Fragrance Is the Last Ungendered Luxury

My father wore Chanel No. 5. Not as a statement, not as provocation — he just liked it. He had grown up in a house where his mother wore it, and the smell meant home, and so when he left Ghana for London in 1987 he brought a bottle with him and kept buying it for the rest of his life. No one told him it was a women's fragrance. Or if they did, he didn't mention it. He simply wore it, and it smelled, as he said, like something worth smelling.

I tell you this not because it is unusual — men wearing "women's" fragrances is as old as the category itself — but because of the way it sits against the contemporary fragrance landscape, with its aggressively gendered marketing, its blue bottles for him and pink bottles for her, its "masculine" woods and "feminine" florals. Someone decided all of this. And the decision was made relatively recently, and largely for commercial reasons, and it has done more damage to the craft of perfumery than any other single development.

The History the Marketing Forgot

Fragrance did not arrive in the modern world with gender coding. The great perfumes of the early twentieth century were not designed for one sex. Guerlain's Jicky, created in 1889, was marketed to women and immediately adopted by men who found it more interesting than anything nominally made for them. Chanel No. 5 was, in Coco Chanel's own description, a woman's perfume with a man's severity. Mitsouko, Shalimar, Tabac Blond — these were not categorised in the way contemporary fragrance is categorised. They were just perfume. For people who liked perfume.

The aggressive gender split is largely a post-war phenomenon, accelerating through the 1970s and reaching its absurd peak in the 1990s, when the market became almost perfectly bifurcated: aquatic fougères for men, clean florals for women, and a shared cultural agreement that crossing the line was somehow significant. This was never about smell. Smell does not have a gender. It was about shelf placement and marketing spend and the relative ease of selling to audiences who had already been told what they were supposed to want.

Why Fragrance Was Always Different

Here is what the gender binary missed, and what my father grasped without articulating: scent does not carry the same social legibility as clothing or hair or body language. It is the most intimate of the senses and the most anonymous. When you see what someone is wearing, you can place it in a social grid — brand, price point, style tribe, gender code. When you smell what someone is wearing, you are receiving information that bypasses all of that and lands somewhere more immediate. It is not legible in the same way. It cannot be read as quickly, or as cleanly.

This is why fragrance, more than any other luxury category, has always had a subterranean cross-gender life. Men have worn florals for as long as florals have existed. Women have worn fougères and chypres that the marketing department filed firmly under masculine. They just haven't always talked about it, because the cultural permission wasn't available. The behaviour was way ahead of the conversation.

Smell does not have a gender. The category did — briefly, commercially, and never convincingly.

The Niche Revolution and What It Got Right

The niche perfumery movement of the late 1990s and 2000s did many things, some of them genuinely innovative and some of them merely expensive. But one of its more durable contributions was the systematic abandonment of gender designations. Houses like Comme des Garçons, Serge Lutens, and later Le Labo began releasing fragrances simply as fragrances, leaving the gender question to the wearer. This was partly ideological and partly practical — a niche house cannot afford to cut its market in half.

What they discovered, almost immediately, was that people were perfectly capable of navigating without the coding. Men bought rose fragrances. Women bought leather. Everyone bought oud. The category did not collapse. In fact, it expanded, because the removal of the gender frame allowed people to engage with smell on its own terms, without the prior permission of a marketing label.

The Unfinished Work

The mainstream has been slower. The big houses still sort their lines by gender, still build marketing campaigns around gender archetypes, still design bottles with the silhouette of the intended customer encoded in the shape. And it still works — commercial perfumery runs on precisely targeted desire, and gender remains one of the most reliable targeting vectors available. I am not naive about the economics.

But the cultural direction is clear, and it is the direction my father was already pointing in 1987 with his bottle of No. 5. Smell what smells good on you. Ignore the labels, which are there to help the retailer, not to help you. The rose is not feminine because someone decided florals are feminine. It smells the way it smells, and what it does to your skin chemistry is between you and your skin and nobody else. That is not a political position. It is just a fact about how olfaction works, waiting patiently for the industry to catch up.