Burberry

sic transit

When I was 16 and moved to London, my father bought me a dark blue Burberry trench-coat complete with big belt, deep pockets accessible from both inside and out, raglan shoulders, buttoned cross-panel below the collar to keep the rain out, and black steel hook to close properly around the neck. I wore it six months of the year for a decade and then gave it away because I had bulked up. It showed no signs of wear, even at the cuffs, and is probably still out there somewhere, ready for another couple of generations. I looked it up, and it now retails for £1895. If the quality’s still the same, that may actually be a bargain.

The world has been turned inside out since then, and the dowdy lining is now more desirable than the amazing twill they used. I am still not fully used to the fact that Burberry does fragrances, or more exactly licensed their name to Coty for that purpose in 2017.

The names: Her, Hero and Goddess partake of that weird cult of personality that has made fragrance move on from descriptive (Jasmin de Corse) to deictic (Pour un Homme) to allegorical (Nuit de Noël) to simply daft (Invictus, etc). People who name perfumes grandiosely do not take into account the fact that half-empty bottles of Hero and Goddess will one day gather dust on a bathroom shelf next to some broken silicone grouting.

Likely as the result of some multidimensional optimisation of advertising cost, brand recognition and consumer choice, each name is used for several different concentrations, which also differ in composition, most different in the Her range. This is confusing, not least because the concentration is written in tiny type. It feels a little like a curious throwback to an older time, when EdT, EdP and parfum were always composed independently; see Chanel No. 5 for examples.

For paid subscribers: Her EdT, EdP, EdP Intense and Parfum; Goddess EdP, EdPIntense and Parfum; Hero EdP,Parfum and Parfum Intense.