The Ed Hardy brand is a phenomenon that is, in the context of today’s pop culture, instinctively logical: Here is Hardy, an artist who works in one of the stranger art forms — tattoos, quite elaborate — and on perhaps the strangest of all art media — human skin, still alive, thank you very much — and were you to acquire one of his works of art, you could virtually guarantee a marvelous explosion from your parents. Thus the explosion of the brand. (When I was in Mexico City a few months ago, you couldn’t throw a Dos Equis without hitting a massive Ed Hardy billboard.) On the other hand, were your parents familiar with the depth of Hardy’s artistry, they might applaud your investment acumen.

Hardy’s tattoo apprenticeship was apparently carried out while earning a San Francisco Art Institute B.F.A. in printmaking. He studied traditional Japanese tattoo art in Japan, and his strange work became strangely beautiful and substantive. He has with his wife written, edited and published numerous books on alternative art while curating gallery and nonprofit exhibitions, and is a frequent museum and university lecturer. Hardy mentors younger tattoo artists, though he is reputed to have now turned his focus to printmaking, drawing and painting. So you probably couldn’t get a real Hardy tattoo even if you wanted one. Still, he created real art.

Enter fashion. The flamboyantly French and ardently litigious fashion designer Christian Audigier acquired the rights to commercialize Hardy’s art by plastering it on everything from hoodies to ball caps to leather jackets, and the bottom of the official Web shop of Audigier’s Hardy-exploitation wear has a list of registered trademarks as long as your arm. You can’t get a Hardy tattoo, but you can buy the T-shirt. More axiomatic still are the perfumes. Oh, but you saw that coming a mile away. Audigier has creative-directed two pairs — a feminine and a masculine each — and one wonders if Hardy smelled them before they left the factory. I realize these things are critic-proof (Macy’s can’t keep them on the shelves), but here we go.

Take Audigier’s most recent launches, in December of 2008: Love & Luck for Women and Love & Luck for Men. For the feminine, Adriana Medina has created a very nice copy of Olivier Cresp’s Light Blue (the feminine) for Dolce & Gabbana, simply lowering the volume almost to zero on the green apple (which is what makes Light Blue so good) and substituting a very light, rather diaphanous spice. It’s a nice scent, not a full-fledged perfume as much as a well-executed initial sketch, but this works perfectly for Hardy’s demographic: mass-market teenagers. It precisely gives the perception of wearing scent without actually wearing much. It’s also the best of the four. (It has decent persistence on skin; on the other hand, it diffuses like lead.)

Love & Luck for Men, by Olivier Gillotin, is equally perfect: the masculine cliché of deodorant soap, aluminum and synthetic spice. Mennen Speed Stick on 17-year-old. Commercially savvy and of no interest at all. Good persistence, sadly.

Ed Hardy for Men, the original masculine that debuted 11 months prior, is Gillotin doing another version of the masculine cliché: subtract some of the aluminum et voilà. That leaves its mate, the original Ed Hardy for Women.

Which is fake strawberry. Like, the stuff used in Jolly Ranchers. This isn’t even a realist school of perfumery because it’s not perfumery at all. Perfumers and flavorists share many raw materials (a lot of the things in your Diors and Laurens are food grade), and what Audigier has bottled, you can find in the cake mix aisle at D’Agostino. I say Audigier advisedly. Technically, this sugary elixir is attributed to a perfumer, Caroline Sabas. To say that her prodigious talents are wasted here is to misunderstand entirely the marketing premise. Obviously Audigier wanted fake strawberry, and that’s what Sabas gave him. (It’s nice as far as fake strawberry goes, incidentally — probably Sabas’s contribution.) And if you’re wearing your awesome Ed Hardy T-shirt, size small, you’ll probably buy a bottle because the packaging design matches. But it’s not good. Not strangely beautiful. And not substantive.

Ed Hardy for Women by Christian Audigier | Ed Hardy by Christian Audigier
(One star; Inoffensive) | $75 for 100 ml; available at macys.com.

Tags: Christian Audiger, Ed Hardy, Scent Notes

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