I've revisited Y2K perfumes, and these are the ones that're worth bringing back
Everyone’s dressing like a Sopranos' mob wife and there's Murder on the Dancefloor, so here are the scents to wear now from culture's favourite era
For the Coquettes - Agent Provocateur
If you’re looking at the 2000s without having lived through it, it appears to be a sex-positive time for everyone involved, but it was far from it. Sex was performed by women and consumed by men. The culture was obsessed with strippers: wet t-shirt competitions, vajazzles, platform heels, fake tan and pole-dancing lessons. If you were an indie girl (me!) and Cristina’s chaps left you cold, you could still do ‘stripper’ but with a vintage twist, in the (hourglass) shape of the burlesque revival.
What started with nipple tassels in the late ‘90s, ended with Lana Del Ray’s first album in 2010. Stripper-but-make-it-vintage was everywhere from Moulin Rogue to Dita Von Teese and even Kylie Minogue climbed into a giant martini glass for the cover of British Vogue.
If you look at TikTok today, you’ll see the look has returned but rebranded as ‘Coquette’, where Sophia Coppola’s new film Priscilla has sparked a million tutorials on how to do wing eyeliner and big hair.
Back when it was still burlesque, every outfit was underpinned with retro-style underwear brand, Agent Provocateur, or ‘AP’ as it was known by the fans. AP was more than a place to buy knickers, it was the indie girl’s way to do ‘slutty’ and it had an iconic perfume to boot. Going to the Soho London or Manchester store was a pilgrimage, everyone wanted to work there in the iconic pink ladies-style uniforms. Only the cool girls got the job, the rest of us settled for the perfume.
On revisiting the scent today, I’m struck by its powdery note with a capital ‘P’, it smells of vintage lipstick and pepper. And the dirty rose that we used to mask the smell of dirty hair, from when you could still smoke in clubs, and your hair smelt like an ashtray at your desk on the morning after.
The ceramic bottle felt iconic and still does, it’s neat and heavy in your hand. Is it an egg-shaped sign of fertility? A sex toy? Or a bomb? You could decide.
Agent Provocateur is a nipple-tassel scent for indie girls everywhere who watched Marie Antoinette in their student halls then and will see Priscilla in the Playhouse now (if the babysitter’s free).
I can’t write about the AP scent, without mentioning its forbearer: Boudoir by Vivienne Westwood which is now sadly discontinued.
I remember reading that Westwood said she wanted a ‘knicker note’ from this perfume. The yonic energy called to mind the cheeky painting, The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, an inspiration for Westwood, and it smelt as frilly and provocative as the artwork.
I imagine Boudoir was on the mood board for the AP perfume (the co-founder of the brand is Joseph Corré, Vivienne Westwood’s son) and both of these cult formulas were big inspirations for The Dreamer and The Lover in our collection.
Boudoir was the scent track to my era working the perfume halls of regional department stores with (in the words of Jennifer Coolidge) the ‘evil gays’. We spent our days selling Marc Jacobs perfumes to the ‘heathen customers with no taste’, but we wore Boudoir. And if anyone has a drop left of this iconic scent, please let me know, and I’ll buy it from you.
For the Girly Girls - Jennifer Lopez Glow
Twenty years after its release, Mean Girls is back on our screens with a musical homage to the cult teen movie. In perfume, 2004 was a key time for celeb fragrance releases, and their diamonte-encrusted, hot pink bottles (like the film) are perfect for TikTok’s current obsession with the #girlygirlaesthetic. They smell of caramel, candyfloss, or peony, and sometimes all three at once!
The ‘Plastics’ girl gang in the movie would’ve worn Paris Hilton by Paris Hilton or Britney Spears Fantasy, and so did you, according to our perfume personality quiz. ‘Fantasy’ is one of the most popular answers to our question: ‘What was your first fragrance?’
However, when I revisited all the celeb frags 20 years on, the only one that stood out was Jennifer Lopez’s Glow. I wasn’t a J-Lo fan then, but like her music, this perfume took me right back to foam party in a nice-top-and-jeans drinking a Smirnoff Ice.
And it wasn’t just the nostalgia factor, in comparison to the other saccharine spritzes of the celeb era, Glow is more developed, a paperwhite floral that smells like a fresh bar of soap. It sits somewhere between hairspray, suntan lotion and baby oil. It’s efficiently feminine: soft but strong, if it was an outfit it would be a white cashmere sweater (off-the-shoulder) and white bootcut flares, just like J-lo would have worn.
The only downside for me was the lack of natural notes. Notes from nature take you on a journey, revealing the top, middle and base layers, one by one. This purely synthetic blend smelt unnervingly the same on a paper strip (and just as strong!) a few days later.
Even the bottle feels right again, wrapped in a bling-worthy ‘name necklace’ the star of Phoebe Philo's recent comeback collection. Mean Girl’s Regina George may have worn Eau-de-Britney, but I bet her ‘I’m a cool mom, not a regular mom’ mum wore Glow, and she still should today.
For the Clean Girls - CK Be
Calvin Klein is never far from the conversation, take the brand’s current thirst trap featuring Jeremy Allen White from The Bear, proving that healthy-looking men in tight white pants will always have a place in the culture. And when it comes to Calvin Kleins’ perfumes, everyone knows CK One, the original squeaky-fresh fragrance but not so many have tried her darker sister, CK Be.
I’ve always been olfactory-motivated and around the millennium, I think I had a whole ‘relationship’ with a boy just because he wore that scent. The ‘relationship’ consisted of us waving through the cigarette smoke in a rock club, snogging to Rage Against the Machine, and then not seeing each other until the following Friday, and repeating it all over again. I can’t remember a single thing about him, apart from that he smelt of clean laundry, peach and swimming pools: CK Be.
Not technically a Y2K release, it was first on the market in 1996, however, things moved slower in those days, and it could still be found on the neck of a provincial club-goer well into the noughties. Everything about CK Be felt mind-bending and new: the matte-ness of the black bottle, the fact it had no spray, so you had to just splash it all over your body. It was for boys, but girls wore it too. It said, ‘I’m not like other girls, I’m one of the guys’, long before that sentiment was recognised as a form of internalised sexism.
When I was a teen CK Be was the girl from the year above who could pull off jeans and a white t-shirt. Now social media talks about ‘that girl’, and the ‘clean aesthetic’ - the Glossier customer who has perfected ‘no makeup makeup’, both these women are cut from the same cotton-fresh cloth.
Back then I craved camp, drama and ‘makeup makeup’, perhaps that’s why I left the provincial club for Saint Martins and never made it past the end of the song with Mr CK Be.
But if you are ‘that girl’ (or want to be) try this shower scent, it’s got a high chemical note of metal and musky sherbert that feels right for now. It’s not a power perfume that’ll break your heart, but it is a pair of white pants (freshly washed by someone’s mum) with just the right amount of lust to keep you coming back for more.