Tom Ford Private Blend: Oud Wood, Moss Breches, Noir de Noir

Whatever my personal opinion of Tom Ford (and now that I stop and think about it, I don’t really have a personal opinion about Tom Ford), I will happily give him kudos for his ability to give the people what they want.

His juvenile shock-marketing campaigns aside (oh, wait — that qualifies as a personal opinion, doesn’t it?), he near single-handedly resurrected the fortunes of aging luxury houses Gucci and YSL before moving on to his own menswear venture, a venture that has thankfully shaken the fashion world to its senses by showing that a menswear designer can be both respectable and profitable through taking the trouble to offer men what they want to wear rather than shoveling ridiculous shrunken-suits, man-dresses and designer on acid collections down the runways year after year.

I mean, you’d never see James Bond in a Thom Browne ensemble, and thank god for such small mercies.

Which brings us to Mr. Ford’s Private Blend collection, a series of twelve fragrances that seize upon the more recently successful trends in niche-perfumery and introduce them to a wider audience. On one hand, you have to just stand back a little and gasp at the chutzpah — here are twelve fragrance ideas that Tom Ford obviously ransacked from better perfume houses with smaller budgets and even more miniscule marketing machines at their backs; but on the other hand, distributing these trends into the wider marketplace might actually help these same niche perfumers, most of whom have their own (again, much better) fragrances already for sale on the net and in exclusive boutiques around the world.

And yes, you heard me correctly — I said “much better” fragrances, for while the Tom Ford Private Blend fragrances are indeed nice, none of them are groundbreaking, unusual or even all that distinctive, but they are, however, successfully commercial interpretations of more interesting ideas gleaned from his competitors.

It’s a good thing the perfume industry doesn’t have pesky copyright laws to get in the way of a good cribbing.

Let’s take Mr. Ford’s Oud Wood, for example. It’s smooth, pleasant, a bit sweet and slightly smoky, but L’Artisan covered this incense territory much earlier, Montale has been doing both incense and oud wood perfumes for years, Comme des Garcons launched both its incense and woodsy series over five years back, and Andy Tauer, Ava Luxe, Matthew Williamson, Serge Lutens, Profumum — all have produced more interesting and creative rides on the golden, smoky incense wagon than Tom Ford Oud Wood, though chances are that the majority of mainstream consumers have no freakin’ idea who these perfume companies are, or where to buy their products.

So . . . points to Ford for getting his big name and his bigger bottles on the giant department store chain shelves first, even though this fragrance smells more like sandalwood and vanilla than anything remotely to do with oud.

Moss Breches is pretty much the same story. A chypre with a few cups of brown sugar thrown in to help it go down more smoothly with the younger crowd. Moss Breches is nice, but yet, again, the chypre is a classic formulation (citrus, oakmoss, ambergris) that’s been around since the early 1900′s and has been worked and reworked to great effect by much better perfumers and more accomplished designers than Tom Ford.

Besides, the amber, benzoin and labdanum in Moss Breches become almost cloyingly sweet as time goes on, and the oakmoss? You can barely (if at all) smell it in the mix two hours later. What kind of self-respecting chypre puts up with that? If you’re going to make an amber, then just make an amber. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to formulate a masculine-leaning chypre that opts for a sex-change halfway through and winds up in a big wig, platform heels and way too much makeup.

Noir de Noir is the more interesting of the three as it shows at least some attempt at imagination, as well as a bit of bite and spine. Noir de Noir is actually the closest thing to a real winner in the bunch, and there’s a dark rooty quality that teams up with a lavish dose of patchouli to put a little fire in the dragon’s belly. Not that it’s all beast and bellow, mind you — saffron and roses have also been stirred into the pot, along with the ubiquitous vanilla (gotta please the sweet teeth).

Noir de Noir is, to my best perception, a perfume for people who listen to ColdPlay — which means millions of potential paying customers, so who can really fault targeting that particular demographic? But really, once you’ve gone and christened the thing Noir de Noir, you’ve pretty guaranteed a mob of oh-so-faux angst-heads will be lining up to grab a bottle for their very own, anyway, and nuts to how it actually smells.

But Noir de Noir isn’t the best bracing patchouli scent you’re likely to encounter. In fact, Il Profumo Patchouli Noir is a more striking example of the form (even including the vanilla), and I hear that Serge Lutens will make his stunner of a patchouli scent, Borneo 1834, available for export soon.

***Additional Note: Tom Ford was creative director with YSL when M7 was produced, and M7 remains an enduring favorite of mine. Unfortunately, I don’t find the same spark of inspiration in Ford’s new fragrance work, and actually thought, while testing out Private Blend Oud Wood, that it could easily be M7′s less interesting little brother.