Launched in 1993 under the designer’s name before becoming Classique, Jean Paul Gaultier’s first fragrance is signed by Jacques Cavallier. The house classifies it as an amber floral: ginger at the top, orange blossom for the heart, vanilla in the base, over an evocation of rice powder. Its bottle, a glass bust laced into a corset, made its legend.
Robin (Now Smell This, 2007) praises a well-made powdery floral oriental, too sweet for her taste; Elena Vosnaki (Perfume Shrine, 2012) dissects it with interest but finds it too loud and too sweet.
Olfastory’s review
Now Smell This: tamer than its packaging
Robin, in April 2007, finds the juice less outlandish than the bottle and the advertising, as Gaultier had hinted. She senses a hyper-feminine, very synthetic character, true to the designer’s aesthetic, but nothing daring: a perfectly wearable fragrance.
She describes flowers and gourmand notes in a soft, enveloping mix, with a generous dose of ambery vanilla musk and a powdery veil over everything. A trace of nail polish remover, felt mostly at the start, makes things more interesting without turning it into something obscure or difficult to sell.
It is not a style she likes, since she already finds the Eau de Toilette too powdery and too sweet, but she considers it well crafted and admires its clever marketing. Now Smell This lists it among the 100 fragrances every perfume lover should try.
Perfume Shrine: too much of everything
Elena Vosnaki, in June 2012, devotes a long analysis to Classique while admitting she cannot wear it. She finds a floral oriental that is intensely sweet and powdery, yet handles the image of femininity with more subtlety than one might expect.
In her view, Cavallier quotes Chanel No. 5 in his formula while slipping in modern elements, which made it a commercial hit of its day. Intense and almost cloyingly fruity as it is, Classique is spared the heavyweight reputation once attached to Poison or Obsession.
She compares it with Trésor, Sophia Grojsman’s peachy rose for Lancôme: where Trésor stays reserved thanks to its structure, Classique, with its girlish rose, shows too much for her taste. She finds it too loud, too sweet and too intrusive.