Have you ever wanted to just bottle up all of the best parts of a great club night? Leaving the combined smell of smoke and sweat and the memories of outrageously long bathroom lines behind, and only taking what truly resonates: the feeling of complete and utter freedom, the unexpected friends you made along the way, and how connected you felt to the moment and disconnected you felt from your phone? Well, there's a fragrance brand for that. Discothèque Fragrances is the passion project collaboration between LA bred besties, Jessie Willner and Hanover Booth, who share a love for the dance floor and the feelings that come along with it. With a fascination about and appreciation for the club culture of the '70s, '80s, and '90s when human connection was the main form of entertainment and doomscrolling TikTok wasn't an option, each Discothèque fragrance aims to transport you to a specific club, specific night, and specific moment through the power of scent. "I think that's the point of Discothèque: all the highs of your life captured," Willner tells us.
A lot of this brand is based off of gut feelings. Willner and Booth describe Discothèque as their "passion project taken too far" and they don't always have an aha! moment when smelling a fragrance that's ready for the market. They often have friends wear fragrances on a night out to see how the scents make them feel, ask for second, third, and fourth opinions and then, ultimately, just have to trust themselves.
Jessie Willner
On their website, each fragrance has a little story that goes along with it—a contextualization of the bottled moment with details about what the sky looked like and what the air felt like, for example—complete with a year and city: 1979 Paris, 1986 Los Angeles, 1989 Ibiza, 1995 Mykonos, 2000 Tokyo, and more. Sometimes the fragrances are inspired by a more specific microscopic moment: "Sometimes we take a moment, like when you catch eyes with a stranger and you guys both feel this electricity between you," Booth shared. And the bottles and packaging are a continuation of the storytelling: tops that look like disco balls and the packing of their 2ml samples resembling condom wrappers. Working with five different perfumers, each fragrance is distinct but with a consistent, Discothèque throughline: it will transport you.
How did you decide on the name Discothèque and what does it mean to you?
JW: "We felt like it was kind of the only word that could sum up everything. We wanted to communicate with Discothèque in one second because it just also kind of brings you to the time that we were trying to evoke when clubs were something else and you had to live in the moment and you couldn't endlessly doom scroll and you had to experience things as you were experiencing them. [The word discothèque] kind of just gives you all of that in a split second. It is very time boxed. You don't think of a club how it is now. You think of a time where self-expression was a location where that was rampant and celebrated and just there's so much vibrancy to it."
HB: "Also, Jessie and I, we definitely have a love for the dance floor, and that's been a big part of our friendship and our lives. And so it's always kind of just something we've been known for is just hitting the dance floor and just creating those incredible moments and those great nights on the dance floor where you just kind of meet your new best friend for life or have some conversation that sticks with you forever or something on a night like that."
What made both of you want to start a fragrance brand? How did that conversation start?
JW: "We kind of felt like the whole inspiration for Discothèque is the best memories of your life or the best moments of your life. And fragrance is obviously so evocative and so is music. We were trying to tie memory to a sense. There's no other senses that really do that the same way, at least for us. When you smell something, you're right back in a moment. If someone says something that reminds you of something, you're like, 'cool, yeah, I remember that.' But it can actually transport you when you smell something. And the same with a song that you can hear one part, the chorus of one song and you're just there. Hanover and I are best friends and we've just had so many of those moments together as a shared experience. We liked the idea of something that could take you right back to those moments if you wanted to just stash them away. We thought it could also work both ways: scents that also inspire you to make those memories and feel like this version of yourself that you love. Everyone always asked why? "
HB: "And how do those two things link? But it actually makes the most sense to me. It makes more sense than anything else in the world."
JW: "We're like It's so obvious, club culture and fragrance, and everyone asks, 'so does it just smell like sticky floors and booze?' Fragrance is just so imaginative. You're trying to capture feelings. You're not trying to just literally translate things. That's not what fragrance creation is."
Jessie Willner
What is it about the '70s, '80s, and '90s that's so inspiring to you?
HB: "It was such an incredible time for club culture and nights out. You couldn't just endlessly doom scroll. If you needed to see the latest fashion or the latest DJ that was playing, you had to go to experience it. And it's such a sensory experience, it's such a physical, real life thing. There's pictures from the eighties of the most iconic celebrity, but mixed with a misfit or just anyone. We always say it's the great equalizer, the dance floor, because it doesn't really matter who you are if you're on the dance floor, you are just all this one connected part of something. And we feel like that era kind of encapsulates that better than probably our modern day."
JW: "There was just such an urgency to live life completely, and I think every night felt significant. You couldn't just view it through someone else's lens in the same way that you can now. You had to just remember it and push it to its limit. And I think there's just something obviously so amazing about just completely living in a moment that I don't even think we fully understand in this world anymore."
What about those eras are we missing today?
JW: "There's a lack of connectedness that we feel in the world now. Back then, a life-changing conversation could happen in the smoking section or just with a stranger on the street because that was your entertainment. To engage with other human beings was entertainment as it should naturally be. And I think that we get so much of that in our brains from our phones and other things that we have just kind of put that aside in our real lives. That's the biggest difference for us that we're always trying to access or recreate."
HB: "Even the way fashion and music and the world was consumed was so different than the consumption these days which is from your phone. You're not viewing a piece of art the way it was intended to be viewed. First you see it on this tiny little screen and then you maybe see it in its proper medium."
JW: "I think there was a collective energy of that where people were feeding off of each other and inspiring each other more."
Jessie Willner
When creating new fragrances, what comes first: the concept, the place, or the smell?
JW: "It's usually the concept of the club, but sometimes we'll smell something that takes us in a totally different direction and we'll shelve the original concept. It almost always starts with the concept or the club and the time period and just the idea of it or general direction of it, I would say. So then the scent is the bulk of everything, and then at the very end is when we name it, we don't feel like we can name it until it's done."
HB: "When we first started the brand, we interviewed a lot of our friends that actually went to these clubs and got the best stories and heard from them about what they wore, looked at their pictures, and thought the feeling they felt. And that did help inspire which direction we would go, where we would start with clubs."
Would you describe perfumery as a creative practice?
JW: "Oh my god, yeah. When you start to talk to perfumers, you realize that they're just the most brilliant people. I'm always like, 'how do you do what you do and translate everything that we're talking about into scent?' I think anything that's subjective is a creative practice."
HB: "It's like painting on a blank canvas with the different color combinations. When you work with perfumers, it is such an art for them because two scents together can completely change a fragrance. It's such a mastered skill and art to be able to come up with formulas that will create that we've asked for or what we imagine and be able to interpret that, but also just to make something smell incredible by combining all these different elements."
Jessie Willner
Jessie Willner
What does the collaboration process with perfumers look like? How much information is in the brief you send them?
JW: "It depends on how fleshed out a project is. Sometimes it's really intense and a lot of history. And sometimes it's mostly imagery, the year, and the club. Sometimes we share the stories that we're really trying to evoke and what inspired us or what makes us obsessed with a club."
HB: "We also help direct it. It's very story-driven. Our bestseller is 'Lola At Coatcheck' and the story is about this imaginary character who takes her coat and she slips a little bit of white chocolate into your coat before she gives it back. And she's in New York in the nineties and she's down a dark alleyway and you just kind of like, I don't know, it's just like you set this scene and then you smell it and you're like, whoa, that is exactly what this smells like."
Jessie Willner
What is coming up for Discothèque?
HB: "We have two new fragrances coming out, which is really exciting. One of them will be available on all of our retailers, and then one of them will be just on our own website and in Selfridges. One is called 'Eye Contact' and one is called 'Body Heat'. They both are from a very similar family I would say. They work really well together and separately. 'Eye Contact; is actually inspired by a nightclub here in London that still exists today."
JW: "Body Heat is a little bit of a hybrid because it's inspired by The Box, but it's also inspired by Taboo Club which no longer exists here today."
HB: "It's scent feels to me feel very clean. It's very different than any of our other scents."
