If you have too much activity with simultaneous launches, the customer is overwhelmed and very few products will actually break through to become successful.
That's Robert Brady of Givenchy, speaking in 1996 about his company's decision to delay the US launch of Givenchy Organza so as "to avoid a packed playing field" (via Women's Wear Daily, 10/25/1996). Strictly speaking, it has nothing to do with today's fragrance, Organza Indecence, which launched in 1999 as Organza's "vampy little sister" (Ibid, 5/28/99), I just couldn't help cracking up when I read it. There were around 200 fragrance launches in 1996; this year, we're expecting some 800. Enough said.
Organza Indecence was meant to attract a younger audience to the Givenchy brand, and it reportedly did very well in its early life. As it was subsequently discontinued, I can only assume that at some point it stopped doing so very well. This year, Organza Indecence is being re-launched as part of Givenchy's Les Mythiques collection and so I thought I'd give it a shot. That I had never tried it before is something of a mystery; I've heard numerous times that it was wonderful stuff, and at least two very kind people went to the trouble to send me samples. I'd be embarrassed to say how long those samples languished in sampling-purgatory, but now that I've tried it, I'm kind of glad I avoided heartbreak by waiting until it was available to purchase.
Organza Indecence was developed by perfumers Jean Claude Delville and Norbert Bijaoui, and is described as a woody-spicy fragrance; the notes include jacaranda wood (aka palisander or Brazilian rosewood), cinnamon, amber, vanilla and patchouli. The opening is a creamy-rich cinnamon pudding underscored by deep woods; as it dries down, the creaminess fades into dry woodsmoke and ambery vanilla with the lightest little dusting of powder. If Donna Karan Black Cashmere and Fendi Theorema had a love child, it would smell something like Organza Indecence: warm and comforting but very, very sexy.
It is a moderately sweet scent, but I don't find it heavy or overbearing. Still, it is more of a winter sort of thing than not. In 1996, it was no doubt considered feminine, but by today's standards, I'd call it a unisex scent. Am I crazy, or is it almost comically mismatched with its name and its packaging? It doesn't smell like anything you'd call "Organza", and the bottle is so much more frou-frou than the juice. Ah well, unless you are willing to look for an older bottle on Ebay, you're left with the newer and much plainer packaging anyway.
The Les Mythiques collection seems to be making its way to the US slowly; so far, Nordstrom has a few of them but no Organza Indecence as of this writing.
Note: image via Images de Parfums.