jtd's Review of Amazone (original) by Hermès

When Amazone launched in 1974 the woody floral was a sensible and well-populated genre. Ranging from heavily aldehydic numbers like l'Air du Temps and Fleurs de Rocailles to glowing classics like le Dix and le De, woody florals had always been above reproach. But the times they were a-changin' and the perfumes that weren't keeping pace were starting to seem perfunctory and stale. Floral aldehydes had been dominant for so long that they had developed coded meanings to those in the know. Chanel 5 was sophisticated, l'Air de Temps was naive, Estée was tight-assed. But to the great majority of people who smelled them they were just soapy and antiquated. Woody florals struggled to strike the attitude that would appeal to the young woman of the 1970s. New green perfumes like Chanel 19 and Diorella spoke to a more provocative femininity and found an eager audience. Amazone seems designed to find a middle ground between old and new styles. Whether it was successful is difficult to answer.

Amazone would likely have seemed too blatantly fruity to the woman who wore Calèche, Guy Robert's aldehydic woody floral that was the only other female fragrance Hermès offered in 1974. Traditional woody florals carried the citrus topnotes needed to create a pyramid but Amazone put fruit front and center. It was a starchy green floral built from taut spring flowers and apparently a whopping dose of blackcurrant. It was crisp rather than lush and while it was a new style for Hermès, it had the conservative sensibility of the house.

To the modern nose shaped by florals like Escada Chiffon Sorbet and Alain Delon Samourai Pinkberry (an actual perfume, apparently) Amazone comes off like most other woody florals from previous generations. Pick your favorite word of disdain–they've all been used. Mumsy, frumpish, dowdy, démodé. Amazone was Hermès's first attempt to find a young female market and the brand wasn't known for nurturing a socially progressive buyer. Amazone didn't try–or didn't try hard enough–to target the boho bougie style that Dior and Chanel nailed with Diorella and Cristalle. The perfume's warrior name implied an audacious femininity that the perfume didn't deliver. Hermès seem to have gotten a foot in the door to the rising feminism of the decade but never quite opened it and marched through. The image of femininity it conjured was conflicted and contradictory, a bit like another oddity of the era, the folk-singing nun.

With Amazone, Hermès mediated the youth movement of the era by effectively ignoring it, a pattern the marque would repeat when it launched the jaunty Eau de Cologne Hermès/Eau d'Orange Vert into the heart of the punk era in 1979. Denial or cultural tone-deafness. Pick your choice.

But time heals all blah, blah and vintage Amazone is an excellent wear today for anyone who chooses to reclaim it. (There are plenty of vintage bottles still available.) The florals are dynamic and the woods are rich but understated. The perfume has an acidulated snap that flouts today's ongoing trend for sweetened fruits and florals. It's a wonderful bit of irony that defying trend–which made Amazone seem out of place in 1974–makes it seem novel today.

Maybe it's a result of my Catholic schooling by nuns. Maybe it's my contemplation of the the self-restraint involved in wearing a full religious habit. Either way, the singing nun routine strikes me as just the right kind of kink and I happily wear Amazone while the refrain of “Dominique” echoes through my head.

from scenthurdle.com

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