Comme des Garçons — Comme des Garcons Play
Essence
Comme des Garcons Play (2007), composed by Aurelien Guichard, is the original fragrance tied to CdG’s Play clothing line, the diffusion range built on a “design by not designing” ethos and Filip Pagowski’s heart-with-eyes logo. It is the great anomaly of an avant-garde house: a citrus-aromatic, marine-tinged fresh scent that critics and wearers alike find conspicuously, almost shockingly, conventional. Its note list promises bitter orange, lime, saffron, sage, sea notes and oakmoss, but the lived experience is dominated by an aquatic wash. The defining fact is that this is the CdG fragrance that disappointed people precisely by being pleasant and mainstream, and it is now discontinued.
Scent Profile
The official pyramid and the on-skin reality diverge sharply, and that gap is the central interpretive issue. On paper it reads as a citrusy sparkle of bitter orange and lime over black pepper and saffron, an aromatic sage-thyme-sea heart, and an oakmoss-musk-patchouli base. In practice, wearers describe a brief citrus opening, often gone in about fifteen minutes, that gives way to a strong marine accord one reviewer called “a powerful olfactory tsunami wave of marine Calone” sitting over a fairly classic masculine fragrance concept.
A vivid recurring report is a strange synthetic, almost electronic or “new plastic” facet in mid-development; one detailed review nails the bitter orange as if “sniffed through a gauze bandage,” then describes a “brand new stereo speaker” plastic quality in the middle. The saffron and oakmoss are largely submerged, and few wearers detect distinct saffron at all.
The drydown is a soft woody musk. Net, the scent is fairly linear after the citrus flash, anchored by marine freshness and clean musk, with citrus, the aquatic accord, and clean musk perceptible while saffron, sage and oakmoss stay in the background as ideas rather than discrete notes.
Performance
Reports are genuinely mixed. Some wearers find it lasts incredibly long, treating that strong longevity as evidence against its supposed forgettability, while others report sillage that stays low and longevity around five hours, or weaker still. CdG fragrances broadly carry a reputation for short wear, and Play sits in the middle of that debate, with results ranging from a few hours to all day depending on skin. Sillage is best described as modest to moderate. It is best treated as a daytime fresh scent where restrained projection is a feature rather than a flaw.
Wearing Context
This is a warm-weather, casual daytime fresh fragrance, exactly the use case its marine-citrus profile dictates and its detractors lament. It works for hot days, errands, the office and easygoing settings where an inoffensive clean scent is the goal, landing in a showered-and-presentable register that wearers compare to clean sheets or fresh soap. It is fully unisex by design, leaning slightly masculine through its aromatic-marine structure. Where it feels wrong is anywhere someone expects the challenging, conceptual CdG signature of incense, woods and oddness; taken on its own terms as a straightforward fresh scent, it does its modest job fine.
Comparisons & DNA
The clearest placement is against the late-90s and 2000s aquatic-aromatic mainstream, the Cool Water and aquatic-fougere lineage, rather than anything avant-garde. Within the house, Play is the deliberate outlier, utterly unlike CdG’s incense Series or the ink-and-aldehyde CdG 2. It is most often confused with the later Play Black (2012) and its Red and Green siblings, but those are a different perfumer, Antoine Maisondieu, and a different concept entirely. No designer clone exists. Its truest comparison is conceptual: it is what happens when an avant-garde house deliberately makes a commercial citrus-marine scent.
Reception
Consensus is “pleasant but disappointing for a CdG,” with the disappointment scaling to brand expectations. The critic Robin set the tone at launch, noting the notes did not sound particularly unusual or playful, and one widely repeated reaction called it shockingly generic given the source, like hotel bed sheets. The sharpest articulation calls it by far the most inconsequential perfume from an otherwise highly regarded house, faulting it for violating CdG’s own anti-mainstream principles. Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez gave the original a not-recommended verdict in Perfumes: The A-Z Guide. Defenders do exist, including wearers with nostalgic attachment to its wood-and-orange character. The polarization runs along two axes: brand-expectation letdown versus standalone pleasantness, and the divisive synthetic plastic mid-note. As a blind buy it is recommended only for someone who specifically wants a clean marine-citrus and can find it cheaply, not as a representative CdG.
Versions & Reformulation
This 2007 Aurelien Guichard composition is the original Play and is distinct from the 2012 Play series flankers, Play Black, Play Red and Play Green, created by Antoine Maisondieu, which are entirely different scents (smoky-spicy, fruity-spicy and green-aromatic respectively). The original Play was an eau de toilette sold in a 100 ml bottle that reused the Odeur 53 flacon shape with the Pagowski heart logo. It has been discontinued, and no reformulation of the original is documented beyond that. The later same-name flankers are separate fragrances, not reformulations.
Acquisition Notes
Now discontinued, the original 2007 Play surfaces on the secondary market and at occasional discount finds, and it originally retailed around $100 for the 100 ml eau de toilette. Decants and samples circulate through sample houses. Because the Play name is shared with the current Maisondieu flankers, the chief acquisition risk is simply buying the wrong fragrance, so it is worth confirming the perfumer, the 2007 year and the citrus-aromatic note set, and being wary of listings that conflate it with Play Black, Red or Green.
Notable Facts & Lore
- Play is named for the CdG Play diffusion clothing line introduced in 2003, built on Rei Kawakubo’s “design is no design” concept.
- Filip Pagowski’s heart-with-two-eyes logo, carried on the line, is one of the most recognizable graphic marks in fashion.
- The fragrance was Guichard’s translation of that easy, basics-driven aesthetic, briefed for approachability rather than provocation.
- Critics found it so un-CdG-like precisely because the brief was conventionality, not the house’s usual oddness.
- Rei Kawakubo is famously not a fragrance fan, a stance the house frames as freeing its perfumes from convention.
- The irony many never forgave is that Play’s conventionality came from a house defined by refusing it.