CK One

Calvin Klein launched CK One in 1994, an Eau de Toilette the house presented as a fragrance for a man or a woman. Alberto Morillas and Harry Frémont, perfumers at Firmenich, composed it; it is considered the first perfume openly sold as unisex to achieve wide success.

A brief for a generation

Harry Frémont recalls that the brief called for a fragrance of youthful rebellion and togetherness, meant for men and women, the first to be done on such a large scale. It had to convey freshness and sensuality at once, two tonalities rarely paired, in a composition both open and provocative.

Alberto Morillas remembers an era of opulent, clearly gendered perfumes, when the idea of a unisex fragrance seemed radical. CK One, he says, didn’t smell like America at all, coming from a perfumer who had spent more than twenty years composing for European houses.

The year of light fragrances

CK One was born in a season of light, less gendered fragrances: L’Eau d’Issey and the first Comme des Garçons perfume also came out in 1994. Ermano Picco links it to the green tea trend that Jean-Claude Ellena started in 1992 for Bulgari.

He also reads in it the response of a generation marked by AIDS, weary of the animalic perfumes of the 1980s and in search of cleanliness, freedom, and tolerance. For him, CK One quietly proclaims that everyone is clean.

Success was immediate: more than five million dollars in sales in ten days, according to Women’s Wear Daily in October 1994, a figure the New York Times repeated in 2019.

A large family

The house extended CK One with CK Be as early as 1996, with summer editions, and with Shock, Gold, Platinum, or Reflections. For the perfume’s thirtieth anniversary, it launched CK One Essence, which it says is twice as concentrated as the original.