Freshly washed laundry? We like it. We love the feel of a freshly made bed, tautly pulled sheets and white linen. We love the neat look of a freshly ironed white blouse, the gentle scent of fabric softener and blue skies, and the soft feel of cotton terry cloth straight out of the tumble dryer. Clean laundry conveys a sense of freshness and comfort and is one of our earliest sensory experiences: after a bath, babies are dried off, warmed with soft terry cloth and lovingly wrapped up. This feeling is deeply rooted in our cultural memory. The scent of clean laundry therefore stands not only for cleanliness and hygiene, but also for care, security and order. A pile of freshly folded towels, a neatly made bed or an ironed white blouse convey that reassuring feeling: here, everything is clean, organised and in its place. And what does it all smell of? Actually, quite mundane: washing powder. We live in an age of consumerism. So it’s no wonder that even the scent of fresh laundry has long since been given an upgrade. From Warm Cotton and White Linen to Bubble Bath – today, an entire family of fragrances is dedicated to a single goal: to smell as convincingly of freshly washed laundry as possible. And even the good old ‘laundry scent’ sounds so much nicer when referred to by the internationally recognisable term ‘Laundry Scent’. An astonishing rise in status for a job that, as recently as the last century, was anything but desirable.
‘Laundry day’ was exhausting. Until the invention and widespread adoption of the washing machine in the 1950s and 1960s, laundry was washed in a labour-intensive process. Not every week, but usually only every four to six weeks. Laundry day was usually on a Monday, although the laundry was often soaked overnight from Sunday evening in a lye made from wood ash. The laundry was then boiled in large washing cauldrons in what was known as the ‘laundry room’. In practical terms, this meant: carrying water, stoking the fire under the cauldron and stirring the wet, scalding-hot laundry with a washing beater or stirring stick. Stains were scrubbed on the washboard, often using homemade curd soap. White laundry was also ‘blue-washed’ and treated with washing blue to prevent it from looking yellowed. The laundry was then rinsed several times with cold water, wrung out by hand or using a mechanical mangle, and hung out to dry – outdoors in summer, and in the loft or cellar in winter. For housewives, this meant days of back-breaking labour. The result was not only sore hands from the caustic lye, but also steam and the smell of soap that lingered in the house for days on end. For example, I can still vaguely remember the huge washing cauldron in the laundry room of one of my mother’s uncles. Not only did he earn money from letting out his laundry room, but shortly afterwards he also began earning money from hiring out the first semi-automatic washing machines.
The historical reality could hardly be further removed from our romanticised notion of ‘Laundry Day’. What we celebrate and crave today as the ultimate moment of well-being – the scent of fresh laundry – was, in fact, hard, physical and often painful labour – and anything but simply adding a splash of scented fabric conditioner to the machine and taking out a snow-white T-shirt an hour later. Of course, over the decades it wasn’t just the washing that changed, but the fabrics too. Detergents improved, as did hygiene and living conditions. Laundry no longer had to be boiled, and washing machines – and later tumble dryers – did the rest. In fact, the story could end there. A laborious task was largely automated through technological progress.
No one need shed a tear for the old days of doing the washing. And presumably no one does. Which is why I find it all the more interesting that this aesthetic has been making a comeback for a few years now. We love the scent of soap and freshly washed cotton. We tuck lavender sachets amongst our laundry, spritz bed linen with linen spray and buy washing powder whose packaging could easily sit alongside a niche perfume. Even fabric softener, whose original purpose was a rather mundane one, has long since become part of an olfactory experience. And finally, we wear the scent of freshly washed laundry as a perfume on our skin. Apparently, practical activity and aesthetics can become detached from one another. As soon as an everyday task no longer has to be done out of necessity, it can become a canvas for projection. Baking bread, preserving food, knitting, gardening – many things that were simply work for earlier generations are now re-emerging as voluntary, unhurried and carefully staged activities and lifestyle choices. When it comes to washing, this trend goes a step further still. For the less we know about the actual process, the more we romanticise the result. Nobody longs for a wash tub. The washboard lives on today, at most, as a ‘six-pack’. And even the washing machine does not play a leading role in our lifestyle-driven visual world.
We want what comes after. The white bed linen fluttering in the wind. Neatly folded towels. A freshly made bed. Cotton, sunshine, soap and lavender. Perhaps this romanticisation works so well precisely because most people who celebrate it today have never experienced the historic washing day. The memory of it is distant enough to have shed its unpleasant aspects. What remains is not the past, but an idea of it: more manageable, slower, more sensual and somehow tidier than our present. It is interesting to note how strongly women in particular respond to this aesthetic. It would be too simplistic to see this as a direct continuation of traditional women’s work. Perhaps the opposite is actually the case. For earlier generations of women, clean laundry was less a lifestyle choice than an obligation. It was the visible result of invisible labour. Today, we can appropriate its symbolism without having to take on that labour. ‘Clean’ no longer means: ‘I’ve done the washing properly’. It means: well-groomed, calm, tidy, uncomplicated. And that leads us rather quickly to an entire aesthetic of our present day. Clean Girl, Skin Scents, white T-shirts, high-quality basics, natural-looking make-up, light-coloured rooms, hotel bed linen and that ostentatious yet understated luxury that seeks to appear as little like a status symbol as possible.
This is also interesting from an olfactory perspective. After all, clean laundry does not naturally smell at all like what we imagine ‘fresh laundry’ to be. What we recognise as clean is, to a large extent, something we have learnt. Soap, detergent, musk, aldehydes, floral notes – over decades, products have taught us what cleanliness should smell like. Cleanliness isn’t just about it being there. We want to be able to smell it. This also explains the success of laundry and clean fragrances. They speak less of seduction, exoticism or grand olfactory gestures than of a state that you can spray onto your skin. Order. Neatness. Calm. Familiarity. And perhaps even a tiny bit of control. Because a laundry basket possesses a quality that has become surprisingly rare in our everyday lives today: you can deal with it. Dirty in, clean out, fold, stack, done. Our social media feeds, on the other hand, are never-ending; the inbox fills up again as soon as it’s empty; news streams round the clock; and even leisure time can now be optimised. Freshly washed laundry, by contrast, is a promise fulfilled. And that perhaps explains why a perfume that smells of white musk, cotton and soap can suddenly seem luxurious. We don’t buy the scent of a washing powder. We buy the idea of a freshly made bed, a free Sunday, a tidy room and, for a brief moment, perhaps even a tidy life.
Machines took over the actual work a long time ago. We have reclaimed its poetry.
