I wore only three things in 1994: Timberland hiking boots, a Betsey Johnson sundress suitable for Lolita, and a plaid flannel. It made sense in 1994, trust me. As far as I was concerned, I had found the look I’d keep for the rest of my life. You don’t tell a girl who just tweezed off 90 percent of her eyebrows that trends will eventually pass.
I was in college then, and I didn’t wear perfume. The way I saw it, the only thing missing from my identity was a signature scent. But which one? I wasn’t an Eau de Toilette No. Whatever person. I needed a fragrance that could throw shade and maybe a touch of irony on all the wispy florals in my closet. Something that told the world I drove a stick shift (I could), possibly had an arrest record (I did), and knew how to change the oil (yeah … no).
One afternoon between classes my friend Madrelle and I went to the only mall in Durham, North Carolina. That was the first time I saw it: Calvin Klein Escape for Men was taller than the other bottles, a frosted-glass cylinder with a thick silver top. And it was as heavy as it looked. This was not a fragrance for the meek. This was a perfume that wore hiking boots with a dress. If you can be transgressive in the fragrance department of Saks Fifth Avenue, I was transgressive, dammit.
Before I even smelled it, I was committed. But after I smelled it, too. It was eucalyptus and sage but also something darker. It embodied the era of Pulp Fiction, Nirvana, brown lipstick, and grungy coffee shops. From that day forward, I didn’t go anywhere without Escape. I Escaped my skin, my hair, my clothes, my books, any surface within reach. I wanted to make it part of my identity, and I succeeded. Or failed, depending on how you look at it.
Calvin Klein Escape for Men entered the world in 1993, a combination of melon, mango, eucalyptus, grapefruit, bergamot, rosemary, sage, vetiver, amber, and blablabla. If you can perform fragrance-note arithmetic in your head, bravo. For the rest of us, Calvin Klein Escape for Men was crisp and musky at the same time. It was vaguely metallic. It was just the right amount of wrong.
Escape for Men was the successor to Calvin Klein Escape (presumably for women but never specified). The ad for the 1991 original showed two people making out on a deserted beach next to, curiously, a single water ski. If you’re stuck on the idea that two people can’t arrive at a deserted beach on a single water ski, let me say, a) they were very thin, and b) that’s beside the point. With Escape in your hand, you’re one rocky shoreline and full-body wax away from ecstasy.
The 1993 Escape for Men ad did away with water sports and captured two attractive people in the breathless moment before they kiss. A little flatline, but that didn’t stop me.
In 1994, I was a one-woman, one-cologne bull market. Perhaps inevitably, I set myself up for an intervention. Escape was my escape, sure, but I hadn’t considered that while it was all over my clothes and books, it had drifted into my friends’ lives. It was in their cars and on their sweatshirts like an unwelcome houseguest. Escape for them was imprisonment.
Maybe its blatancy was the point. I was 20 years old—not the age for subtlety or tastefulness. This was the time for me to grab an identity and double down on it. To live out the fantasy of what kind of woman I thought I was going to be.
At the intervention, my friends complained that my Escape wasn’t exactly theirs. “Your perfume is stressing us out,” Madrelle told me.
Eventually, I toned it down, then gave up the fragrance that I had committed to for the rest of my life. Sometimes I miss that girl, the one who felt so sure of who she was that she was willing to impose it on everyone in her path. It was sad to say good-bye to her. To smell that fragrance now is to spend a micro-second in my misspent youth. And for all her follies, I loved being that person. Even if it was just an escape.
Danielle Pergament is a Los Angeles–based writer. Formerly the editor at Goop, she frequently contributes to The New York Times
