” knowledge and above all, a dab hand with a test tube. Neither pompous, nor nostalgic nor overwhelming, as far as I’m concerned: it’s artfully done and quite chic!

Fabienne ANTONIEWSKI Fragrance journalist From marketing to journalism, the world of cosmetics and fragrance has been the common thread in her career for over twenty years. A frequent contributor to Elle magazine’s ‘Beauté’ column since 1995, she reconnected through her writing with one of her first loves: perfume. Helping readers smell and dream, inventing new scenarios, putting feelings into words; she aims to evoke the most intimate and emotional facets of a fragrance, the better to resist reducing it to a banal consumer product. She still considers that defending the artistic side of perfumery and encouraging creativity and the search for meaning and quality is one of the main points of her profession.