This year smells less like teen spirit and more akin to a gentleman’s closet, as a flurry of fashion houses launch male scents this fall, including Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, Bulgari and Aramis.
Most appear intent on capturing a refined and elegant consumer with classic flacons best suited to a valet’s leather trunk. Standing out among this slew of launches is Marc Jacobs’ newest male fragrance Bang. With its crumpled, beaten and bashed metallic bottle, it resembles less of a rollout and more of an object that’s gone 10 rounds with its competitors on the men’s scent shelf — a savvy statement in a jostling marketplace.
Related Articles
“It’s very difficult to combine masculinity and whimsy together,” said Harry Allen, the Manhattan-based designer who conceived Bang’s heavyweight-faced glass bottle with a crumpled center supposedly resembling the feeling of electricity. “The bottle is quirky in its nature, like the Marc Jacobs brand, but the crashed effect of metal is also very real,” he added, referring to its anodized aluminum layers.
You May Also Like
Allen explained how Marc Jacobs, together with Coty Prestige, wanted the bottle to be a statement, but he was challenged by exactly how far to take the design element. “A few years ago, I designed skate stores for the brand Supreme, and I discovered most guys are actually design-phobic. It’s a delicate balance. I thought to myself, Would this guy pick up the Bang bottle?”
Allen’s modern résumé spans the disciplines of industrial, furniture, product and interior design, summing up the very definition of a contemporary career.
“A lot of my work is very borderline, it treads a fine line between tacky and high design,” he said from his New York studio, Harry Allen Design. His ceramic foam lamps are in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, and he’s designed packaging for Dom Pèrignon — and interiors for the skate brand Supreme, along with offices for the Guggenheim museum and visual display design for the Estée Lauder Cos. Inc. brands.
Akin to a so-called effortless sartorial look, the work involved in creating Bang’s artfully distressed bottle wasn’t straightforward. Jake McCabe, creative director for Marc Jacobs fragrances, explained gluing the metal plaques was the testing part of the process.
“One of the challenges of this bottle was to find the right glass color — not too dark, not too light — to avoid issues with the UV glue,” said McCabe. “Marc wanted to have some light peeking through, and technically we wanted to avoid showing the glue adhering the plaques to the glass.”
In somewhat of an ironic twist, the finished product resembles a Frank Gehry building, with its unfinished, almost crude design — although this wasn’t Allen’s intention. “If you strike a chord, all of a sudden you have a reinforcement of a good design.”