Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, April 15, 1994                   TAG: 9404200006
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JAMES WARREN CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THIS IS A $4 BILLION FIGHT THAT MAKES PERFECTLY GOOD SCENTS

The revamped, and somewhat improved, fixture of fashion, health and solicitous celebrity profiles takes a look at a $4 billion business in ``Future Scent: Sex and $ and Rock 'N' Roll and Everything Else It Takes to Launch a Megascent in 1994.''

Well, whether you wanted to know or not, be apprised that there are about 600 brands to choose from and about 50 scents to be launched this year by an industry that, like many others, is now dominated by a handful of big guys who've wiped out many little guys. In this case, it's really three giant firms, Unilever (which owns Calvin Klein Cosmetics and Elizabeth Arden, among others), Cosmair (Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren and Lancome), and Estee Lauder.

Reporter Annemarie Iverson informs us that just one fragrance in 10 survives past a fifth year and that at least $20 million ``in seed money'' is needed to start a new one and, ``to support it, $1 or $1.50 on every dollar made the first year.''

To succeed, says one supposed expert, one must be ``optimistic, and relevant to the American lifestyle.'' Ralph Lauren's Polo Sport men's fragrance is cited as the epitome of such values, with stars-and-stripes logo on ``athletic-inspired packaging.'' It has even gained lots of female buyers, with what Saks Fifth Avenue President Rose Marie Bravo terms its ``very '90s'' male-female aura.

Interestingly, our celebrity-obsessed culture does not translate into easy success for real celebrities - or at least non-design-world celebrities - who enter the fragrance field. Elizabeth Taylor is an exception.

But that isn't deterring Madonna, who apparently has given her name to a scent now in the planning stage at a Unilever division. Do fans of Madonna actually wear perfume? One unidentified fragrance executive declares that this ``has a slightly better chance to succeed than a Michael Jackson scent.''

The industry Establishment claims the scent is the thing. The name, the promotion, are secondary. Maybe.

The same article relates the tale of rising design world star Jean-Paul Gaultier whose new fragrance was a smash in France, thanks largely to its package: The bottle is a ``curvaceous woman in a corset who sits in an aluminum soup can. It is modern and genius and amusing.''

Hey, maybe Madonna will copy the idea, adding only a gizmo that shouts a four-letter word after you open the top. The world's first talking fragrance.

\ Quickly: April 18 New Yorker's long profile of Chicago's mass killer John Wayne Gacy, scheduled to be executed next month, is a study in Gacy's banality, unrelenting self-deception and comical feelings of victimization (the poor baby feels wounded because ``the press has portrayed him as a monster''). It's also a curiously self-absorbed effort by reporter Alec Wilkinson who, among other matters, feels compelled to tell us about his dreams prior to spending much time with the killer of 33 boys, and how, once he'd met him, ``I realized I was nothing like him, and my fears subsided.'' His magazine colleagues can breathe a sigh of relief.