Linearity is a blessing and a curse; if the fragrance smells good, it's the former, and if not, the latter. But what happens when a linear fragrance smells neither good nor bad, but just "so-so?" At what point do we decide that linearity is a driver of something other than one's subjective level of enjoyment? At what point is it automatically something undesirable?
Replica By the Fireplace by Maison Margiela was released in 2015, which was when perfume was entering a new phase, the Era of Dior Sauvage. Enter the bazillion online chads who can't stop themselves from jabbering aimlessly about Ambroxan, because just saying and typing the word makes them feel smarter by a hundred I.Q. points. Enter the monster woody-ambers that trail the wearer by thirty yards and fill the workplace with something the locals mistake for bathroom cleaner. It was also a time when niche began to cut corners, with stuff like Ferrari's Bright Neroli legitimately competing with "high art" like Zoologist's Bat. The playing field had been leveled by the synthetic oud craze, which was revelatory in its bringing an ostensibly expensive material down to the department store level of Ralph Lauren and Perry Ellis, and thus a sizable number of niche brands began using designer-grade materials in unorthodox compositions to pass them off as worth more than a dollar per milliliter. Your nose might smell something cheap, but listen, it's a bizarre composition, okay? That means it's niche, so pay up or shut up.
Maison Margiela, to its credit, avoided weirdness with this fragrance. Replica By the Fireplace is conceptually a staid affair, conjuring in its image and copy the comforting feel of a mug of coffee by a toasty hearth. It doesn't get any more conservative. And indeed, spray it on and you get a delicious blast of vanillic kitchen spices next to a smoky blaze, and there's even a hint of coffee atop a blanket of fluffy vanilla. The vanilla is the saving grace of this scent, which by the way lasts fully fourteen hours at full steam, so it's definitely perfume strength. The money went to the vanilla, which has a rounded and woody-floral feel, even in the far drydown. I have no problem with how it smells, but I do quibble with how RBtF performs; this is a very linear perfume. Let me state for the record that if a pricy niche perfume is aiming for linearity, the accord should be mind-numbingly novel. You don't need to up the quality of materials; Vicky Tiel's Ulysse is linear and smells amazing because its cheap accords form an attractive and unparalleled smell. I would pay eighty dollars for two ounces of Ulysse. At ten dollars, it's beyond a bargain.
I wish I could say the same for Replica By the Fireplace, but to me it's simply too boring to warrant the cost for a full bottle. The way it smelled at six in the morning is how it smells at seven-thirty in the evening. The spicy nuance, the smoky woodiness, the lick of coffee (I get zero chestnut), and the great big vanilla musk undergirding it all is quite literally frozen in time. There is no movement. I enjoy it, but do I enjoy it for twenty-four hours? Do I want an expensive fragrance to keep beating the same three notes from my work breakfast to my midnight snack the next morning? It smells nice, and it's a comfortable fragrance, easy to wear to work or on a date. But it's boring. Vanilla isn't a challenge; perfume vanilla was established 175 years ago. Old Spice has an excellent vanilla note, especially in the Shulton formula. Any of your wetshaver aftershaves from the early twentieth century can do it just as well. You don't need to splurge on anything for good vanilla.
So why splurge on this? I'm not sure. If there were at least two changeups in the fragrance's drydown arc, I could see it. Maybe the smokiness intensifies and overtakes the sweetness, only to subside again six hours later. I'm not even asking for anything new to emerge here, but I'm not really satisfied with the same-old, same-old "here's the whole tamale" approach. This isn't novel, this is a candle, or a room spray. I appreciate that it's pleasant, but if you're charging me $24 for six milliliters, it needs to be more than that: It needs to be interesting, too. I look forward to a hundred milliliters of this costing $24 at bargain-basement TJ Maxx in twenty years.