Ever since its founding two decades ago in Brooklyn, D.S. & Durga has steadily become one of the most popular indie fragrance brands around. Its husband-and-wife founders—David Seth Moltz and Kavi Ahuja Moltz—have released a steady stream of sure-to-appeal fragrances that not only smell good, but they elicit certain feelings and emotions through each scent’s dedicated backstory (who wouldn’t feel a little giddy-up in their step after a spritz of Cowboy Grass?).
The brand’s inventory of scents has always been unisex, with no one scent ever truly being in the camp of “for men” or “for women” (save for the difference between the fragrances Cowboy Grass and Cowgirl Grass). But Seth Moltz, the brand’s self-taught perfumer, decided it was time to release a limited-edition line of fragrances inspired by classic men’s colognes—hence, the brand’s first foray into a dedicated men’s line of scents.
“It is still my position as a brand that it’s kind of dumb to say: ‘This is for men; this is for women,” because it doesn’t matter,” Seth Moltz says. “You decide that. I have my opinion about what I find to be masculine [and] find to be feminine, so I’ve made myself colognes for forever that I’ve never released and I just thought it’d be so cool to put these [new colognes] out there as a one-off launch.”
The result is D.S. & Durga’s line of The Colognes—Golf Jazz, a grassy, woody number; Grey Blazer, a spicy, herbaceous fragrance; and Rum Bay Rum, an intoxicating neroli scent—that are contemporary takes on common masculine scents that Seth Moltz says would easily slot into a man’s lifestyle: a scent for work, play, and sport. And Seth Moltz doesn’t want the perfumeheads to come after him: He knows the designation of “colognes” means the percentage of perfumed oil in the product—and therefore potency and longevity of the scent—but acknowledges how “’cologne’ is like a dog whistle for [men’s] fragrances.”
While D.S. & Durga has certainly always had scents that, by smell, skewed more traditionally masculine or feminine, the release of The Colognes can be seen as a signifier for heterosexual men, who Seth Moltz says are “traditionally the ones who are not wearing stuff [across gender] lines,” that there are these fragrances that are in line with those classic male scents they’ve been accustomed to. He also reiterates “this is [not] a line for just men,” though can surely see current D.S. & Durga offerings getting the “Cologne” distinction because of their traditional leanings towards what a male fragrance is. But until then, Golf Jazz, Grey Blazer, and Rum Bay Rum make the great basis for the start of an excellent fragrance rotation.
