Leather Fruit: CK One Shock for Him

The most shocking thing about CK One Shock is how good it is, compared to how mediocre it should have been.  What of note has Calvin Klein done in the last several years?  Secret Obsession, Beauty, and any number of interchangeable flankers have been disappointments - even the pleasures of Euphoria were pale in comparison to the brand's great fragrances of the eighties and nineties.  Obsession, Escape, Eternity, and CK One, however repugnant to some, were distinctive enough to warrant strong opinion, and each seemed to encapsulate its era through a radical marriage of scent and sensibility.

There have been many seasonal Ck One successors, none of which I paid much attention to.  By now, these iterations are so far removed from the original that they have nothing to do with it, and Shock, particularly, has more to do with other lines and other trends in perfumery than it has to do with the original CK One.  In that sense, it can be viewed as redundant, but Shock coalesces these trends in such subtly surprising ways that, for me, it transcends its influences, and feels altogether new.

It borrows much from Bulgari Black, Van Cleef & Arpels Midnight in Paris, Paco Rabanne One Million, and Jean Paul Gaultier Le Male, to name only several, but it doesn't read like a compendium; nor does it feel derivative.  It has some of Black's strange rubbery facets, making much more of them than the lackluster Givenchy Play Intense did.  It has shades of the fruity spice undertones overdone in One Million, subtle black tea hints from Black and Midnight in Paris, the tension between sweet and tart played out at maximum volume in Le Male.  It is strong but subdued, feeling much more like a niche release than a mainstream mall fixture.  At times during its development it reminds me of Santa Maria Novella's wonderful Nostalgia, part asphalt steam and the friction of tire against road, part floral, part fruit and spice and leather gloves.

The notes are laughably inventive.  It's described as an oriental with mandarin, cucumber, Red Bull accord, pepper, cardamom, tobacco, ambrene, musk, and patchouli.  I've also heard: black basil.  Of these, I can identify nothing definitively but the tobacco, which is where the fragrance ultimately comes to rest, in a wonderfully soft, powdery sweet melange of cigar stub and sugared rubber.  This dry down is wonderful, but the real moment of distinction in Shock, where it earns its name, is upon application.

The combination on skin isn't something I've smelled before - not quite.  It's as if Shock reassembled familiar motifs, changing the chemistry of their individual properties through skillful, well calibrated combination.  I get spices and leather, a wonderful balance between opposites.  This isn't the effervescence of a citrus but the succulence of something like a peach or a ripe mango.  Mind you, I don't smell either of those fruits in the mix.  Just their quality of succulence, and it's perfectly tempered and muted by a phantom sense of florals which apparently don't exist here.  I smell the ghost of jasmine, personally; probably an illusion created by the mellow alliance of leather, spice, tobacco, and musk.

I would never mistake this for a feminine, and in fact it seems less commercially unisex to me than Bulgari Black.  It announces itself pretty emphatically as a masculine, and yet in overall effect it isn't quite like any masculine I know, however many fragrances of the category it recalls or references.  Ultimately this is what makes it most literally and refreshingly unisex to me.  As on a man, on a woman it would seem familiar but distinctive, the smell of her leather gloves mingling with her perfume and the events she's just experienced out on the road.  It feels unisex, in other words, in a way which isn't marketable, which is probably why there is a feminine counterpart on the other side of the store.

Once it arrives at its tobacco base, Shock goes on indefinitely.  It has minimal but decent projection.  It is just odd enough, and I would love to see more mainstream releases achieve this kind of delicate alchemy.  The ad campaign and the design of the bottle demonstrate how entirely accidental this accomplishment of novelty is, referencing not the moment but some moment past, drunk on the look of a Stephen Sprouse ensemble from the mid eighties.

Eternity: Cleaning Up The Eighties with Calvin

Christy Turlington, saddled with motherhood, daydreams of a night out at Studio 54

For a long time, I regarded Calvin Klein's Eternity as its own sort of stand alone monolithic entity.  In my mind, it sat on its own somewhere, out of context.  It was so all over the place during the time of its release and for several years afterward and was such a brilliantly art-directed phenomenon that it seemed more like a cultural attitude than a scent.  You smelled it everywhere, on everyone.  It seemed so definitively of its time, yet it wasn't anything particularly new (Tania Sanchez has remarked how closely it resembled an earlier Caron, which itself was pretty traditionally floral; a little stuffy, even) and in fact it essentially took an older form, the dowdy floral bouquet, and shoved it into the big shouldered stance so popular in the eighties.

Sophia Grojsman, the perfumer behind Eternity, was of course the go-to woman for this kind of treatment.  She'd done Paris, the quintessential neon floral, several years earlier, and excelled at pumping up the volume without sacrificing density.  Her fragrances of that time were loud without being shrill.  No one has really matched Grojsman in terms of radiance.  Her fragrances, especially the scents she created between the mid eighties and the mid nineties, were radiant to the point of radio-activity, translating the baroque intensity of classical perfumery represented by a fragrance like Bal a Versailles in a uniquely contemporary way.  A Grojsman fragrance took over the senses in a way very few eighties scents, as loud and bombastic as they were, managed to do.  They were powerful but because of their radiance felt buoyant rather than heavy.

Obsession, which came out in 1985, was really Calvin Klein's first massive success in fragrance.  Obsession was one of the heaviest of the heavies, as dark, deep and mysterious as Eternity was bright, buoyant and straightforward.  Even the ads for Obsession were dark: dimly lit scenes viewed through screens and colored filters.  Josie Borain was the perfect model for the Obsession campaign, and really the first sign of Klein's still unparalleled brilliance at creating powerful associative images and personas which brought his fragrances vividly to life in the imagination.  Borain was the athletic-to-the-point-of-boyish Calvin Klein consumer wandering into the exotic oriental territory of Obsession.  The ads depicted her sensual saturation in a nocturnal  world of hedonistic abandon, emphasis on random couplings and sweat.  Obsession was Klein's mass-market version of the often anonymous nightlife excesses popular among the early eighties Studio 54 celebrity demimonde.