I've caught myself smelling my own clothes and wondered what exactly I was checking.
It usually happens without thinking. You pick up a jumper, a shirt or a coat and bring it towards your nose. Perhaps you're deciding whether it needs washing. Perhaps you're checking whether the perfume you wore earlier is still there. Or perhaps you've no real reason at all. You simply smell it. It's one of those tiny things we do that makes perfect sense while we're doing it, but becomes rather strange if we stop to think about it. We don't normally stand around smelling our clothes for pleasure. Yet the moment something familiar reaches our nose, we seem to want to know what it smells like.
Perhaps the reason is that our clothes give us something we can't quite get from ourselves. We become accustomed to our own smell. The things that surround us every day gradually disappear from our conscious awareness, including the fragrance we wear and the smells that belong to us. Our clothes are different. They're slightly removed from the body, so when we smell a sleeve or the collar of a coat, we encounter a version of our own scent from the outside. Something that has been with us all day suddenly becomes noticeable again.
That's particularly clear with perfume. Spray a fragrance onto your skin and, after a while, you may stop noticing it. This is one of the strange things about wearing perfume. Other people may still be able to smell it, but your own nose has become accustomed to it. Put on a coat you haven't worn for a few days, however, and the fragrance can seem much stronger. The fabric has been quietly holding onto it while you've moved on.
Our clothes collect more than perfume. They pick up shampoo, soap, detergent and traces of the places we've been. A coat can smell different after an evening in a restaurant; a jumper can carry the faint atmosphere of a room. Fabric holds onto these things without any intention on our part. We tend to think of scent memories as coming from perfumes, flowers, food or particular places, but clothing quietly gathers the everyday evidence of where we've been. The smell isn't deliberately preserved. It's simply there when we return to it.
Perhaps that's why smelling our clothes can feel oddly reassuring. We recognise something familiar, but we're encountering it from a slight distance. It's still our smell, just not quite as invisible to us. And sometimes it's not our own fragrance we recognise at all, but a reminder of somewhere we've been or someone we've spent time with. A smell can bring back the atmosphere of a place without immediately bringing back the details of the day itself.
Clothing isn't a diary, and it doesn't preserve a complete memory of a day. It holds fragments: a trace of perfume, the atmosphere of a room, the detergent used at home. These are small details, easily overlooked, but they can make a familiar garment feel unexpectedly vivid when we smell it again.
We spend most of our lives surrounded by smells we barely notice. Then, every so often, we stop and smell a sleeve. Maybe we're not checking whether our clothes need washing after all. Maybe, for a second, we're simply discovering a little piece of where we've been.
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