Liquid Wardrobes and Sensing: A Phenomenological Approach to Digital Perfume Communities

The fact that perfumes have been regarded as enhancing one’s appearance opens up questions about knowing and wearing fragrances. The connections between fragrances and fashion are being reviewed first according to the notion of embodiment as applied to the understanding of clothing fashion (Entwistle 2000, 2015); then, the lens of “mediatization”, as applied by Rocamora (2017) to grasp the contemporary entanglement of fashion and digital media, further serves to turn to digital perfume communities. These constitute an essential resource to the extent that they share experiences while producing data about wearing and collecting fragrances. By tracing the recent insurgence of perfume criticism and by mapping certain techniques of entering into relation with fragrances through community members’ perfume reviews as well, the study argues that their idiosyncratic and often artistic language is countering the impersonal language of perfume advertising; ultimately, the study suggests unravelling perfume consumption patterns via an aesthetics of attention.