There’s just nothing sadder than old people trying to pretend they’re still young and hep. Or def, or whatever slang you crazy youngsters are using nowadays. Back in the Nineties, Calvin Klein had the precious, indefinable aura of brand hipness, but these days it’s coming across like the corporate equivalent of an aging MILF who wants to hang out and party with her teenage kids. After several years of lean profits, the company is trying to recapture the grunge-era marketing success of CK One, that unisex scent with the surly monochrome ads, with some new smelly stuff called in2u, aimed squarely at a probably nonexistent market sector the Klein people are calling “technosexuals.”

Believe it or not, Calvin Klein has actually copyrighted this word, which supposedly describes physically bold. even slutty people who limit their emotional involvement to online media. Here’s a sample line from the proposed campaign: “She likes how he blogs, her texts turn him on. It’s intense. For right now.” The notion of marketing perfume to hygienically challenged people with no social lives seems a little…. I don’t know, outside the box. But the sales of celebrity scents are dropping like their sponsors’ panties, and the Calvin Klein people have such high hopes for this stuff that starting next month they’ll be shipping 2 million units to retail outlets that cater to gullible shut-ins. It’s possible a few whiffs of in2u might even waft through the virtual spaces of this blog. If that’s the case, then this fragrance had better reek of cupcake accords.

(Via ONTD, just so we don’t have to give the NYT a direct link.)