Italian Disco Interlude: Our Gift Guide

It's that time of the year

Italian Disco Stories is jumping onto the gift guide bandwagon! While music— in terms of themes, playlist, and material collections— is the central part of Italian Disco Stories, for this gift guide we wanted to give a few suggestions that explore the multi-disciplinary and multi-sensory nature of the disco-music phenomenon.

PSA before you dive in: this is simply a personal curation of items. We are not using affiliate links and won’t make a dollar out of this. We just wanted to partake in the holiday and gift-suggesting (or “curating”) spirit.

Disco: Music, Movies, and Mania under the Mirror Ball by Frank DeCaro

This book by Frank DeCaro sets the standard for modern-day encyclopedias of pop culture. While the jump-off point is, clearly, disco music, this coffee table book provides in-depth essays, interviews, playlists, and even fashion spreads. DeCaro, who authored the coffee-table book Drag in 2019, extends his interdisciplinary approach to disco. You’ll learn why disco musicals in the disco era routinely flopped on Broadway (without the prism of nostalgia, danceable music does poorly in an environment where you’re forced to stay seated), you will discover the cottage industry of disco-themed movies or movies that have nothing to do with disco but comprise, inevitably, a dancefloor sequence, and of singers both green and seasoned that saw disco as a way to be relevant. In interviews (Angelica interviewed him twice), he is fond of mentioning the Ethel Merman disco album, an absurdist, high camp effort where the veteran Broadway star just had her hits rearranged to the disco beat—it might be considered an anomaly by Anglo ears, but as Italians, we found the Ethel Merman Disco Album completely in line with disco-by-way-of variety shows.

Discotheque Fragrances

What do the dance floor and the club smell like? Or, even better, what’s the scent-based equivalent to the atmosphere conveyed by discotheques in a specific time and place? Jessie Willner and Hanover Booth answered this in Discothèque fragrances, a line of home and personal scents. The vessels resemble the lighting-design palette of a club: Kinky G, for example, whose vessel has a gradient that goes from bubblegum pink to red, has notes of “Coconut Cream, Milk, Cherry Pie, White Peach, Cloudberry, Almond Blossom, Cedarwood, Vanilla.” The perfume bottles recreate the geometric architecture of clubs and the cap references disco balls.

Violette FR Eye Bijoux

Make-up artist Violette, who both serves as the Creative Director of Makeup for Guerlain and also has her eponymous line of makeup essentials known for ease of application and great color payoff, recently launched Eye Bijoux, three-dimensional self-stick face jewels in four colors (holo, gold, blue, and copper) and two designs (teardrops and circles). Each eye bijou is reusable up to three times, and accommodates both bold and subtle looks.

Caran d’Ache Cosmic Blue Collection

Sheila and B. Devotion sang about “Spacers,” a young Sarah Brightman fell in love with a Starship Trooper; Meco turned the Star Wars soundtrack into a disco phenomenon; La Bionda dueted with a female space robot that repeated “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” and Moroder’s synths evoke both futurism and space. You can’t talk about disco without referencing the cosmos. For your reading and studying session, or for when the creative bug strikes, Caran d’Ache just launched the “Cosmic Blue” collection that, in its packaging and pigments, takes inspiration from the cosmos, combining the image of the starry sky with metallic hues in pencils and watercolor pastels. If you want your pencils to be as sharp as they can get, the Cosmic Blue mechanical sharpener looks like a piece of steampunk machinery.

Disco Inferno Liquid Heat

Liquid Heat brings a much wanted kick to any type of beverage thanks to the presence of bird’s eye, Scotch bonnet, aji panca chiltepin, counterbalanced by Euphrates Mint and cinnamon. Liquid Heat is brainchild of multi-hyphenate Leslie Kirchhoff,a cube innovator, cocktail consultant, photographer and DJ. Kirchhof is mostly known online for bringing a craft-like approach to the ice cube, which take inspiration both from discothèques and the art of ikebana, which she showcases under the handle @discocube. Her companion book Disco Cube Cocktails was published in 2020.

DIVA by Kate Bailey

This volume is the companion text to the V&A Museum 2023 exhibition entirely dedicated to Divas. With photography, installation shot, and essays of varying depth, it surveys the evolution of the figure of the diva, from deity to opera singer, from demi-monde fixture to icon transcending demographics, from the embodiment of femininity to an expression of gender euphoria of any kind. It also brilliantly acknowledges how a diva is, in and of itself, both an artist and a total work of art. “To play the diva requires exceptional talent, dedication, and the pursuit of perfection, but also the behind-the-scene support of creative teams who work to construct and maintain captivating personas.”

Ultimately, both the book and the exhibition (catch it if it’s traveling anywhere near you) acknowledge that the legacy of the diva resides in the way their art, their persona, and their performer impact culture and society beyond their direct sphere of influence.

While not entirely about disco, it inevitably touches on the era and the genre, given how heavily it relied on the stage presence and vocals of larger-than-life performers.

A Ticket to Spiegelworld’s DISCOSHOW

Spiegelworld’s DISCOSHOW opened in September 2024 and is known as a meticulously crafted tribute to the New-York disco era. The environment the audiences explore includes a grimy subway car, a diner (aptly called Diner Ross) a veritable loft furnished with vintage design finds, Italian design wares, and ramshackle furniture and, of course, a real dance floor. Oh, there is also a room that is meant to look like the inside of a disco ball. The playlist includes both well-known disco-fare and deeper cuts of the 1970s music scene of New York and other countries. There is some element of childlike wonder that comes with immersive shows, and DISCOSHOW is now a great fixture in Las Vegas’s stacked lineup. Closing date is still TBD, so you have plenty of booking options.

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