All hail our new overlord: Mocha Mousse
We all know that fashion and fragrance are inherently linked - particularly fine fragrance to high fashion (although of course there are crossovers down the younger/more affordable end of the spectrum, from Zara perfumes to Barbie body sprays). Dior, Chanel, Van Cleef & Arpels, Versace, Viktor & Rolf… the list goes on. Once the pioneers of new and inventive perfumes that broke stereotypes and conventions (for eg., Schiaparelli’s groundbreaking “Sleeping”, designed to wear whilst, obviously, sleeping) (can we have a moment for the genius that was Elsa Schiaparelli?), fine fragrances of the top fashion houses are now heaving, populous stands on the ground floors of department stores and usually have a completely separate parent company than that of the actual fashion.
However, they are nonetheless inherently linked and therefore sway by the same momentum - the zeitgeist. I’ll also note here that there’s also an interesting intersection between perfumery and the art world, heretofore less explored, but I’ll dive into that in another post. All three, nonetheless, are both slaves of and driving forces in the zeitgeist. Which brings me to wonder: are we all being ruled by Pantone?
Pantone Colour Institute, eponymous pigment-naming giant-corp and encyclopedia of colours, selects a “colour of the year” at the end of the preceding year, almost as a superstitious announcement of the year to come. It has the same anticipation of the announcement of a new Pope and the same social weighting as a movement of the Doomsday Clock. From the moment of its announcement, this new COTY finds itself the centre of attention and the star of the show - conversations ensue from social media commentating (“yuck!”, “not another pastel”, “omg I’m changing my visionboard palette to this”, “finally we’ve moved away from those awful bright colours”, etc, etc), to board rooms and focus groups where discussions around how to incorporate or even concentrate on the COTY in the forthcoming collections of clothing, accessories, packaging, branding, and other worldly goods get imagined into reality.
(I’ll note there that even Pantone cannot control the chaos of the zeitgeist: in the year of Viva Magenta, Barbie Pink reigned from the moment the PR campaign was launched; in the year of Peach Fuzz, Charlie XCX’s neon Brat green dominated the visuals of Western pop culture.)
This of course trickles into the land of perfumery. In 2023, Creed’s Carmina was resplendent in Viva Magenta. In 2024, Peach Fuzz was assigned perfume notes by dsm-Firmenich (in what capacity, I don’t quite understand). In 2025, the year of Mocha Mousse, will we see a spike in coffee, mocha, chocolate, creamy gourmands? We are yet to see. Just as with Barbie and Brat, not everything can be dictated by the COTY. Viva Magenta certainly didn’t seem to align with the very obvious vanilla fragrance tsunami that came down upon us all in 2023. In 2024, the biggest perfumery trend was… vanilla with other stuff in it, it seems. All those who wanted to join the vanilla train in 2023 had to go ahead and develop fragrances plus packaging and put the whole things together and let it macerate and send it out… all of that can take a good year to complete. So it’s no wonder. However, the appetite for vanilla was a lot calmer, and thankfully there were also other fragrance families to grace the shelves of department store and niche boutiques alike.
If Mocha Mousse makes its way into perfumery, can we handle another year of gourmands? I’m not sure if we’re at capacity or not - certainly the USA’s voracious appetite for gourmand perfumes does not seem to have diminished, even after drowning in vanilla.
Other trends I saw last year were rice (a new favourite of mine), tea, and book-related smells like ink and paper. As China steps onto the global stage of perfumery with its new openness, we should start seeing numbers skewing away from Western-heavy trends and over to the Eastern preferences.
And as for fashion? Never the twain shall separate. Fine fragrance is not a cosmetic, it is an accessory, and until IFRA and the EU restrict ingredients down to their quietest and most simple existence, it will continue to be an outlet for expression and style just like clothing is.
