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If you'd asked me twenty years ago if Tres Nuit by Armaf (which was actually released in 2015, but let's pretend for a minute) smells like Creed's Green Irish Tweed, I would have said it's pretty close, especially in the top notes, but that it's a tad soft, synthetic, and thin in the base, and falls short overall. If you ask me now? Entirely different answer.
Green Irish Tweed has always been an aberration in the brand's range. It's the one Creed that is blatantly synthetic, yet it's that luxury soap quality that makes it smell great. The list of chemicals is astounding: Dihydromyrcenol (> 15%), Ambroxide, Galaxolide, Methyl Octine Carbonate, Methyl Heptine Carbonate, and it goes on. In isolation they smell cheap, but together they're heavenly. Pierre Bourdon's original 1985 fougère was a resounding breakthrough in masculine perfumery, and a singular masterpiece for Creed.
Over the years, GIT has changed. It went from having the world's smoothest and richest sandalwood base, to having no sandalwood base. It went from having a grassy green apple top, to having a muted minty opening that resembles Aspen a little more than it should. To conceal the lack of precious wood notes in the drydown, Creed amped up the iris (irones) and violet (ionones), which resulted in a rich, purple-floral accord that smells great but linear. These changes made GIT vulnerable to the likes of Dubai-based Armaf and its well-tuned gas chromatographs.
Enter Tres Nuit in 2015, right around the time when GIT lost its luster. Whoever put this scent together did two things soundly: They studied several vintages of their template, and spliced together their rendering of two different GITs. They used the diffusively aromatic top accord of pre-2005 GIT, which, when compared side-by-side with Lancaster Cool Water's top accord, is nearly indistinguishable, and they incorporated the simplified floral musk drydown found in the post-2011 version of GIT. The result smells so much like Green Irish Tweed (and not Chez Bond) that I no longer need to buy the Creed.
Many reviewers claim that Tres Nuit contains a strong lavender note that isn't in GIT. I think the people saying this are just "joining the crowd," so to speak. One or two people said Tres Nuit has lavender, so now everyone says it has lavender. I don't really smell a strong lavender note, although there's certainly lavender blended in there, as there is with Cool Water. But there's also a soft lavender in GIT, so I'm not sure why detecting a bit of it in Tres Nuit is supposed to make it wildly different. These are all fougères, people.
Edit 5/23/23:
I've been watching interviews of Gabe Oppenheim, author of The Ghost Perfumer: Creed, Lies, & the Scent of the Century. In them, he claims that Pierre Bourdon's brief for Lancôme's Sagamore was essentially the formula for Green Irish Tweed, and alleges that Olivier Creed pilfered it after Lancôme rejected it. Supposedly this was something Creed did repeatedly with many of Bourdon's rejected briefs, and he did it without ever paying him. If true, it's a hell of a story. (That's a very big "if," and I'll follow up soon with another article on the subject.)
It would mean that Tres Nuit is basically what Sagamore would have been, had Lancôme been a little wiser. Lancôme is a typical cosmetics brand that shrewdly balances its formula budgets, and it doesn't spend absolute top dollar on its perfumes, so it's compelling to think that Sagamore would have been almost exactly like Tres Nuit, i.e., GIT on a designer budget. This really blows my mind, to be honest. Oppenheim's contention creates a very interesting list of "what-if" scenarios, and the Sagamore brief is one of them.
Like all things, the credibility of the author's claims is problematic, and I look forward to unpacking why I believe he might be only partially accurate in his assertions concerning Bourdon and Creed.