The best clothes have a smell

And there's an epidemic of "good" ones that don't

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Photo by Chang Young. Illustrations by oxygen and Inna Kharlamova, via Getty Images

It’s 87F° in Paris as I (Jonah) write this, and Erin and I have got smelliness on our minds.

In more ways than one. Much like New York, Seoul, and Rome, among other hot metropolises I’ve spent time, Paris is the kind of beautiful, bustling city that gets exponentially more aromatique the deeper into summer it gets. And friends, it’s been a swampy scorcher here all week. Why are we in Paris again? First and foremost, to see people who make clothes we love and admire. It’s the biannual “Paris Men’s Week,” where labels from all over the world open up showrooms, and put on runway shows, to drum up noise for forthcoming collections and sell their work to stockists. This brings the buyers from some of our favorite small shops to Paris, too, along with people, like us, who cover clothing.

Last summer, we discovered that there’s no better way to see all of the above people, and meet cool new ones, than to throw The Week’s Chillest Party, open to all, which we did this time with our friends from Neighbour and Lady White Co., sharing wines from Nøvice, n.a. aperitifs from iessi, and an extremely sick selection of music kindly put together just for us by the great Yu Su — you can listen to it if you have Spotify, here:

Thank you to Saager and Karyna from Neighbour, and Taylor, Phil, Ken and Mat from Lady White for co-hosting with us. Shout out to everyone who came through, including Larz and Aida from Man-tle, Julia Heuer, Hannah Cawley of Cawley, Keith Henry of Henry’s, Dan Climan, Nick Dierl, Romeo Okwara, Gabriella Coll, Camiel and Floortje from Camiel Fortgens, Keiko Seya of Seya, Evan and Neal from Evan Kinori, Nur Abbas of Gnuhr, Sweetu Patel of C’H’C’M’, Tal and Eldar from Colbo, Eric and Hampus of Nitty Gritty, Jukka from Tarvas, Cecile from Sisi Joía, Ollie from Conkers, Noah Johnson, Emily Eisen, Elijah Funk of Online Ceramics, James and Lawrence from Throwing Fits, Yuji Chung from Ernie Palo, Sigurd Bank from Mfpen, Chris and Axel of Ven.Space, Louis Cheslaw, Agyesh from Stòffa, Mia from 11.11, Bill from William Frederick, Mark from Archie, Brookes from Boswell, and whoever else was on hand shining.

If I hugged you at the function and you wondered how I managed to smell so nice despite the dank weather, the answer was a spray-on vetiver déoderant I got from a crunchy biodynamic supermarket that I’m surprised worked as well as it did. And that brings us back to smells.

All week, looking at clothes on racks and runways and bodies, Erin and I have been thinking about smells.

Specifically, we’ve been thinking about a metaphor that Simon Homes of the excellent UK label Sono planted in our heads when we visited him at Sono’s east London studio during our recon trip there earlier this month.

“Some brands have a smell, and some brands have no smell,” Simon said. “You look at Margaret Howell — her clothes have a smell,” he continued, positively, whereas “[redacted clothing line that’s had some moments, but on the whole is looking more and more everyday like an uninspired muddle of Lemaire, Howell and COS] has no smell.”

Simon credited some Japanese friends of his with introducing him to this concept. “The correct Japanese word is funiki or kūki,” he explained over email later, clarifying that “this doesn’t translate smoothly, and refers to aura, ambiance, vibe on Google, but 3 Japanese friends think it means fashion smell. Lost in translation — I prefer to go with their weird version.”

Us too. We love the idea of clothes with an aura, ambiance and vibe so distinct you feel it in your nostrils. You could use a word like ‘personality,’ but ‘smell’ captures something special. Something… particulate… airborne… sensory.

We’ve long advocated for physical spaces that — rather than feeling antiseptic, precious, and lifeless — thrum, instead, with what we call G.O.O.D. G.E.R.M.S. The vibiest house we’ve ever been to, near London, which we just wrote about the other day, is a brilliant example of a place with a Fecund Swag Microbiome.

And the idea of a clothing line with a smell strikes us as a closely connected concept.

There are all kinds of smells, of course, and they can hit your nostrils with various intensities, in various registers. Some smells are, of course, nicer than others. Some are off-putting at first, but there might be something intoxicating about them that grows on you with time. Some smells are just plain bad, and you naturally want to avoid those. But if clothes have no smell at all, the effect will be a bland, shrugging, saucelessness: If you want to truly dress well, you want your clothes to have a smell.

To be clear: The question of whether an outfit has a smell is different from the question of whether a clothing line has a smell. Someone with Mach 5+ style can take a seemingly scentless garment and freak it into pungentness. By contrast, a Human Sauce Sink can evacuate all the stink from a garment that reeked in a lookbook or on the rack. As a broad rule of thumb, vintage, secondhand, and just straight up well-worn clothes that you’ve owned and rocked for ages are, on balance, going to have more of a smell than new clothes.

Everything in our list of The 35 Modern Spyplane Icons smells — and a brand doesn’t need to have a big smell, obviously, for it to have an aroma. Lemaire and Auralee have refined, restrained aromas, but both brands unquestionably have smells (Lemaire has notes of ink, Burgundy, and petrol, while Auralee’s are more floral).

Julia Heuer’s clothes have a smell (watercolors, metal, candy). Evan Kinori’s clothes have a smell (clear-heart Western Red cedar that’s been sawed edge-grain and then kiln-dried). Camiel Fortgens’s clothes have a smell (model-glue, soldering irons, Dr. Pepper). Mfpen’s clothes have a smell (cologne, hot printer paper). And so on.

Big Red MSCHF Boots, meanwhile, have a horrible smell (figuratively and after a few days walking around in them, I assume literally). Primetime ‘90s-era Versace clothes smelled insane, but you couldn’t deny that it was a signature scent all their own. Demna clothes, Rick Owens clothes and Emily Bode clothes each have distinct, powerful smells, and those smells may or may not be for you, but they are undeniably all up in your nasal passage — whereas the clothes made by their many lesser imitators are not.

This brings us to the no-smell flipside: A legion of pleasant-enough-but-thoroughly-unmemorable clothing brands that have no smell whatsoever. And this scentless legion seems to be on the rise.

As big luxury houses come to register as cold, juiceless and/or evil to more and more people (the way most of them have long felt to me and Erin), and as the bottom of the market chokes on depressing, mass-produced proto-landfill, the space in between is getting crowded with clothes that look… fine… and yet you can’t bring yourself to give a f--k about them because they have no smell.

To choose one obvious category of contemporary smellessness: All the V.C.-funded and/or DTC labels you’ve never heard of that still get pushed to you on IG or via “content creators” who get affiliate kickbacks or free products in exchange for coverage. The pants seem nice and roomy, the cottons seem perfectly soft, the muted colors seem perfectly tasteful. But there is nothing piquant about these clothes, and nothing subtly aromatic, either. They have no top notes, no heart notes, no base notes. They’re scentless all the way down.

There’s also more and more small, independent, ostensibly “Spyplaney” labels that have little-to-no “VC-backed DTC” energy, but don’t have much of a smell of their own, either. If you put your nose right up against their earth-toned / natural-fibered / roomy-cut fabrics, you might detect the promising traces of more-distinct aromas from the more-distinct brands that seemingly inspired them. And you hope they gain their own, fuller-bodied fragrances with time.

There is scentlessness among putative GOATS, too. Some beautiful Loro Piana materials might have a smell, but rare is the Loro Piana garment that has much of a smell, and don’t let anyone try and fool you into thinking otherwise.

Similarly, The Row started off smelling extremely good, but as they spiral further into an Italian-milled cashmere-and-viscose sensory deprivation chamber of dead-behind-the-eyes “luxury,” they risk smelling, increasingly, like nothing — unless you count the thin, papery whiff of a price tag with an incomprehensibly high number on it.

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One way to understand the smelly/smelless dynamic more deeply is to see how it plays out in other creative forms besides clothesmaking…

The other day, I woke up to a text from my friend who knows how much I love Alex G sending me his newest single. It’s a lovely, ever-so-slightly off-kilter ballad called “June Guitar.” I listened to it on repeat along with Alex G’s other wonderful new single, “Afterlife,” playing both of them back to back as I walked through the 10th to get coffees. Magical.

Each time the songs played through, I had to take out my phone and manually restart them, before the Recommendation Algorithm Autoplay took over and took me elsewhere. To be sure, if I’d just let the algo cook up an Alex G-inspired playlist, I’d probably have heard some other music I like a lot. I’d have likely heard a smelly gem or two from Spyplane Melody Hero Mac DeMarco, maybe his cool new single, “Home.” I might have heard smelly slappers by Clarissa Connelly, Nilüfer Yanya, or Adrienne Lenker, or the recently reissued 2011 track “Daddies,” by the gifted young postmodern smell-juggler and Spyfriend Porches, who made a wonderful song here that smells, variously, like Porches, Kurt Vile, Elliott Smith and Leonard Cohen:

But as the algorithm kept cooking, I know I’d also hear a ton of music by bands I do not know, and whose general energy is so indistinct that you wonder whether anyone knows them.

I’m talking about music that sounds paradoxically familiar and anonymous at the same time — maybe with some nice guitar tones, a cool riff, and pretty, fuzzed-out vocals. Music where the songs lose steam halfway through the first verse and reveal themselves as sub-mid, or just drift by unmemorably, without adding up to much besides pleasant-ish “vibes padding” for a playlist.

They are not songs, in other words, that you could imagine any fully sentient human putting on themselves, certainly not with anything resembling excitement or emotional investment. These songs are probably good for a streaming platform’s bottom line, but they are bad for the soul, because they have no smell.

There’s an epidemic of bland, serviceable “vibes padding,” and we gotta resist it. I don’t wanna listen to vibes padding, and I don’t want to wear it.

P👃E👃A👃C👃E til next time

— Jonah & Erin

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