Denim Tears has spent years using cotton as more than a textile. Under Tremaine Emory, it has functioned as material, historical reference, and recurring symbol through which the brand examines Black American experience. Its latest collaboration with COMME des GARÇONS Parfums takes that idea somewhere clothing cannot: into scent. Tears, an eau de parfum launching September 18, attempts to capture cotton not as a clean fabric accord, but as part of a specific landscape in rural Georgia.

Perfumer Paul Guerlain built the musk-floral fragrance around Emory’s memories of Harlem, Georgia, particularly the environment after rain: red clay, morning dew, heat, sweat, wet fields and vegetation. Galbanum, ambrettolide and sage create the green opening; daffodil, jasmine, flouve and orris form its floral and powdery center; while vetiver, hay, cypriol and musk create a drier finish meant to recall warm fields rather than freshly washed cotton. The campaign, photographed by Dexter Navy in Harlem, Georgia, ties the fragrance back to the geography that produced the idea.

That distinction is what makes Tears more interesting than a fashion label moving into fragrance. Denim Tears is not simply translating its logo onto another category. It is translating its subject matter. Cotton has already carried much of the brand’s visual language. Here, the question becomes what happens when a material commonly encountered through sight and touch is reconstructed through memory and smell.

Fragrance is particularly suited to that task because scent can collapse geography, history and personal memory into a single experience. In Emory’s description, cotton does not exist independently of the red earth beneath it, the humidity around it, or the body moving through that environment. Tears therefore becomes less about reproducing the literal smell of cotton than recreating the conditions surrounding it.

That also points toward a more interesting direction for fashion fragrance. Many collaborations begin with a desirable brand and work backward toward a scent. Denim Tears appears to be doing the opposite: starting with an idea the brand has spent years exploring and asking whether perfume can reveal another dimension of it.

Tears launches globally September 18 through Denim Tears, Africa Diaspora Goods, and select Dover Street Market and COMME des GARÇONS locations.