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~ Confessions of a Known Bonnet-Wearer

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Tag Archives: smell

Smell Ya Later

16 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by kittycalash in Clothing, Fail, History, Laundry, Living History, Reenacting, Research

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

19th century, 19th century clothing, authenticity, clothes, Clothing, common people, historical clothing, historical myths, historical reenactors, history, interpretation, laundry, smell

Wool on hooks, cat on prowl

Wool on hooks, cat on prowl

One of the most common questions you get when you’re wearing historical clothing is the undying, “Aren’t you hot in those clothes?”

A heavily perspiring visitor wearing practically nothing usually asks this question, and the standard reply is a variation of “Aren’t you hot? In really warm weather, everyone is hot. But natural fibre clothing wicks the moisture from the skin and helps to keep you cool.” My internal response (vocalized only once) is, “Why yes, I am—and thank you for noticing. I work hard for this look.”

The “aren’t you hot” question is often followed by, “Wow, and they didn’t bathe, so everyone really smelled.” You try not to think of that Monty Python sketch about Britain’s deadliest joke program in WWII and move the conversation on to weekly laundering of body linen, multiple shifts, shirts, and under-drawers, and the general hygienic practices of the past.

What struck me after a sticky weekend is how much I noticed the smell of modern people.

two tailors and a tailoress

two tailors and a tailoress

My traveling companions and I bathed on Friday morning, drove for 7+ hours in muggy weather, slept in our clothes, wore wool, cotton and linen in rain and thick humidity, sweated in the tailor’s shop, slept in our clothes again, and spent another warm, close, day in muggy weather, including grave digging and pall bearing. But as feral as my shift may have been on Sunday night, I never smelled us.

Mr H reported that his wool trousers were really stinky in the rain, and I think his white Spencer was well-seasoned even before this weekend, but I didn’t notice anything. Mr S’s soaking greatcoat was whiffy only at extremely close range.

What I did smell were modern perfumes, deodorants, and hair products. Those linger around their wearers and trail behind them, sometimes eye-watering in their intensity. I encountered lingering perfume in a bathroom at the museum, and we were overwhelmed by cologne at diner Monday morning: wow, people must really smell now, of petrochemicals.

more wool

more wool

This is not to say that homeless people and sulky teenagers don’t smell of unwashed bodies and clothes, but people in the past may not have smelled quite as badly as we think. They washed, if not bathed (bathing being full immersion washing) and by changing body linen and airing their clothes, they kept reasonably clean.

There was plenty to whiff in the past: wastes of all kinds, stagnant bodies of water used as dumps, rotting foods and corpses. But I’m not convinced that we haven’t simply exchanged one set of smells for another of different origin and intensity.

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Smelling the Past

19 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by kittycalash in History

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

history, memory, smell

20120919-053844.jpg
What did it smell like? I think that’s something many of us would like to know about the past. We can, with some hard work and luck, know what it felt like (clothes, furniture, household furnishings can be touched with an appointment in some museums). We can know what the food tasted like–and last weekend’s event at Coggeshall provided excellent examples of that, since we ate meals based on traditional receipts and made with vegetables and meat grown on the farm. Musicians play period music on period instruments, deportment books, plays, and letters give us insight into how things sounded.

But what did it smell like? That seems more elusive, but just as important. Smell is critical to forming memories, and recent research has highlighted links between odors/scents and the formation of memories, especially episodic and emotional memories, and summarized well here and here. So knowing what the past smelled like–and that is a crazy big generalization–would help us understand the way people experienced their lives and formed memories, like Proust and his madeleines.

But it’s easy, you say, the past smelled of horse dung, urine, and wood smoke, and to a degree it did. But yesterday, sitting on the hill of the John Brown House watching weather slowly come in from up the Bay, I thought of the smells of Providence. The lawn smelled of dry mowed grass, because it had been mowed in the sun on Monday. The wind smelled of fish and salt water as it whipped up off Narragansett Bay, and I thought of the smell of the shift, apron and shirt washed at the farm on Saturday, and realized we forget the smell of laundry.

When we unpack from an event, the house smells different: things reek of wood smoke, sweat, and black powder, and sometimes rain. The smoke smells a little different each time, depending on the wood we burn. But the things from the farm smelled really different, and it was the laundry. It smelled of fat.

Basic soap is made of fat rendered with wood ash and lye, though fancy soaps used olive oil instead of animal fat. So my laundry smelled of the soap that was used, just as it does today, but this soap had both a softer and a stronger odor. That is, there wasn’t the bite of chemical backlash you get with some detergents, but one shirt, one shift, and one apron, folded, created a marked island of scent in the corner of the room.

If I had been sitting in mowed grass on the slope of Power Street 213 years ago, I would have smelled my self (wood smoke, laundry soap, sweat), the grass, and the fishy wet wind from the Bay in addition to whatever was rotting in the midden or festering the street where the horses had been. Spices and oranges on the docks might add to the wind from the Bay, and I like to think that all together, in the 18th century, Providence smelled like possibility.

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