Viscose 07: SCENT

The seventh issue of Viscose explores fashion’s enduring bond with scent and perfume. To be sure, fashion smells. Olfactory sensations have leaked from industries of style since its inception: scent, the stuff of ancient history and myth, has been traded as precious commodities alongside textiles and garments since the world’s earliest trade routes (if for a range of social, religious, and political purposes). But the connection between scent and clothing is more profound than their commodity status. For if fashion can be understood as a ‘social technology’ that represents self and body as culturally produced concepts, then olfaction is indeed fashion in the purest sense of the word – a supplementary limb, or a garment, as it were.