Smell Something Familiar?

Dossier’s dupes have disrupted NYC’s niche fragrance district.

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In Nolita in early April, a “coming soon” sign popped up in a storefront on Elizabeth Street announcing the opening of a new perfume store. This is not an unusual occurrence in the area, which is colloquially known as “Perfume Alley” due to the concentration of fragrance retailers located there. Le Labo was the first perfume store to open on Elizabeth Street, back in 2006, followed soon after by Aesop and Diptyque. Over the years, more retailers moved into the area: Scent Bar, D.S. & Durga, Olfactory NYC, Osswald, Naxos Apothecary, Elorea, and Mizensir. Stéle opened their second location on Mott Street at the end of 2024; Commodity opened around the same time, and Granado, a Brazilian outfit, opened on Spring Street a couple of months ago. The neighborhood has grown into a veritable perfume shopping paradise.

Typically, the opening of a new store would be a cause for celebration for fragrance enthusiasts, but this one may be controversial. The new store is the first physical location for Dossier, a company that mainly (though not exclusively) sells what are commonly known as fragrance “dupes.” 

A dupe is a fragrance meant to replicate the scent of another, a sort of “smell-alike” of a popular (usually expensive) perfume. Dupes are not a new phenomenon. Dossier is the Gen Z successor to earlier brands such as Designer Imposters, a company founded in 1981 whose fragrances come in towering cans labeled with the phrase, "If you like ___,  you'll love ___" (e.g. "If you like Giorgio, you'll love PRIMO" or "If you like Obsession, you'll love CONFESS").

Dupes are a contentious topic in the fragrance community. Some defend them as an affordable way for people to try scents that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive, or just a smart hack for those who want to save money. Others believe they exploit the labor and creativity of people working in the fragrance industry, opportunistically capitalizing on successful works of fragrant art. Since fragrance formulas are not protected by copyright or patent laws, they are uniquely exploitable in the luxury goods market — there is no legal mechanism to stop Dossier or any other company from recreating a particular fragrance and selling their own version of it. 

Fragrance has been used to indicate class status for hundreds (and even thousands) of years. Perfumes made with costly, imported materials were an important status indicator for European aristocrats. Following advancements in chemistry and manufacturing, personal fragrances were made commercially available to people outside of the nobility. “Taste” and “appropriateness,” shaped by the values of the dominant classes, emerged as standards for judging a fragrance’s aesthetic value. Fragrance continues to be an indicator of cultural capital to this day, signaling that one understands what to purchase in order to convey good taste, trendiness, and status. In an era when perfume consumption has absolutely exploded, good taste is more socially important than ever, with an unending array of options to choose from — and the ability to edit and curate has an even greater importance than in the past. As a dupe company, Dossier essentially operates as a curator of the wider fragrance industry. The fragrances they choose to dupe have already been “pre-vetted” for popularity and wide appeal, winnowing down consumer options to the scents that already have a degree of approval from Gen Z tastemakers. Thus, Dossier presents an array of smells to the consumer that mimic fashionable tastes while circumventing the actual material investment required to purchase a particular luxury fragrance (you can buy Dossier’s Floral Marshmallow and smell the same as someone wearing Kilian’s Love Don’t Be Shy for about $200 less, for example).

Essentially, we’re looking at one facet of taste: authenticity. When considering authenticity as a sign of taste, a name-brand product is typically considered distinct; a knock-off or generic product is considered vulgar. This is as true for breakfast cereal as it is for fragrance. However, the brilliance of Dossier from a branding perspective is that they have managed to sidle up to authentic, brand-name luxury while also repudiating it, thus sidestepping this accusation of vulgarity. They justify their business model with an appeal to equity couched in the language of social justice, rejecting the luxury fragrance industry as a system that exploits consumers, proclaiming: “We believe that access to premium fragrances shouldn’t be a privilege for just the 1%, but the norm for all.” Dossier describes their fragrances as fair-priced, claiming that they offer lower prices because they don’t add the unjustified markup that designer and niche brands use to generate massive profits. The extent to which this is true is, of course, up for debate. The retail price of a luxury fragrance can be many times the cost of its ingredients, but there are other costs incurred to bring a fragrance to market aside from the materials used to make it. By copying existing fragrances, Dossier profits from the creative labor of the perfumers whose fragrance formulas they copy and the work that others in the industry put into marketing and building a customer base for their fragrances, thereby avoiding incurring those costs themselves. 

Blending moral signaling into their marketing language positions Dossier as an ethical disruptor. Their value prop to customers is that Dossier’s products are high quality and desirable, just like the luxury niche brands’ — and they smell the same, so buying them is a smart, cool choice: you have good taste, understand luxury, and you’re maybe a little subversive, too. This opens up a pathway to a new consumer relationship with the concept of authenticity, where finding the perfect replica of an expensive fragrance becomes a status symbol rivaling owning the real thing. Parallels exist elsewhere in high-end fashion, for example: “superfake” handbags mimicking luxury designs with exacting precision have become a status symbol in their own right, a sign that one is familiar enough with the markers of the original to know what will convince even the most discerning audience that it is the original.

Dossier also integrates the language and character of the fragrance community into their products. The Dossier customer is presumed to have some knowledge of fragrance that a casual buyer may not. The company promotes the fact that their fragrances are produced in Grasse, France, the epicenter of luxury fragrance production — a fact that would be apparent to a fraghead but not necessarily to someone only casually interested in fragrance. Dossier’s naming convention for their fragrances repurposes the jargon used to describe fragrances, accords, or notes, “Ambery Saffron”  or “Woody Sandalwood,” for example. For the fraghead who is immersed in the world of perfume, these descriptive names will immediately click and provide a very basic understanding of how the fragrance will smell (if they are not already familiar with the original version Dossier is duping), essentially operating as a sort of shorthand for someone literate in the language of fragrance notes. For the uninitiated, the descriptive name serves as an educational tool — one will learn over time what “ambery” smells like from repeated exposure (presuming the customer buys more than one Dossier fragrance of that type). The descriptive names also position each of Dossier’s fragrances as a type of perfume, part of a continuum or an aggregation of similar fragrances, subtly deemphasizing that it is a copy of a specific product. And Dossier is correct to point out that numerous “ambery saffron” fragrances are very close to the scent of Maison Francis Kurkdjian’s Baccarat Rouge 540 — essentially, the distinction between other fragrances that capture this scent profile and theirs is that Dossier explicitly calls out that their Ambery Saffron smells like Baccarat Rouge 540. Dossier also co-opts the minimalist luxury styling conventions of trendy niche brands like Byredo with their packaging — each fragrance is housed in rounded glass and labeled with an attractive sans-serif font, ideal for posting on Instagram.

Dossier’s decision to open their first physical store in the specific location they chose feels very intentional. It is located next to Scent Bar, where many of the original fragrances they copy can be purchased. There are, of course, purely economic reasons for Dossier to open here (it’s likely to have a high concentration of people who want to buy perfume because of the cluster of existing fragrance stores, so presumably they have a ready-made customer base). However, and perhaps more importantly, their location is socially tactful, as Nolita is the center of the local perfume hobbyist scene in New York — a place where people interested in perfume meet, socialize, and network. Many of the stores there serve as third spaces for the fragrance community, and it’s not uncommon to see sales associates and others in the industry socializing off-duty at an event in another shop. Choosing this area to open their first store is an attempt to further embed Dossier’s brand within fraghead culture. Previously, dupe brands were typically sold in humble locations — the bottom shelf at a drugstore or in a big box outlet like Walmart. Opening an independent boutique in Nolita distances Dossier from the downmarket status of past dupe brands.

Dossier’s move to Elizabeth Street allows it to profit from the area’s cachet without contributing to it. In the same way they mine the creativity and business acumen of other companies by copying their products, they’ve wormed their way into their physical realm to further eat away at their business (“Why buy the $300 fragrance at Scent Bar when you can come to us right next door and get the same scent for $50?”). The existing businesses worked to build the area into the destination that it is today, and now Dossier is coming in to capitalize on it. 

It may be easy to suggest that Dossier moving into Perfume Alley is a sign that fragrance culture has reached its saturation point and is cooked. The ever-burgeoning industry has been copying itself for decades now and growing into a model where the primary directive is hyperconsumerism, so why not throw a dupe store right next to the biggest multi-brand niche retailer in the area? After all, trend cycles have always existed in fragrance. Angel by Mugler, released in 1992, started a trend for “fruitchouli” scents — characterized by floral and fruity notes atop an earthy, mossy base. The trend gained steam throughout the 2000s and became a dominant style for women’s fragrances for over a decade. Luxury brands such as Chanel, Dior, and Viktor&Rolf all launched their own versions of the fruitchouli fragrance. The trend eventually trickled down from the luxury fragrance market to affordable brands such as Britney Spears, saturating the market at all price points. Perhaps today’s dupes are just an extension of this phenomenon.

Dossier presents a version of fragrance artistry that is prepackaged — the "important" scents have been curated for easy consumption. But the shops in the fragrance district can offer endless options to experience fragrance beyond what does numbers on TikTok, hidden gems from independent and niche artisans that a fellow fraghead or studied sales associate can uncover for you. In the fragrance community, niche fragrances signify a particular type of cachet — an awareness of lesser-known brands and artisans that indicates seriousness and expertise similar to how knowledge of obscure bands functions for record collectors or awareness of unknown authors operates for people in literary scenes. This expertise extends into knowledge of the perfumers behind the fragrances and the history and evolution of the fragrance industry. It is a type of embodied cultural capital that can only be obtained through study and time. It’s not surprising that the people I’m acquainted with who know the most about fragrance and have the best-curated collections are highly educated museum and arts professionals — the same skills that are required to understand and “consume” a work of visual art are transferable to analyzing a perfume as a work of olfactory art.

Recently, Stéle, a fragrance shop located a few blocks away from the new Dossier store, hosted an exhibit in partnership with the fragrance manufacturing company Givaudan, where visitors could smell and select raw materials used in perfumery alongside fragrances specifically created for the event composed with those materials, none of which were for sale. Jake, the co-founder of Stéle, noted that the people gathered together weren’t there to buy anything — he quickly added the caveat that of course he wants and needs people to buy fragrances from the store, but sales are not the primary motivator for Stéle’s events — they’re truly for supporting a community of people with a common interest in fragrance, who appreciate it as an art form. Although fragrance collecting is typically a hobby focused on consumption, it doesn’t have to be — having physical spaces to gather and smell things without the necessity of making a purchase is one of the ways this can be facilitated. Essentially, Stéle’s space operates as the locus of the fragrance community, which is composed not just of consumers but of perfumers, industry professionals, creators, and writers.

As someone who lives and socializes in proximity to Perfume Alley, I tend to assume that, because the shops in this area serve as third spaces for me and people like me, we are the primary denizens of this place. The first time I walked by the Dossier store, I thought, “That’s for tourists.” Maybe Dossier will hold events and become part of the local fragrance community (I’m sure they’ll at least have some sort of influencer-focused “activation” when they finally open), and maybe they won’t. Maybe they will become a highlight of the grand tour of the perfume district — a must-stop location for tourists and locals alike. While Dossier’s move into Nolita may signal that the saturation and “fast fashion-ification” of the wider fragrance industry has hit the local market, the NYC community will continue to come together to champion fragrance as an art form. 🌀

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Quinn MacRorie lives and works in New York City. She writes about olfactory aesthetics and culture on her Substack, SMELL WORLD.