CK One. One bottle for two.

1994: a bottle that did not divide

In 1994 Calvin Klein launched CK One. It is usually credited to Alberto Morillas and Harry Frémont. What made it a landmark was not its materials. It was its answer to a question: who is this bottle for?

The answer was: anyone. For most of the twentieth century perfume was sold on two shelves, men's and women's. Flowers and powder for women, woods and lavender for men. Those lines were drawn mostly by selling, not by the materials.

Before CK One there were scents worn by both men and women, such as the citrus colognes of the eighteenth century. But CK One was a bottle that a large house openly marketed as a scent for everyone, and it took that idea very far.

In 2017, in the Perfume exhibition at Somerset House in London, CK One closed the introduction of ten pioneering scents of the twentieth century. The venue described it as the original gender neutral scent of Western perfume culture, the one that led the trend for clean scents.

Green tea, citrus, clean musk

CK One is usually described in a few strokes: bergamot and lemon above, green tea in the middle, musk and light woods below. No large flower stands at the centre. No thick sweetness.

Green tea is a telling choice. Tea does not belong to the dressing room. It belongs to the kitchen, the desk, the morning. By putting tea in a bottle of perfume, CK One pulled scent out of the world of evening parties and set it into ordinary life.

Clean musk, the synthetic kind that suggests skin, cloth and soap, forms the base. It is not warm like the animal musks of older bottles. It is more like a room with the window just opened.

The result is light, airy, almost transparent. Some have called it the smell of nothing. But nothing is also a choice.

The flask: a container for a generation

The CK One bottle is frosted glass, flat, with a screw cap, close in shape to a hip flask. It has no soft curves and no crystal stopper. It looks like an everyday object that could go into a backpack.

The container says the same thing as the smell inside: no ceremony, no division. Two people can share one bottle. It can sit on the bathroom shelf of a shared flat.

The 1990s were a time of plain T shirts, jeans and neutral colours. Calvin Klein's clothing was closely tied to that look. CK One is the same aesthetic in smell: ornament removed, the basics kept.

A bottle, then, is also a record of its time. Looking at it, people remember a decade before they even open the cap.

A smell that does not ask who is wearing it

After CK One, scents that did not divide by gender slowly became ordinary. Many smaller houses later dropped the men's and women's shelves altogether. People talked more about materials and less about wearers.

The question CK One raised is still fresh: whom does a smell belong to? If it is made from tea, lemon peel and wood, it belongs to those things, and to the place where someone stands while smelling it.

At the Perfume exhibition at Somerset House, CK One stood at the end of a historical corridor, just before the rooms given to contemporary scents. That position says a lot: it was the end point of an old way of thinking and a door to a new one.

One bottle for two. Or rather, one bottle that does not need to know how many.