Fashioning Smoking Space: A Sensory Historical Geography of the Smoking Suit from Olfactory Barrier to Dernier Cri

Sometime before the Great War, somewhere in England, a woman in a green silk kimono locks the door of her room and lights a gold-tipped cigarette. This simple act, and the memory of it traced in the archive, will be explored and used as a route into narrating a sensory history of the smoking suit from its use as a masculine garment designed to obviate putrid tobacco smells to its eventual adoption as a feminine object of high fashion. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, from newspaper and magazine articles to etiquette books, advice manuals, fashion plates, and trade journals, the paper examines the representations of the smoking suit from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century and the role it was ascribed in the constitution of gendered smoking spaces. By weaving through the textures, smells, flavors and places associated with it, the paper attempts to tease out the sensory, affective and embodied micro-politics of wearing as this plush item of smoking fashion moves from the private space of the home, to the public spaces of the fashion show. The paper concludes by arguing for the importance of taking seriously the multisensory, everyday geographies of fashion, and their capacity to both perpetuate and disrupt wider relationships of power.