STYLE : LOOKS : Swapping Scents

When it comes to fragrance, more and more men and women are cross-dressing. Take my friend Peter, a true guy’s guy, who always has a trace of motor oil under his fingernails. Manicure notwithstanding, he admits to a preference for Calvin Klein’s Eternity for women. And then there’s my girlfriend Kathleen, who alternates her patchouli oil with Aramis or Drakkar Noir. “My knees go weak when I smell them,” she says, “even on myself.”

What’s going on?

Fashion, a reflection of culture, dictates trends in fragrances. In the ‘20s, for example, emancipated women began wearing spicier, more “masculine” scents to complement their bobbed hair and sportswear. This boyish mode returned in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when the liberated woman dared to pair her menswear with scents such as Canoe and English Leather. Today, identical jeans, shirts, work boots (even haircuts) for men and women have led to a resurgence of unisex scent. CK One from Calvin Klein is positioned as gender-neutral, its ads showing a variety of models with sexually ambiguous expressions. The message: Male or female, straight, gay or bi, this One’s for you.

Couples share fragrances the way they might share their denims or sweats. Lionel D’Aliotta of Maison D’Aliotta in Palm Beach says he met his wife, Susan Anapol D’Aliotta, when “she came into my SoHo store wearing Comptoir Sud Pacifique’s Vanille Cafe, which I wore in France and couldn’t find here.” Now they wear a dozen of the same scents.

“Crossover fragrance is a major trend,” says D’Aliotta, noting the popularity of Chanel No. 19 and Guerlain’s Apres L’Ondee among men. Others favored by both sexes include Angel from Thierry Mugler, L’Eau D’Issey from Issey Miyake and Chemistry Skin Cologne from Clinique.

The bottom line? “Men and women no longer care about wearing a fragrance that’s clearly defined as being ‘for a man’ or ‘for a woman,’ ” says Annette Green, executive director of the Fragrance Foundation in New York. “They want to wear what they want to wear.”