In the year of our Lord 2025, Barneys has long departed, The 21 Club has yet to reopen and Brooks Brothers—the real Brooks Brothers—is also shuttered. There’s more: Paul Smith on 16th Street, The Oak Room and Louis Boston. Gone. Gone. Gone. These pillars of classic sensibility and a certain masculine taste are no more. Instead we have Suitsupply and UNTUCKit, where they care as much about tailoring as they do for punctuation.
One sign of the old guard remains: The bottles in the men’s room of any clubhouse you walk into. You know the ones: Limes, Bay Rum, Witch-Hazel (I’ve never known exactly what that is). Maybe there’s some Old Spice, if you’re lucky. Right Guard, if you’re not. You’re not messing around when you dab your neck with a little Clubman Pinaud. Meanwhile, Royall promises to convey “the message of Bermuda overseas”—as if the fragrance was a diplomat.
This cologne and aftershave exists outside of time, like an old bottle of Scotch at a summer house, standing there as long as anybody can remember. They seem to have been acquired in bulk during the Eisenhower administration. There’s something to be said for splashing alcohol on your face out of a bottle whose label hasn’t changed in decades.
Why do we like these bottles? Is it some enduring sense of familiarity? Are we predisposed to sandalwood or lime? Does it remind us of our father? Did he like it because it reminded him of his father? Or maybe we only like these scents in a certain place—like drinking bad beer in a dive bar.
In public men have, for the most part, performed a sensory pivot. Some of these decisions have been regrettable. Drakkar Noir in the 1980s, Eternity in the 90s. Eau Sauvage was in there somewhere (pretty good, as it happens), and Polo in the green bottle, which is bracingly piney. I wrote about wayward cologne chronicles of teenage years, when we pair our first disposable income with too much time in malls. The results are dangerous spray bottles that may still be lurking in our parent’s home.
When I moved to New York there was a Kiehl’s store on Third Avenue. I was scandalized when they changed the label and added a dash of a faux yellow highlighter across an otherwise austere label. That, alas, was a sign of things to come. And Kiehl’s, of course, was bought by an international conglomerate, though I’m still surprised to see them in airports around the world.
These days, if you buy cologne your girlfriend may be inclined to borrow it—unisex fragrance is the rule not the exception. This will be a subtle but expensive scent named for a Moroccan village known for spiritual pilates and, if things go well, an Aman opening in 2027. I’m not complaining, I enjoy Aesop (and Aman, for that matter), but I also enjoy passing the windows of London barbers that haven’t changed for a hundred years. Geo. Trumper, Taylor of Bond Street, Truefitt & Hill all sell some version of limes. They’re trying but not trying too hard—like a side dish at a steakhouse. The intention is there and the execution just has to be good enough.