Gianfranco Ferre by Gianfranco Ferre

Gianfranco Ferré was a perfume, as Selene says, very sweet. Nowadays, that word is misleading, because current sweetness is burnt, sticky and dirty. Ferré and similar scents are exuberant, chaotic, honeyed and fruity, yet always natural. Natural like a cooking of flowers, fruits and syrups; yes, manufactured, but without that nasty ethyl maltol that drips from every froutchouli in the infinite spaces thanks to La vie est belle, which could also be called Hell is beautiful, though that depends on taste. Ferré is a perfume that could have been released ten years after its launch; it feels more like a transitional fragrance between the eighties and nineties than from 1984. In the eighties, enchanting resins or narcotic chypres were more fashionable to wear with sheer stockings and kilos of varnish; these molotov-style syrupy cocktails à la Kenzo Kashaya would take a few years to arrive. The funny thing about Ferré is that it doesn’t list fruit at all, yet your mind is incapable of sensing anything else. After the initial shock, a dizzying firework of pollen, stamens and nectars, Ferré took on a stunning banana tone. A fleshy, carnal banana, comforting, appetising and packed with crushed and battered tuberose and narcissus, squeezed to extract the most insolent and sexual juice they hold inside. This fruity burst with a shampoo-like taste was like having a small caramel made with a thousand essences in your mouth, a caramel that made your palate, taste buds and nostrils tingle. I don’t want to be too repetitive about how sweet and toxic it was, but the first half-hour of this fragrance was something extraordinary. Unfortunately, at some point during the transition, ylang made an appearance; to the almost psychedelic initial natural revelry was added its fruity musky tone, much less narcotic than the narcissus, hyacinth and neroli, but above all, a heavy orchid note (a note I absolutely love) gave it a slightly unpleasant and synthetic aftertaste (to me, the orchid note always smells artificial, as if it were a cleaning product). In the dry-down, the glorious frenetic feast of sweetness from the beginning remained, but much lower, slightly spicy and less luxurious, with hints of dirty wool. Gianfranco Ferré is a perfume well worth considering; it was modern and visionary because it anticipated the cloying floral and fruity scents that reigned during the early nineties.