Pharrell's Louis Vuitton LVERS Fragrance and Camo Trunk.

 

From Louis Vuitton's creative director, Pharrell, comes an entirely original fragrance called LVERS.  

Made with Jacques Cavallier-Belletrud, it is a unisex fragrance, which press-releases say contains cedar, sandalwood, gum resin, ginger and bergamot.  All packaged in either a blocky camo print trunk triple set, or tube, with the tube coming in at £300, and the trunk expected to be £4,800.

We are not particularly interested in the dull simplistic, heteronormative concept of colour coding.  The classic and eternally cliched "blue is for boys and pink is for girls".  However, that being said, it is extremely difficult to conceive how on packaging alone this can be considered as coded in any way other than for a masculine audience.  Never mind the fragrance itself.

We have a chunky, pixel art print, with pixel art coming from video games, and these being historically considered (wrongly) a male pursuit.  Which is in camo, a design inspired by field military clothing for soldiers.  With soldiers having been solely males for the majority of human history.  Along with a combination of base notes usually seen in scents marketed towards the male consumer market as a summer perfume, of bergamot, cedar and sandalwood (Creed Aventus anyone?)

None of this really matters. This is a consumer product, and it's all just marketing.  Anyone who likes the smell of any fragrance regardless of gender or primary sex characteristics can use any they wish.  It is though, rather odd, to see such classically "male" semiotics marketed as "unisex".