5/4/24

Replica Springtime in a Park (Maison Margiela)


Jacques Cavallier is
a well-respected perfumer, and author of such hits as Bvlgari Aqva Pour Homme, Cartier Pasha, L'Eau d'Issey Pour Homme, and M7 by YSL. But he's also an incredibly prolific perfumer, with roughly a hundred creations to his name. Not all of them can be memorable, and Springtime in a Park is as forgettable as a Crayola color. 

Bear in mind, I'm a fresh-floral enthusiast. I have Davidoff's Sea Rose, Bond's Chelsea Flowers, and Banana Republic's Peony & Peppercorn in my collection, among others, and I wear all of them, so I'm not biased against what Cavallier was going for with this 2019 Margiela release. I just don't particularly like it very much. It opens with a fairly pleasant if unoriginal musky pear note, followed by five hours of musky white florals, mostly a laundry-soap muguet and aldehyde affair, sweet and sour in equal measure. For what a bottle of this stuff goes for, I would at least expect a more dynamic floral bouquet, if not better ingredients, and in their absence the fragrance smells like shampoo.

Not everything is designed to appeal to finicky men, so I understand that if I don't like Springtime, I'm not saying much. But likewise, brands like Maison Margiela are trying to sell the all-fragrances-for-all-people line, subtly avoiding cliched terms like "unisex" in favor of "genderless" marketing. By that metric, I should be won over. Perhaps if the brand actually splurged on quality materials for their formulas, I'd be more inclined to join their tribe? We as a culture should expect more from our upscale designers; this fragrance should have been so much better.