Viscose Magazine #7 – Scent

Viscose 07 examines scent through a variety of lenses, observing its historical and contemporary role in fashion culture. The issue seeks out scent histories—developed with or by artists and designers—who have embraced and involved smell as a medium of possibility and knowledge production, gesturing to histories of manufacturing, trade, branding, and commerce, but also sexuality, desire, identity, and memory.

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. Smell is a critical dimension of social appropriateness (which is how Arjun Appadurai once defined fashion), beginning, of course, with cleanliness. Smell is brutally implicated in the production of gender, ethnicity, race, and class, linking many of our social anxieties and aspirations to concrete chemical compounds that are still mostly unnamed.

published by Viscose
2024, 237 pages, 17 x 24 cm