In Love With You

Giorgio Armani opened his own house in Milan in 1975 on a single idea: take the structure out of tailoring and let the cloth move. Emporio Armani, launched in 1981, was the younger, faster line, and its fragrances have always been allowed a little more mischief than the main label. In Love With You, released in 2019, sits in the Emporio range that also produced Stronger With You, and it is unmistakably a product of the late-2010s cherry boom, when sour red fruit and patchouli became the defining pairing of mainstream women's perfumery.

The opening is tart rather than sweet. Raspberry and blackcurrant sharpen a sour cherry that lands closer to morello than maraschino, with a faintly medicinal, almond-adjacent bite behind it. Rose and jasmine follow, but they are not the point; the interesting move is wormwood, a bitter green herb that cuts across the fruit and stops the whole thing collapsing into syrup. Underneath, patchouli does the heavy lifting, dark and slightly earthy, giving the composition a woody spine that lasts long after the cherry has gone. Armani does not credit a perfumer publicly, so it is best treated as an unattributed house composition rather than guessed at.

Evenings suit it, and so does cold air. Warmth pushes the fruit forward and it can turn cloying by mid-afternoon, whereas a Free State winter night gives it room to sit close and smell expensive. It reads romantic and slightly theatrical, which is the whole design brief given the heart-shaped bottle.

Two things to be straight about. First, performance is good rather than remarkable: six to eight hours on most skin with moderate projection for the first two, then a patchouli-musk skin scent. Second, and more importantly, availability has narrowed considerably. Armani's own beauty sites no longer carry a live product page for In Love With You in most territories, and it appears to have been quietly retired from the active line-up in favour of newer Emporio releases. Stock in the wider market is largely existing inventory, so if you have worn it before and want it again, buy accordingly and check batch freshness. As a fragrance it has aged well; as a purchase it now requires a little more care than it once did.