Can you smell techno?

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Jocelyn Silver on a new brand of music-inspired fragrances.

What does disco smell like?

If the experts are to be believed, disco epicenter Studio 54 smelled like a slutty garden. "The 1970s were an era of heady white floral perfumes, and since flowers like jasmine and tuberose can smell elegant and a little dirty at the same time, those were a good fit for disco nights," Jessica Murphy, a fragrance writer and manager of visitor experience at the Brooklyn Museum, told Vogue in 2020. You could catch whiffs of tangerine, plum, cloves, coriander, carnation, Lily of the Valley, rose, myrrh, opoponax, castoreum, cedarwood, and sandalwood. That is, the club smelled like the Yves Saint Laurent fragrance Opium, which had its American launch in 1978 on a ship rented from the South Street Seaport Museum with Truman Capote at the helm. The afterparty, attended by Cher, Grace Jones, and Diana Vreeland, was of course at Studio 54. "I traveled with my toothbrush and Opium 1978," legendary makeup artist and Studio 54 regular Sandy Linter told the magazine.

But these are fairly antiseptic remembrances. There may have been florals, but they were rotting. Studio 54 was so exclusive that someone literally died to get in; in 2018, co-founder Ian Schrager confirmed that a dead body was found in an air vent during the club’s heyday, a crasher in a tuxedo. And journalist Judy Licht shared a matter-of-fact sense memory with the New York Times. “Everywhere in the club you could smell the poppers. Before there was L.G.B.T.Q., there were the bathrooms at Studio 54.”

I don’t know what Studio 54 really smelled like, because I am not super young but also not that old. But for the past week, I’ve carried around a sample of Disco by Chicago DJ and perfumer Zernell Gillie, and I’ve been dousing myself in his Techno scent for months.

KATY KELLEHER ON PERFUME

PARTY ON

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