The box arrives in marine blue, the bottle in Montale’s signature silver, but that’s the last you’ll hear from me about “presentation.” What matters is the scent, and online the chorus is deafening: Fougères Marine smells “just like Tommy,” only richer, smoother, longer lasting, and therefore—according to the internet’s most excitable NPCs—worthy of immediate purchase. I understand the impulse. I smell it too. Yet I can’t quite join the chant, because I was there. I wore Lauder’s vintage Tommy when the nineties were still happening, not yet a nostalgia industry. I loved that fragrance. And this is not that fragrance.
This is the brief for that fragrance—a parallel-world scenario in which Tommy Hilfiger’s team bypassed Lauder entirely and instead tried to slip Olivier Creed a suitcase of Euros to work his unofficial “Creed magic.” In this imaginary scenario, Olivier remembers he isn’t a perfumer and dutifully outsources the job to an S-tier ghost: someone with the skill and precision to construct Tommy’s bone structure using top-flight materials, and lace its freshness with dusky herbal aromatics, Calone 1951, and a massive synthetic ambergris accord (Cetalox, Precyclemone B) for that "marine" piece. The result behaves like the finest Creeds once did: rich yet airy, diffusive yet tingling in cold air, gliding forward with the self-assurance of a fragrance that lasts twenty hours on skin and nearly forever on fabric.
Wearing it, I’m reminded that formulas age even when nostalgia doesn’t. Today’s Tommy cologne still resembles its former self, though a juniper-seaside inflection has crept in, muting the gauzy sweetness of its youth with a hint of lavandin-fueled marine bitterness, as if quietly borrowing a page from Montale’s book. If you must compare Fougères Marine to Tommy, compare it to this reformulated Tommy, not the original one worn with striped crewnecks and Caesar cuts in 1995. Montale’s version is too complex, too polished, too gleamingly synthetic-ambergris aquatic to truly resurrect the spiced-apple style of the nineties, a genre unlikely ever to return.
What it does revive, however, is a rarer pleasure: the sense that a fragrance can be both supremely wearable and quietly spectacular. Tommy was always a good idea, but Montale perfected it. To quote the NPCS: "S-Tier." Even my fiancée likes this one, and she doesn't like anything.