Meet the party girls behind Discothèque, the fragrance brand unlocking your most sanguine self

When I ask the founders of Discothèque how they met, Hanover, one half of the LA-born duo, jokes: “On the dancefloor.” While that might be an idyllic re-writing of history — the perfect meet-cute for two women running a scent brand based around nightlife — that’s actually the truth for myself and Hanover. Our first encounter was at a party, right next to the DJ booth, glasses of champagne in hand. An apt first rendez-vous if I’ve ever heard of one. When the glamorous stranger and I asked each other what we do for work, Hanover revealed that she is, in fact, the co-founder of the perfume and candle brand, Discothèque. I let out some sort of embarrassing squeal. “I’m obsessed with Discothèque,” I told her. That feeling quickly transferred to Hanover and fellow founder Jessie Willner. A sublime, rare combination of effortlessly cool and unimaginably kind, Hanover and Jessie are the ultimate party girls — not just because of their own joie de vivre, but because they know exactly how to diffuse the same energy around a room. And, more importantly, bottle it.

If you can imagine two women who go about life finding the most fun parties and skipping the hangxiety the next day, that is Hanover and Jessie. However, the best thing about the pair — for myself, at least — is that they’re veritably funny. The first time I met Jessie, she told me, between sips of her olive-garnished martini and fits of laughter, about a game she and Hanover play on a night out: dare or dare. The founders made an effortless double act as they recounted one particular night — a snowstorm, a quiet, small-town club and two women determined to have a good time despite all odds. Finishing each other’s sentences, excitedly adding titbits and forgotten details, they recalled how Jessie’s ‘dare’ (a dance off with an unassuming but unexpectedly keen gentleman) resulted in a failed attempt of the Dirty Dancing lift. Jessie realised she wasn’t going to be caught, attempted to jump over her now-crouching opponent for an impromptu finale and… smack. Pelvis to skull collision. The man was knocked to the floor. The encircling crowd gasped. Then, cheers and whooping flooded in as Jessie was crowned the winner with a move newly coined as the ‘VKO’ (you can figure that one out for yourselves). 

Hanover and Jessie’s brand is just as fun, though a little (read: a lot) sexier, than that particular anecdote. Often dubbed as ‘the ultimate party girl’ fragrance brand, Discothèque’s USP is making things, in Jessie’s words, “only we can get away with”. A discovery set that looks like a cigarette case? Check. Handbag scents easily mistakeable for condoms? Check. Campaign imagery that you could get you fired for viewing on your work computer? Also, check. And the brand’s newest fragrances match up. Body Heat and [Eye Contact] (square brackets included) are, as with all Discothèque products, inspired by a club-centric place, thing or feeling.

“There’s this amazing thing: the dance floor.”

Here, the latter applies. Body Heat, with select notes of suede, dark chocolate, oud and coffee, evokes sweat-dripping bodies, flushed skin and bitten, espresso-flavoured lips. Just as visceral is [Eye Contact]. With (pink and black) pepper, leather and musk, it’s the olfactory equivalent of eye fucking. Imagined to be worn in secret rooms with peepholes and masks, it carries the seductive powers of “a bull to red silk”. My advice? Do not: wear these scents to the office lest you feel the sudden urge to quit your job and start a new, bohemian life. Do: wear a Dicothèque perfume when you’re in the mood for fun. I guarantee it will find you just as easily as two pairs of wanton lips in a dark, sweaty room.

Han! Jessie! How did you guys actually first meet? 

Jessie Willner: We were friends of friends and then became best friends, and then started working together. 

Hanover Booth: We instantly knew we were kindred spirits. And my mom dated her dad when they were in their early twenties.

JW: We could have been sisters.

HB: We are sisters. 

Then how did you come to start Discothèque?

HB: We started coming to London for [our fashion label] The Mighty Company, and we were very inspired by this city and life here. We had this passion for fragrance and wanted to start another brand together. You’ve heard from the stories, we love disco — some of our favourite memories are nights out. There’s this amazing thing: the dance floor. We referenced it on our website as ‘the great equaliser’ because you can be anyone on the dance floor, it doesn’t matter who. The most iconic person or a misfit or people like us, whoever, you’re all the same on the dance floor. 

So, that’s one element of it, but then there’s the aspect of wanting to recreate some of the best nights of our lives with fragrance. Only music and fragrance can really do that to you — where you’re transported back. The clubs [that inspire the scents] are all before our time, but it’s that idea.

JW: I started The Mighty Company when I was twenty-four and a year later, Han came on as COO. Then we travelled all around the world for random things and that was what really inspired Discothèque. There was something about our friendship and those environments that just thrived — an understanding between us that no one else could really get. It was always a one-thing-led-to-another type of night and we had the greatest time of our lives with each other. So we thought, How could we capture this feeling? There’s so many incredible forms of art, and some of them are really evocative, but you can’t quite revisit things the same way as with smell. 

So we hope when you wear Discothèque it makes you feel like, I’m actually going to make tonight the best night of my life. It can work in two directions: to inspire the best nights, and to re-live them. 

Before you brought the fragrances out, you started with the candles, right?

JW: While we were making the fragrances, we launched the candles because the fragrances took us a really long time. Fragrance was always the main vision.

HB: It does take a lot longer to develop fragrance than candles, but also, we were really specific about the first seven fragrances and how we wanted those to be. So we were like, Let’s launch the brand, let’s build a fan base, let’s get this idea out into the world that’s merging scent and discothèque and the seventies and eighties, and create this whole brand and world around that. So that by the time we launched fragrance, I felt like, Oh, that makes sense in this world.

When we first launched the candles, it was so nice to bring the discothèque home with you and not make a candle meant for chilling. This is for when you’re having people over. This is for having a good time. This is meant to represent nightlife and music, and take that into your home. 

JW: First, it was bringing the club home with you, then it was taking it everywhere with you. The fragrance was an evolution.

Your candles are the only ones I burn when I’m getting ready to go out.

JW: Everything we do, we try to make it like that feeling — things that inspire you to feel excited, or like something’s about to happen. Obviously, part of it is in the concept, but a lot of it is also in the formulation. That’s why the perfumes took so long — because we worked with five different perfumers on the collection to make the original seven scents as different from one another as the actual clubs they were inspired by were.

Our perfumers have said sometimes a brand will be like, Okay, take this fragrance, copy and paste it but make it a little bit different. But they’re like, You guys always start from a feeling or an idea or a story about two people that had this incredible moment. So it’s a very back-and-forth process, and sometimes you smell it and sometimes one iteration isn’t capturing it, and then you smell the next and you’re like, This is it.

What are your favourite Discothèque perfumes and candles?

HB: There’s this combo that I’ve been doing for, well, we just had our year anniversary. Call For A Good Time and Heathens, Cowboys And The Santa Ana Winds. I cannot walk into a room without someone commenting on it. Then for candles, I’d probably say Crisco Disco, one of our OG candles, and Kinky G. 

“It’s the first perfume I’ve ever worn to sleep.”

JW: Baise Moi On The Dancefloor, which means something special to me in French. It’s the first perfume I’ve ever worn to sleep, because I was actually smelling it just for me. So I think that’s stayed my favourite. Then, I think the candle is probably Remezzo. We developed it for a year and a half before it came out, so it’s felt like a long time coming for us, and it’s hands down my favourite.

HB: We’ve also [just released] Lola At Coat Check, our bestselling fragrance, as a candle. That smells so good. 

JW: That might surpass [Remezzo]. Lola At Coat Check is one we both wear a lot. We know it’s a crowd pleaser. It just always hits the spot.

My favourite perfume is Dark Imagination.

HB: That one’s a very vampire scent.

JW: It is a fucking vampire scent.

HB: That’s why you like it… When we first made it, we were like, This is a filthy rose, a funeral rose. Smoky. Mysterious. It’s like taking a rose and fucking it up. 

The candles are all inspired by a club. Are the perfumes, too?

JW: They’re inspired by a club, a moment, a year and a place.

HB: So it’s like a vibe, but that vibe includes the place. If it’s a place like Mykonos — salty, oceanic — that’s incorporated into it. But it’s still that, like, sweaty dance floor, beach, just got out the sea and now I’m dancing at a rave…

There’s also a real sexiness to Discothèque. Tell me about that.

JW: When I’m doing the packaging design, I always think of it as trying to take something and subverting it — doing something that only Discothèque or we could get away with. No other fragrance brand would make their samplers condoms. 

HB: Or discovery pack a cigarette. 

JW: But no one blinks an eye when we do it. We’re the biggest advocates of letting our freak flags fly, and embracing the things you think are unhinged thoughts and letting them out into the world. I don’t really think people should be checking themselves as much as they are.

That perfectly leads on to your new fragrances, [Eye Contact] and Body Heat. Can you tell me about those?

HB: Body Heat is going to be an exclusive with Selfridges, so that’s really exciting. Then [Eye Contact] is our release that’s for everyone.

JW: Body Heat is inspired by Monte Carlo. It’s so sexy. The reason it’s called body heat is because it mixes with your skin in a way that brings out the sexiest parts of how you smell. It’s coffee, dark chocolate and orris in a base of oud and lots of amber.

HB: And then there’s this very elegant, rich element to it, which is why we thought the Selfridges customer fits really well.

JW: [Eye Contact] is trying to capture that moment of all the unspoken things between two people. I think [the scents] are kind of relatives in that sense. They’re not themselves animalic, but the sensations are. [Eye Contact] is like the progression of that moment [evoked in Body Heat]. 

“We’re the biggest advocates of letting our freak flags fly.”

HB: You know, that moment on the dance floor where you see someone and maybe something happens, maybe it never does.

JW: And [Eye Contact] takes a second. It’s very spicy, peppery, right at the beginning, which is a very literal translation of that feeling. When you see someone and then a minute in it’s completely different. It seeps into your skin, like something taking over your body.

And the ‘place’ is London, so it’s kind of following our own story.

Finally, Discothèque is often described as the ‘ultimate party girl’ fragrance. How do you define that identity? 

HB: Jessie and I have an abstract definition of party. It’s not your, like, I’m going on a fucking bender and I’m not going to see you for five days. It’s not not that, but it’s more the moments when you’re on a night out and there’s that pure bliss feeling that carries through with you forever — which is the idea of these fragrance. They’re meant to carry through the decades just like the music of that time period.

JW: It’s just anyone having the best time of their life.

HB: The scents can be worn during the day, during the night, to the beach, to wherever. It’s just bringing that joyful feeling. 

JW: It’s distilling those perfect moments in your life. Giving you something that lets you step into a version of yourself you can’t step into otherwise.

Shop [Eye Contact] on the Discothèque website, and Body Heat at Selfridges. Or go and smell Discothèque in person at their pop-up shop at 19 D’Arblay St, Soho, W1F 8ED until 14 December.