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| A 1963 print ad, the oldest I could find. |
One of the many things that plague the fragrance house of Creed is the argument that "deep vintage" bottles that predate the 1970s don't exist, despite Olivier and Erwin's claims to the contrary. Indeed, an internet search fails to yield imagery of anything particularly antiquated, beyond perhaps a few very early iterations of the contemporary flask bottles, all of which read "Olivier Creed." This of course exposes them to constant criticism.
As I've argued in the past, Creed has a built-in excuse for this problem that, to me at least, actually washes: their pre-seventies output was primarily bespoke. If you're only in the market for individualized orders, there will be no examples of those products for the public to see, not unless any of Creed's clients offer them up. If I'm a multi-millionaire who hires the Creed company to make me a bespoke cologne, and I pay $100,000 for a 17 ounce flacon (with a bonus refresh flacon), the outside world won't see those bottles. They'll never see what I privately commissioned for myself, because, well, it's private.
Very few people seem to accept this logic, however. So, Creed continues to get hammered on the issue, and likely always will be. But strangely enough, the benefit of the doubt is very readily given to another fragrance that sneakily claims to have a wizened lineage that also is not supported by any available sources, at least not online. The fragrance in question is English Leather by MEM/Dana. MEM had cited English Leather's release date as 1949, with tales of it originally being launched as "Russian Leather" sometime in 1930s Germany, then discontinued, then relaunched after WWII, again as Russian Leather and again in Germany, before being renamed "English Leather" and marketed to Americans throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
If you look on Basenotes, Parfumo, and Fragrantica, they all cite 1949 as English Leather's release date. This is curious, because 1949 is a long time ago, but not that long ago. There should be an abundance of print ads dating back to the 1950s available online, much as there were for Old Spice, which predates it by nine years. Yet when I search for those print ads, nothing comes up. The oldest ad I can find online dates back to 1963. And, also quite curiously, there is no record of MEM Company, Inc. ever existing on 347 Fifth Avenue. It's like the fragrance and the company behind it were legacy inventions for 1960s consumers, and that invented legacy continued to transition along unchallenged through the subsequent five decades, all the way up to today.
Today, I'm challenging it. Where are all the "deep vintage" bottles of MEM English Leather? A search online yields results that again only date back to the early 1960s. I've purchased the oldest vintage "all-purpose lotion" bottle I could find on eBay, with a label marked "MEM Company Inc., Northvale, NJ" and a bottle marked "Bottle made in West Germany for MEM." The product is clearly from the early or middle 1960s, and it's even possibly a little newer given its pristine like-new condition and blond wood cap. One thing I do know -- it's definitely not a 1950s bottle. I can't find one of those, nor can I find an ad for one.
Neither can Chat GPT, for that matter. I asked the A.I. to utilize its research mode and find me links to documents that prove English Leather predates the 1960s. After conducting an exhaustive scouring of the internet that took just under an hour to complete, it admitted to me that it couldn't find any evidence of English Leather ever predating 1963. There are zero documents, zero patents, zero bottles, zero print ads, and zero photographs to back up the claim that English Leather was released in 1949. Not one single spec of information to support the claim that MEM produced English Leather as "Russian Leather" in the 1930s. No documented proof that MEM ever marketed English Leather to anyone other than postwar Americans. No proof that MEM manufactured English Leather prior to the 1960s. I've scoured eBay for "deep vintage" bottles, and 95% of the deepest deep vintage bottles available are from the 1980s.
I also purchased the bottle pictured below, after searching "1950s Vintage English Leather," and finding this among only a few bottles. The fancy metallic leafing on the label's border and lettering suggests to this commercial design major that it's an early 1980s bottle of cologne.
And this is the other bottle I purchased, a late 1960s to mid 1970s vintage:
As with Creeds, the only thing consistent about MEM's production and packaging of English Leather are its inconsistencies. From year to year there are wildly varying graphic designs for the labels and types of wood caps used. No two bottles look alike. Bottles from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s are all very difficult to match, and neither of the bottles shown in this article resemble the 1980s vintage bottles I used growing up. But all bottles have one thing in common -- they all say "English Leather." Where are those first-issue "Russian Leather" bottles?
What does this dearth of documentation mean for English Leather? Hard to say for certain. It's possible that there are simply no surviving bottles or print ads for deep vintage 1950s English Leather. No surviving "first issue" bottles from 1949. No "dark vintage" bottles of the original prewar release. ("Dark Vintage," by the way, is my term for fragrance vintages that are exceedingly rare, borderline extinct, or possibly never seen.) These bottles simply were used up and thrown out, and nobody has access to them anymore. The print ads? Lost to the annals of time. The documentation of MEM Company's residency on Fifth Avenue in NY City? Also lost. This is all totally possible.
Or, it could be that MEM did not make English Leather prior to the 1960s, and someone at MEM coughed up a random release date of 1949 to give the brand the postwar luster that so many real postwar fragrances enjoyed. This fib would give it a rosier history than the Vietnam era could offer, and make it substantially more romantic in the eyes of vintage hounds. What guy doesn't want to envision square-jawed mad men of the 1950s powering through their martinis and secretaries while reeking of vintage MEM English Leather? Better that the Silent Generation than the Baby Boomers lay claim to the stuff.