Who: Hanover Booth and Jessie Willner, are two of the three co-founders of Discothèque, a luxury home fragrance brand based out of London, and The Mighty Company, a jacket brand based in LA. We met them both recently at the launch of their cool new candle range, based on the hippest dance clubs from around the globe. And in case you were wondering, we’re talking olfactory atmosphere and musical imagination rather than real life sticky floors and grubby corners.
Today we are burning Crisco Disco by Discothèque. It has some duality as it’s playful but decadent and it is made to be very light and exhilarating, which makes it hard to stop burning. We describe it as whipped cream foam, a suede jacket, the scent of cedar, blood orange, the lyrics to burn-baby-burn as your heart floats in a fluffy vanilla sky, the night you fall in love in the Meatpacking District. That sums up how it makes you feel perfectly.
We always have a mixture of Discothèque candles burning, because we’re always testing out various combinations and what matches our moods. Our personal favourites are probably Crisco Disco, Paradise Garage and Milk! So we have those lit every day at some point. We like to layer some of our favourite perfumes before going out, and usually don’t apply them when working. We travel together a lot so are always borrowing and trying out the other’s perfumes. Sometimes we’ll rub some of our candles’ wax between our wrists (don’t try that at home), so we can wear our own scents out. But we are developing fine fragrance for Discothèque, so hopefully we won’t have to resort to that forever.
Fragrance is something that can make you feel completely different than you did a second ago, which is rare in the world and fragrance is one of those things. So is listening to the right song at the right time. So is walking into a room filled with indescribable energy. By creating Discothèque, we wanted to combine some of these things together.
Fragrance can transform a space, imbuing it with warmth, character and a touch of the sublime. It becomes an intangible element of comfort and serenity, a testament to the power of scent to shape our perception of place and invoke a sense of belonging.
The combination of candles and clubs came from our love of the energy on a dance floor and the evocative power of the senses. Scent possesses an astonishing ability to transport us instantly, to profound love, devastating heartbreak, or the hazy corners of a long-forgotten moment. Our shared and intense passion for a dance-filled night has always played a significant role in our friendship. We’ve worked together for years and as a result travelled the world together, falling in love with each new city by falling in love with its DJs and dance floors. During lockdown, as we quarantined together, we sought to recreate the experience at home. With music blaring from our speakers, we set the stage for a living-room disco. The perfect combination? A song resonating amidst the flicker of candlelight.
When we set out to capture the essence of iconic clubs around the world, we knew there would be a fair bit of imagination involved, lest the outcome smell solely of cigarettes and booze! So we thought of how the each club made those who were there feel, a combination of the atmosphere, music and sensations associated with it. Our collaboration with talented perfumers brought these concepts to life, who then formulated scents made up of notes that have been known to evoke similar moods or sensations… with some creative liberties, of course.
The one we both love would probably be the aforementioned Crisco Disco. The two of us have very different taste and noses, actually — and it’s the one we agree completely on.
We absolutely used fragrance to help our wellbeing during Covid. It seemed that was a very universal sentiment, you saw so many people finding solace in anything that made them a bit happier in the confines of their home. Home fragrance was one of those things for us, combined with lots of kitchen-dancing to music playing much too loudly.
