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08/03/2021
ThomC
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ThomC
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The forest green Le Male for the people
I just love him, this strange green guy from Bogart. It is displaced because it stands between the chairs of different style-forming perfume decades: 70s soap, 80s shoulder pad brachiality, 90s modernity. A hermaphrodite, and yet so strikingly masculine, austere and forbidding. One that doesn't know where it belongs - and neither do those at Bogart, I suppose, but let it go on under the radar, as a few scattered individualists faithfully stand by Force Majeure. But such a fragrance tells me stories, and I like that.
The bottle alone: an ugly duckling in forest green. The cheap-looking plastic cap in silver reinforces the visual first impression - a confused style mix, the decades stylistically hardly assignable, but so likeable that he may pass as retro chabby chicler the barriers of the style police benevolently. A bit like the old VW Beetle: it wasn't beautiful by classic standards either, but offered a timeless concept with endearing simplicity that you just had to like.
Force Majeure is on today's perfume streets a rare but cheap youngtimer from France, which was probably never popular in Germany. And looking back already to its birth year 1998 on anachronistic paths was - had he been thrown in this style twenty years earlier on the market, one would have seen him as a typical thing of the late 70s. But so?
It remains a typical French niche product and reminds like cars of Talbot in its time: hardly visible, but silently cherished. (just saw a small garage the other day that still had a rotten TALBOT brand sign on the front - just beautiful!)
The scent, however, has it all: angular, with clear rectangular lines and delightfully uncontemporary. Insanely striking, dense, without caring about broad consensus. Broad-legged and gently coarse. It's the slaying moss, the forest floor, the hint of woodruff laced with chords of old leather. Lots of wet black pepper in the foundation. Topped with a sillage that is a stunner. If it weren't for that, it wouldn't be a real Bogart. Fits, then.
Cliché head images come up and such fragrance clouds I assume the aging village macho of the 70s, black leatherette jackets and iron crease in the mousy fabric pants, Gitanes fluppe handy, the red Mittagsburgunder in the glass, bussi here, ça va bien there. This attitude towards life is force majeure. The force majeure.
It also reminds me of Gaultier's long-running Le Male. which is a little older. Both I insinuate with their coarse spicy-green mint a distant kindred spirit. Still, the Bogart seems stylistically older in everything, is more unpolished and lick-my-mouth.
The "Le Male" acts like the distant dazzling uncle from America, related by a thousand corners but not seen for at least 25 years. While the one in the striped torso flacon made international career as an eccentric clubbing fragrance, the other remained with both feet on the ground of the French province and pulls his show in the simple café in the village square.
Yes, the Force Majeure is - I just noticed - the Le Male for the people, which does not make it worse because of that. Quite the opposite, in fact. While the Le Male likes to drift into the pretentious with a touch of Parisian international haute couture, the Force Majeure remains a deliberately coarse fine spirit with sausage fingers right from the start. A Gérard Depardieu of fragrance. Boozy, wild, and freedom-loving with anti-opportunistic traits - cheap on the outside, striking on the inside. Its conspicuousness is its merit, because rarely have I had a perfume of this price range, which is so loaded with emotion anchors, as this.
*the music to the fragrance "Force Majeure" by Tangerine Dream (1979)
The bottle alone: an ugly duckling in forest green. The cheap-looking plastic cap in silver reinforces the visual first impression - a confused style mix, the decades stylistically hardly assignable, but so likeable that he may pass as retro chabby chicler the barriers of the style police benevolently. A bit like the old VW Beetle: it wasn't beautiful by classic standards either, but offered a timeless concept with endearing simplicity that you just had to like.
Force Majeure is on today's perfume streets a rare but cheap youngtimer from France, which was probably never popular in Germany. And looking back already to its birth year 1998 on anachronistic paths was - had he been thrown in this style twenty years earlier on the market, one would have seen him as a typical thing of the late 70s. But so?
It remains a typical French niche product and reminds like cars of Talbot in its time: hardly visible, but silently cherished. (just saw a small garage the other day that still had a rotten TALBOT brand sign on the front - just beautiful!)
The scent, however, has it all: angular, with clear rectangular lines and delightfully uncontemporary. Insanely striking, dense, without caring about broad consensus. Broad-legged and gently coarse. It's the slaying moss, the forest floor, the hint of woodruff laced with chords of old leather. Lots of wet black pepper in the foundation. Topped with a sillage that is a stunner. If it weren't for that, it wouldn't be a real Bogart. Fits, then.
Cliché head images come up and such fragrance clouds I assume the aging village macho of the 70s, black leatherette jackets and iron crease in the mousy fabric pants, Gitanes fluppe handy, the red Mittagsburgunder in the glass, bussi here, ça va bien there. This attitude towards life is force majeure. The force majeure.
It also reminds me of Gaultier's long-running Le Male. which is a little older. Both I insinuate with their coarse spicy-green mint a distant kindred spirit. Still, the Bogart seems stylistically older in everything, is more unpolished and lick-my-mouth.
The "Le Male" acts like the distant dazzling uncle from America, related by a thousand corners but not seen for at least 25 years. While the one in the striped torso flacon made international career as an eccentric clubbing fragrance, the other remained with both feet on the ground of the French province and pulls his show in the simple café in the village square.
Yes, the Force Majeure is - I just noticed - the Le Male for the people, which does not make it worse because of that. Quite the opposite, in fact. While the Le Male likes to drift into the pretentious with a touch of Parisian international haute couture, the Force Majeure remains a deliberately coarse fine spirit with sausage fingers right from the start. A Gérard Depardieu of fragrance. Boozy, wild, and freedom-loving with anti-opportunistic traits - cheap on the outside, striking on the inside. Its conspicuousness is its merit, because rarely have I had a perfume of this price range, which is so loaded with emotion anchors, as this.
*the music to the fragrance "Force Majeure" by Tangerine Dream (1979)
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BrianBuchanan
