I bought a bottle of Pure Havane from Nordstrom in 2013 November in Phoenix (Scottsdale, to be precise) when I was a poor grad student. It smelled like …… magic in the air.
Aesthetically sort of the antithesis of Chanel. Mugler’s perfumes were bold, brash, youthful, larger than life, and beautiful – a perfect contradiction to the understated elegance and refined abstraction of Chanel. Yet, both so very French in their own ways if you ask me. Mugler’s perfumes marked a paradigm shift in the 90s with their unique and iconic scents.
I remember the hardcore Mugler fans from the early days of Basenotes and pre-influencer YouTube. Jerry Garcia apparently said of the Grateful Dead
You could say something similar about Mugler’s perfumes and its core base of fans. And whether you liked the perfumes or not, it was something interesting to witness. The discussion wasn’t always tasteful, particularly at the height of Pure Malt hype mania on Basenotes, which saw several controversial threads and comments. In hindsight, that defined an era on the forums here.
I don’t want to try the line now, whatever is left. And that Thierry Mugler is gone, too. I hope Angel and Alien aren’t reformulated. I worry they have been reformulated. It would be not just a loss of perfumes. It would be a loss of culture. Maybe it has already been.
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Enough talk. I need sleep. get on with the day …………