DS Durga
Perfume is armchair travel
D.S. & Durga was founded in Brooklyn in 2007 by David Seth Moltz, a self-taught perfumer with a background in mediaeval music, and his wife Kavi Moltz, an architect who designs the bottles and brand identity. The house began as a side project releasing two fragrances a year and grew without outside investment into one of the most-watched American niche operations of the past decade. Moltz composes everything himself in a Brooklyn lab, working from references that range from Edward Gorey to nineteenth-century botanical guides to American road trips. The catalogue is unusually idea-driven — Debaser is a fig taken seriously, Big Sur After Rain a literal landscape, I Don't Know What chases the smell of skin and aldehydes. Pricing sits at the upper end of niche, with distribution through Bergdorf Goodman, Liberty London, and the brand's own SoHo and West Village shops.
DNA over time
Each column is an era. Each colored band shows that family’s share of accord weight across every perfume the house released in that window. Bigger band = the house leaned harder on that family.
