It was the beginning of the me, myself, and I culture,’ says Fabien Baron, art director of the original 1994 CK One ads, about which just about everyone had something to say. The words of the many-pronged campaign, written by Glenn O’Brien and recited as overlapping dialogue (some lines in foreign languages), really should be officially published some - where in total as a document of their time: ‘No, no, they were incredible, what are you talking about… the sexy one… the nasty one… the wild one… the male one… the female one… CK One… a fragrance for everyone…’

Marketed as the first mass scent developed for both men and women, CK One was heralded as a turning point for gender categorization. As a branding project, it was an encapsulation of an era and an elegy to Generation X, icon ic for pinning down the fashion world’s pivot from maximalist glam to pared down androgyny, despairingly called heroin chic. ‘Baywatch they’re not, these kids,’ wrote Peter York in 1995 for The Independent. ‘The boys are all bare-chested, very skinny and unpumped, the girls are mostly flat-chested and short-haired. And the attitude is very New York gender-confused-what’s-the-difference. And very druggy.’

In a 1995 Art Forum column, the artist Collier Schorr wrote, ‘Though [Calvin] Klein has always been associated with homosensual imagery, this new product, the first mainstream unisex scent, enables a homosexual doubling to invade a heterotopic bathroom: ‘One clear choice.’ ‘Clarity, not clutter, in your mind, your world, and on your shelf.’’

‘Now? Forget it,’ says Baron, who designed the fragrance’s bottle to resemble a simple pocket flask, in frosted colorless glass. ‘In the ’90s, it was about a sense of real realness, want - ing to break with the bullshit. [Now,] because of TikTok and Instagram and all this, the influencers, the way they [compose] this fake world that doesn’t exist, looking at yourself all the time is what’s going on. The anti-social social. That’s what it is.’

In 2024, CK One is still in a category of its own. Wander any airport’s duty-free fragrance displays and you will witness an as-ever conservative fantasy, morphing women into bow-covered bridesmaids rolling through flowers or crystalline goddesses gliding past stars and men into dust-kicking cowboys or sex-starved racecar drivers, old sweat comingling with fresh perspiration.

‘It’s a shame that there’s no other ad campaign that has touched upon the freedom of that campaign,’ says Orlando Pita, hair stylist for the first CK One shoot. ‘I think it’s a lot more open in real life today than it was back then, but we still had all those kinds of expressions that today have labels.’ Part of the power of that campaign, he recalls, is that the casting and staging felt naturalistic. ‘It crosses different age groups, it is diverse in ethnicity, it’s diverse in sexual preferences, [but] it wasn’t like we were trying to tick off any boxes. It was just the people that everybody on the team gravitated towards.’ Now, it is often referenced and analyzed (in magazine articles, on TikTok explainers, by theorists) as a moment of art meeting commerce, or one of the last high fashion fragrance campaigns that had guts.

Is the outcome of algorithmically produced bubbles the end of mass appeal? Are we now even more allergic to so-called inclusive advertising, now that we’re so used to being person - ally targeted based on our searches and shop - ping habits? This could partially explain why big fragrance has not, even amid a prevalence of fluidity discourse, re-embraced an image of diversified self-expression. As a 20-year- old Kate Moss, hands in miniskirt pockets, recites to a panning lens for one of its mid-90s TV spots, ‘the only one’ is (still) ‘CK One: a fragrance for a man or a woman.’ We could start there. Because this campaign is a piece of history, it is a relic of bygone idealization, no longer the prophesy it intended to be. ‘One…for…or’ today sounds a bit illiterate of intersectionality, and the idea of ‘unisex’ became dated once we began discussing the oppressiveness of binary thinking. But, like all trains of thought concerning the topic of identity politics, this one tends to circle itself: If scent can be intended for a man or a woman, and the codes of femininity and masculinity are simply societal constructs, then such intentions themselves are constructions to be applied at will by any or all.

CK One was meant to change everything. ‘It was, I think, the first fragrance that stepped outside of the norm of a sexy, romantic, and luxurious fragrance,’ says Baron, who Klein tapped after seeing the minimalistic bottle he and Issey Miyake made for L’Eau D’Issey. He collaborated directly with Klein on the object: ‘I said, ‘What is the gesture that every single kid is doing today in America?’ They’re open - ing a bottle of Coke. Let’s do a twist cap, just like a bottle of Coke. Let’s bring it down. Let’s do it in aluminum so it’s recyclable. Let’s get rid of all the [extra] packaging.’ He also sug - gested photographer Steven Meisel for the ads: ‘It was a bunch of dirty kids with black feet standing in the studio and being very much who they were, some of them ugly, some of them beautiful. That mix, that was shocking, at the time, for people. I remember they tested the whole thing; it didn’t test well.’

The CK One campaign, both print collage and video, was inspired by Richard Avedon’s half-nude, semi-transexual Andy Warhol and members of the Factory, New York City (1969). On either side of the ’80s, the slouching and undressing youth in gritty black and white stood in stark contrast to stiffly smiling supermodels. The callback was supposed to signal that we were on our way, again, to a type of expressive freedom (and, perhaps, substance abuse).

The cast featured a lot of sharp jawlines such as Moss’s, Stella Tennant’s, Kirsten Owen’s, and Mike Campbell’s, mechanic-turned-model Jenny Shimizu’s famous pin-up tattoo, the bewildered stares of former It Girls Donna Mitchell and Veruschka, the knowing gaze of Donovan Leitch Jr., son of the folk singer, and plenty of non-models. It even had raconteur Quentin Crisp, age 87, asking us, ‘What does it all mean?’ contrasting then and now (’90s) queerness. In the video, the cacophonous milieu – dancing, jumping, talking, splashing the scent on naked torsos – gives way to the monolithic One: a vague promise of intergenerational, cultural, and sexual harmony.

‘So much in fashion is done for box-ticking, but some people really believe it, and I think Calvin believed it,’ says Joe McKenna, the campaign’s stylist. Now, ‘it’s a template and you can see that it’s stood the test of time… I was watching something recently and saw an ad on television that, by the framing and the set-up was completely the CK One ad, the way it rolled along the screen. It’s nice to think that it has a life that goes on.’

By all accounts, CK One moved the needle. Despite the property not testing well during a market research phase, ‘it became the number one fragrance in the world; the biggest launch of a fragrance ever,’ says Baron. ‘It became successful with the cool people. And every - body wants to be like the cool people. The people in the middle that didn’t like it, they changed their minds. The normal people can say it’s not cool, but as long as they start seeing it on really cool people, they catch up to it. It changed the norm.’

By the time CK One came out, Calvin Klein had already swung and hit with Obsession (1985) and Eternity (1988), through sensual ads starring Moss and Christy Turlington, respectively. Next, Klein wanted to lean into his own youth-oriented, sex-selling ready-to-wear strategy and speak to kids who wanted in. They were already buying the underwear and the jeans, based on witty TV spots featuring Moss and Marky Mark, and before that, a teenaged Brooke Shields.

A strategy that involved selling CK One at Tower Records culminated in more than $5 million in its first 10 days, according to the company. It was said that twenty bottles were sold every minute. Which meant CK One was popular against the odds, proving that consumers don’t always know what they want, and that designers might be better off trusting their own instincts – and/or the acumen of the young people in their lives, such as Klein’s twenty-something daughter, who, according to Baron, was the one who suggested he make a fragrance targeting younger people. ‘For him, it didn’t matter – youth was female and male; youth was youth, which I found interesting. He was intrigued by youth and the power of it.’

CK One was a continuation of what Calvin Klein, the brand, was doing at the time, with its stripped-down billboards and unfussy runway shows, which successfully addressed an insecurity about the overly sophisticated fashion world. The campaign saw models in basic Ts, tanks, bra tops, boots, sneakers, and denim, conversing, slouching, and scowl - ing – offering a reprieve from the high street’s stuffiness and effecting the exact misanthropy that later defined a pre-millennial sensibility. Importantly, each model is placed along a single plane and cropped bluntly, often in half, not centering anyone as a star. They are photo - graphed against a white seamless backdrop in vivid contrast. They are not in color, and they are all wearing Calvin’s lower-end clothes, yet through movement and stances – prototypically masculine, feminine, proper, rough-edged, shy, or secure – their diversity, as a group, is undiminished.

Today, on Calvin Klein’s official website, the menu bar only offers cologne within its two categories, meaning we must use the Men or Women dropdowns to enter a Fragrance page. CK One is available on each side. There is no integrated, nonbinary section (the case with most fashion sites). Missing from these Fra - grance pages at the time of writing are later attempts at inclusive scents CK All (‘be one. be all. just be.’), CK Everyone (‘for everyone of me’), and CK2 (‘for the two of us’), each introduced with ensemble campaigns of bare-faced youths borrowing one another’s clothes and kissing, some straight, some gay, all seem - ingly cisgendered – which leads me back to the initial push of CK One: it was for men, and it was also for women, because it was made for the ’90s, not now, when those labels do not represent the full spectrum of identity.

Hunter Schafer is now the face of Mugler’s bestselling Angel scent, taking the trope of hyper-femininity in a direction it was always heading by animating her as an otherworldly being or girl-superhero. Casting an out trans actress in this role certainly breaks barriers, but it also underscores the trend of heightening sides on a binary: pink/purple or blue/black, hourglass or chiseled chest.

If a scent is being marketed to the pronoun-announcing community, is it obvious that these signifiers would be further distilled, or does gender-fluid, FKA androgynous advertising again make sense? If surgeries and make-up tricks designated feminization and masculinization exist to allow a person their desired place within some standardized understanding of those identities, does the selling of some middle ground look passé? If no identity is fixed, everything is up for synthetic alteration, and so applying a mist or oil, the final touch of a synthesized image, is part of a gender confirmation process. In that way, the hyper-binary codes may as well be enhanced, not flattened, for a younger set. In other words, it’s all unnatural, anyway.

Fragrance, as a branding process, epitomizes such constructs. It can tell us who we are and what we aspire to be – not because wearing a scent can change our chemical make-up, as much as we would like to think it could – but because by default, fragrance ads are about defining a company’s customer. Cologne is an entry point product, developed to keep many a luxury house afloat by growing its audiences to include those intimidated by couture. A scent is cheaply made, easily transported, sold everywhere, and wearable by people of all sizes and walks of life, on any occasion, which can’t be said about a company’s more tangible items. Plus, the make-up price point is usually more attainable than the rest of their offer.

Because scents are so important to push, they must be vastly communicated, necessarily via scentless media. We are sold the idea of a perfume – chemicals undetectable to the eye and ear – before we can smell, through visuals, with or without sound. Hence the history of psychedelic scent campaigns, both imaginative and mainstream, a perfect space for directors to flex their most conceptual creativity, to pitch a brand at top speed. (Perfume ads are where David Lynch and Ridley Scott could famously flesh out the seductive atmospheres for which they were later known – in ads for Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium and Chanel No5, respectively – not bound to the plot of function that other products might require.) In a scent commercial, everything is a metaphor, which is why it’s where creatives can be their most imaginative. Or it used to be, and it could be, again, says Baron, ‘if the fragrance industry would follow and take risks.’ Instead, ‘they do certain things that have worked, and they stay there. They keep the market where it’s at.’

Unlike in the ’80s and ’90s, ‘the investment is too big today. There’s too much competition. Everybody has a fragrance. Every brand has multiple fragrances. To break through is difficult.’ In other words, a scent’s storytelling must connect with people right away for it to have a chance. More times than not, that means telling a story that’s been told many times before. The euphoria of smelling something pleasurable is illustrated with bursts and blooms and heartbeats and dizzy, panting, pacing: a foam - ing whirlpool or a bending lawn or rolling clouds or a wet night lit by jazzy traffic. A character is often peeking beyond a barrier, hoping to enter some dreamy place, a refreshed mem - ory. The images are sexually charged, meta - phors for performing sex roles: lying in wait, pining from afar, floating in space, or manning a ship, taming a stallion, crossing a border.

The juice itself hardly matters in the selling of it, says Baron. ‘For example, Chanel No5 in a blind test, without the name, the packaging, or the story behind it? It tests absolutely poorly. It doesn’t matter. People like this idea of being part of certain things. ‘I want to be that Chanel girl…’ It’s the influence of the sto - ries around what you’re selling, what the brand represents.’ No5 is still a bestseller, and its latest ad features a woman in a sparkling gown, dancing with a tuxedoed man, on the moon’s surface.

Somewhere along the line, the essences of these brands became watered down, not outlining each edge of the image being sold, but selling an easy piece from somewhere in the middle. Even if we have more fragrances than ever (and more perfumers, who create prod - uct lines unconnected to fashion, not geared to specific genders), in the world of department store labels or celebrity products, a man can be musky, smoky, and woody accords, while a woman is florals, powder, and fruit. In the world of their promotion, men are crashing through icy rapids while women are running away from soft waves on the beach. These ads make for the bluntest of gender descriptors around, creating images that are much more traditional than their companies’ other hold - ings or their celebrity endorsers’ public personas, usually.

‘Listen, most brands today,’ continues Baron, ‘are not happy with their fragrances. ‘This is not us; I don’t like the smell; but it works.’ You know how many times I’ve heard that from designers? Like, ‘I hate it.’ I work on a lot of fragrances. [The designers] get so excited. They like the smell…and it tests poorly. ‘This is what people want right now, so let’s do that.’ It’s insane how many fights there are. [With] CK One, there was none of that. The fragrance company totally went with what Calvin want - ed, one hundred percent.’

Which was how notes of citrus and grass became the scent of the nonconformist within a certain corporate agenda. As Vanessa Friedman wrote for the Times in 2019, it ‘smelled like teen spirit… the perfect sensory expres - sion of a generation that grew up at the tail-end of the illusion that was the American dream, without the self-satisfied ambitions of their striving parents.’ The grunge fashion movement was in large part a dream of equality – or of selling single products to more people at a time. Now, we’re meant to pick a side, even when purchasing CK One, as a man, a woman, or anything else.

We can choose Pour Homme or Pour Femme and call it some end to a gender spectrum, just as we’re still expected to find clothing from one side of a store or the other, even though people dress ever more androgynously in comparison to any preceding era. Perhaps we’re bold enough to traverse the departments, effecting an inversion of projected expectations, by wearing a shoe that is sized for someone else, a pair of jeans that was modeled by another identity. The cool people have always done that, and maybe one day the corporations will catch up to them again,